Minister warned unis of campus tensions days after October 7 (2024)

Universities assured Education Minister Jason Clare they had measures in place to deal with antisemitism on campuses within days of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, months before a wave of pro-Palestine student protests fuelled scrutiny of the sector’s ability to balance free speech and student safety.

But it took seven months for the tertiary regulator to make its first intervention and tell universities what they needed to do to quell tensions, despite vice chancellors having faced weeks of political pressure over their handling of student camps.

Correspondence tabled in Senate estimates this week calls universities’ preparedness to deal with domestic fallout from the Israel-Hamas war into question, despite Clare and university heads discussing the risk of antisemitism just days after October 7.

The fresh revelations came as the Coalition sharpened its critique of the tertiary sector, with Coalition MP Julian Leeser presenting a private members bill that would introduce a judicial inquiry with royal commission powers to investigate antisemitism on campuses.

Leeser on Thursday told parliament that Jewish students had been spat at and taunted on campus but he did not trust Labor’s new probe into racism in universities, which will be run by the Australian Human Rights Commission, because there was “systemic racism against Jews at the commission”.

His intervention adds to an already tense political debate about free speech and discrimination, and whether the university sector’s handling of pro-Palestine protests and university encampments has been adequate.

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“There’s only one community on campus that’s having its students spat at and taunted, and its staff offices urinated on, and the vice chancellors standing by saying: ‘That’s just the price you have to pay for free speech’ – and that’s the Jewish community,” Leeser said in parliament.

The Coalition also used budget estimates on Monday to accuse the government of turning a blind eye to antisemitism on campuses – a claim disputed by the government, which has launched a two-year review of racism on campuses and told universities it expects them to keep students safe.

New correspondence reveals several vice chancellors had plans to increase visible security patrols, monitor social media for signs of protest activity and collaborate with the police when Clare wrote to them on October 11 seeking an urgent briefing on how they were protecting students from antisemitism and Islamophobia as hostilities escalated in the Middle East.

“The events of the past few days make this work more pressing,” Clare wrote, after revealing in the letter he had broadened the scope of a working group on campus safety to include issues of concern to Jewish students.

Monash University, where students claimed last month to have been threatened with expulsion for involvement in protests, replied to Clare on October 17, telling the minister it had warned students against racial vilification and created a hotline for students and staff.

The Australian National University, where students were forced to relocate an encampment last month, said it held regular meetings with student representatives to guard against racism, had met with Jewish students, and had staff consultants to speak to students feeling harassed.

Both the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney pointed to their anti-racism statements, while Sydney, the University of NSW, UTS and the University of Wollongong had boosted their visible security presence or stood up an incident response team.

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Both UNSW and Wollongong were also working with local police while monitoring social media and websites for any signs of protest activity or threats.

Western Sydney University said it had engaged with crime prevention and multicultural liaison officers at the police, increased security patrols and introduced a daily security report to identify problematic behaviour.

It was also testing responses for scenarios where there might be a clash between freedom of speech and safety, and reviewing events scheduled on campus, such as a Muslim students’ prayer meeting.

But the student protest movement did not take off until this year, when activists set up camps on university grounds. The protests heightened unease about the legal lines between free speech and discrimination, and prompted university heads to seek clarity from Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus on May 9 about whether certain phrases such as “intifada” and “from the river to the sea” were permissible.

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The university regulator, the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, wrote to university heads for the first time on May 10 – seven months after the outbreak of the war. The agency said it was aware of protests that risked falling outside the protections of free speech and hindered universities’ ability to teach or undertake research.

It listed several measures universities were required to undertake to maintain campus safety. These included removing “materials” that broke the law or from their property, acting against students and staff behaving unacceptably, bolstering relationships with law enforcement and taking action against outsiders causing trouble on campus grounds.

“We appreciate the events are evolving very quickly and responses needed to be constantly reviewed and adjusted,” the authority’s chief commissioner, Peter Coaldrake, and chief executive Dr Mary Russell said in the letter.

But Leeser said there was false equivalence between antisemitism and other forms of racism when instances of the former were at their worst in Australia’s history.

“It creates some sort of dangerous narrative for our social harmony that suggests a Jewish-Muslim conflict here in Australia, when so much of the antisemitism is actually propagated by the militant socialist left,” he said.

The Human Rights Commission was approached for comment but did not have an opportunity to view Leeser’s speech before deadline.

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