Envoy appointment delayed ‘for political reasons’

In a damning personal submission to the Royal Commission, Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) president Daniel Aghion accused the federal government of holding up the appointment of Australia’s first antisemitism envoy “for political reasons to demonstrate even-handedness”.

The submission, lodged on June 14, offers a detailed account of correspondence between Jewish community leaders and the government, and charges that until the Bondi Beach terror attack, Canberra’s response to rising antisemitism was “tentative and reactive”.

In December 2023, weeks after becoming ECAJ president, Aghion travelled to Canberra with ECAJ immediate past president Jillian Segal and co-CEO Peter Wertheim to present the idea of an antisemitism envoy to Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who was receptive.

“In January 2024, the federal government responded to me to the effect that they would agree to our proposal, if an Islamophobia envoy were also appointed,” Aghion wrote. He advised this was acceptable, provided the two roles were not filled by the same person, because “the sources of antisemitism and Islamophobia are different … and tackling those two forms of racism requires different knowledge bases and skillsets”.

By Easter 2024, no appointment had been made. Aghion says government representatives told him the delay was because they were taking longer than anticipated to identify a suitable Islamophobia candidate.

“The delay in appointing the antisemitism envoy was extremely frustrating,” he wrote. “The appointment of an antisemitism envoy was being held up because of the government’s inability to fill an unrelated position, which we considered the government had created for political reasons to demonstrate even-handedness.”

The Australian reported that Segal was the clear frontrunner for the role as early as March 2024, but the government had hoped to announce the antisemitism and Islamophobia envoys side by side.

According to Aghion, the logjam broke only because of a deadline. An international gathering of antisemitism envoys was scheduled for July 2024 in Buenos Aires, at which the ECAJ warned it would be embarrassing for Australia to have no representative.

On July 9, 2024, at what Aghion describes as a “hastily arranged media conference”, Segal’s appointment was announced, and she departed for Buenos Aires that week. The Islamophobia envoy, Aftab Malik, was not appointed until September 30.

The submission also revisits the government’s handling of Segal’s plan, released on July 10, 2025. The ECAJ pressed repeatedly for a response, and on December 8 publicly called on the government to act. The response came on December 19 — five days after the Bondi massacre. “No explanation for that delay has ever been provided,” Aghion wrote.

The delay echoes a separate controversy from July 2025, when Education Minister Jason Clare said he would not consider Segal’s plan “in isolation” and would wait for Malik’s report.

Aghion was careful to qualify his critique. “I do not accuse the federal government of ill-will,” he wrote. “I do however contend that until Bondi, the federal government failed to appreciate the significance and scale and severity of the problem.”

He credited the government with genuine measures, including the establishment of Operation Avalite, Albanese’s visit to the firebombed Adass Israel synagogue, increased security funding, hate-speech and doxxing reforms, and the Royal Commission itself.

“I believe that since Bondi, the government has been more prepared to recognise the scale and severity of the problem,” he wrote. “However, it took the tragedy of Bondi to cause the government to recognise and adopt this position. There is a long way to go and much remains to be done.”