Mark Dreyfus: Former Attorney General details ‘confronting’ anti-Semitism he has faced as Jewish politician

Labor’s former Attorney General Mark Dreyfus has detailed the antisemitic abuse he has endured as a prominent Jewish politician and called for a toughening up of the hate-speech laws he introduced to Parliament just two years ago.

In a submission to the Royal Commission on anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion, launched following the Bondi attacks, Mr Dreyfus has detailed his own experiences of being personally targeted and his Melbourne office vandalised over the war in Gaza.

“The repeated antisemitism directed at me since 2023 on social media, in public, and at my electorate office in the form of hostile accusations, moral condemnation, and antisemitic abuse has been confronting,” he writes.

“A man crossing Latrobe Street looked at me as he approached. I did not know him, but I cheerfully said, ’Good morning’. He responded with ‘You’re a genocidal Zionist.’ You should be ashamed of yourself’,” Mr Dreyfus says, recounting an incident in 2024.

“I found this shocking because in the 17 years I had by then served in the Federal Parliament, I had never experienced this kind of public abuse. Sadly, it has continued since then.”

During World War Two three of Mr Dreyfus’ great-grandparents were killed in the holocaust, while his father and grandfather were able to flee Nazi Germany and settle in Australia as refugees.

“I have been called a ‘Kapo.’ That word is not a general insult. It comes from the machinery of the Nazi concentration camps. It carries with it an allegation of collaboration in the destruction of one’s own people,” Mr Dreyfus reveals.

The former Attorney General has detailed how during a program on Sky News last year one of the presenters also accused him of being a ‘Kapo’, in the full knowledge of its meaning and “the deep historical pain it carries”.

“When language drawn from the Holocaust is knowingly exploited in mainstream political commentary against a Jewish Australian, antisemitism is not merely present. It is being permitted to enter public debate under the cover of political criticism.”

“That is how antisemitism becomes normalised: when words carrying the suffering, degradation, and murder of Jewish people are used publicly against a Jewish person as though they are an acceptable part of political debate. It is a vicious charge, because it casts me as a betrayer of the dead, of millions of murdered Jews.”

In 2024 while still serving as Attorney General, Mr Dreyfus introduced a bill to Parliament criminalise certain forms of hate speech or vilification based on a range of attributes, including race.

The legislation, which became the Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Act 2025 outlawed actions such as advocating or threatening force or violence against protected groups, but Mr Dreyfus argues “it is now clear that this offence is too limited.”

The Labor MP, who was removed from Cabinet as part of a factional carve-up of the Albanese government’s frontbench last year, says “a further extension of hate speech laws is needed to create a broader offence that does not require elements of violence or threatening force.”

“Throughout the debate on hate speech laws experts and officials have repeatedly provided evidence that some groups are acutely aware of the legal threshold and use that grey zone to recruit, socialise and normalise extremist beliefs.”

During his annual threat assessment last week, ASIO boss Mike Burgess described how Jewish people in Australia were continuing to be targeted, saying: “Sadly, and illogically, hatred of Jews is one thing virtually all the violent extremist cohorts have in common.”

“Neo-Nazis are antisemitic. Islamic extremism is antisemitic,” Mr Burgess said.