Mark Dreyfus details antisemitic abuse to Royal Commission

Former attorney-general Mark Dreyfus told the Royal Commission on Monday that being abused as a Jew was a new development in his political life, describing being called a “genocidal Zionist” in a Melbourne street, the vandalism of his electorate office with dual-loyalty slurs, and a stream of online hate drawing on the language of the Holocaust.

Giving evidence as a Jewish Australian and long-standing MP, the member for Isaacs said the October 7, 2023, attacks had changed how it feels to be Jewish.

Three of his great-grandparents perished in the Holocaust, and Australia had given refuge to his father, uncle and grandparents.

He recounted a man responding to his “good morning” in central Melbourne last April by calling him a “genocidal Zionist”. In 17 years in Parliament, he said, no one had ever abused him for being Jewish.

Weeks later his Mordialloc office was vandalised with red paint and the words “who does AG Dreyfus serve?” – invoking, he said, old tropes of dual loyalty. He also described frequent online abuse, some of it from other Jewish Australians, which he had been unable to answer while bound by cabinet confidentiality.

Dreyfus, attorney-general from 2022 to 2025, urged several reforms: a broader Commonwealth offence of serious vilification, following Victoria and NSW; an enforceable “digital duty of care” on social media platforms, with a “private right of action” allowing takedowns through a court or tribunal; and protest-exclusion zones around synagogues and Jewish schools, modelled on safe-access zones at abortion clinics.

He said the safety of Jewish Australians was a primary responsibility of state and federal governments, but ultimately a whole-of-community effort – noting that every Jewish school and synagogue in Melbourne now had guards outside, something no other religious group had to walk past to worship.