Flawed report does not seriously address Jew hate

The Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) report published last week, February 17, Respect@Uni: Study into antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism and the experience of First Nations people is stated to be the “first national survey that attempts to capture comprehensive, sector-wide data on the lived experience of racism in universities”.

The AHRC report is, however, less than comprehensive and its blindness and lack of appreciation of the characteristics of antisemitism are a great disappointment. Although the AHRC was provided with the Australian Academic Alliance Against Antisemitism (5A)’s 2025 detailed survey and analysis of antisemitism in Australian universities following Hamas’s attack of October 7, 2023, that survey did not rate a mention. Nor did the antisemitism survey conducted by the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) in 2023; nor did the comprehensive reports on anti-Jewish incidents published by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), based on many years of data collection and analysis.

Respect@Uni was developed by Giridharan Sivaraman, Race Discrimination Commissioner, who has grounded it in critical race theory, into which the Jewish people do not easily fit. While acknowledging the antisemitism that Jewish students and academics face, it fails to acknowledge the historic and contemporary casting of Jews as a uniquely powerful and demonic global enemy, a quality that is distinct to antisemitism. Instead, it tends to equilibrate all racisms as the same and merely to identify where they intersect – a simplistic, abstract, cookie-cutter approach. Such misdiagnosis can yield a misguided response.

There is nothing of the recent escalation of antisemitic violence in Australia. This oversight, despite warnings of the rise of violent antisemitism by ASIO chief Mike Burgess and extensive published observations on the prolific nature of attacks on local Jews, is surprising. The omission occurred because Respect@Uni does not recognise antisemitism as a distinct phenomenon that is dangerously connected to the worst terror attack in Australia. The report’s maximum acknowledgement is a last-minute note in the preface to recognise the Bondi Chanukah massacre.

One sees that it notes but does not endorse recommendations about combating antisemitism at universities made by the Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism. To the contrary, those are treated as controversial, by citing criticism by the tiny so-called Jewish Council of Australia. Unacknowledged is the endorsement of the report by the Jewish community’s widely recognised and representative national roof body and all mainstream Jewish community bodies.