While new hate speech laws are being enforced, it seems every other dangerous form of racism in this country is left unchecked, writes Tom Tanuki.
BRANDAN KOSCHEL was sentenced last week to one year in gaol after delivering a brief antisemitic speech during Sydney’s 26 January 'March for Australia' open mic. The magistrate observed at the end of breakneck proceedings that her harsh sentencing, using one of Australia’s many new laws to deal with this sort of thing, “must be used to deter others”.
After Koschel’s sentencing, I saw many people, including comrades, asking questions along the lines of:
Are the hate speech laws being enforced equally?
Of course, I know what they mean.
Since Brandan’s in gaol for his brief open mic bit of filth, what about every other racist bit of filth we have to put up with in this country? There’s a lot around.
What about every other 'March for Australia' speech over the three nationwide protests held under its banner? They delivered Islamophobic, anti-Aboriginal, anti-Indian and anti-African bile to the entire nation. What about them?
What about every other dangerous form of racism people experience in this country, usually lacking the exceptional institutional recognition that antisemitism enjoys among the bipartisan Zionists who occupy our Parliament?
I’m not equivocating on the danger of antisemitism after the Bondi massacre. I am saying that after 26 January, 2026 in Perth, no politician can really keep pretending that only antisemitism requires our attention. I am referring to Liam Alexander Hall, finally named last week after being arrested for allegedly attempting to bomb Perth’s Invasion Day rally.
After that day, I would argue that everyone who threatened Aboriginal people in the lead-up to this Invasion Day, and before that, everyone who spent years demonising Indigenous activists and sovereignty advocacy for political gain, helped till and sow and fertilise the political circumstances that led to it.
Advance Australia. The Liberal Party. Newscorp. Sky News. Peter Dutton. Jacinta Price. The National Socialist Network. March for Australia organisers. The lot.
They all, among many, by letting their bile through the Overton window for political gain, let Liam Alexander Hall through the gates. A wannabe heir to Australia’s last white supremacist mass murderer, Brenton Tarrant.
It seems that as a nation we are proving as good at forgetting Hall as we were at forgetting Tarrant. Because the bomb didn’t go off, or perhaps because Indigenous rights lobbyists just aren’t as connected and ruthless as Zionist ones. Our overlords don’t seem to care enough to throw out due process and civil liberties in the wake of Perth, like they did after Bondi.
They’re not being equal about it.
I have an anti-racist ideal, which I always promote in this column space, of the community banding together to collectively reject racists and eschewing the need for constant state intervention. My ideal can’t address sophisticated attempted bomb attacks, I know. But I believe we can quell division at its societal root when we collectively stand, staunch, and insist on what discrimination we won’t permit our neighbours to experience.
That’s the ideal, anyway. But many of us feel more powerless to enforce that ideal than ever, as state repression grows. So many are left meekly asking for all the rising authoritarianism to apply equally.
On the right, they’re demanding that the very same thing happen to us.
Large far-right social media account "Kofy Time", to choose one example out of countless others, asked the following:
NSN agitator Brandan Koschel, was recently sentenced to 12 months jail for inciting hatred against Jewish people under the new hate speech laws.
While there’s no love lost here, it’s worth stating plainly: right-wing extremists did NOT carry out the Bondi attack.
Yet we continue to see pro-“Palestine” agitators openly chanting “Intifada” on Australian streets with seemingly no consequences.
So Australians are left asking:
Are hate speech laws being enforced equally?
Like he said. Are hate speech laws being enforced equally?
Are we receiving equal treatment under the umbrella of all these terrifying new laws?
My sense is that when we ask this question we’re implicitly shipping with it an acquiescence to the legitimacy of the laws themselves. It’s not that I need the draconian laws repealed anymore. It’s just that I’d like them to be spread thinly and evenly across the land, like Vegemite across toast.
In saying this, I can see that, in a creeping and patchwork fashion, the state is becoming very consistent indeed.
In Queensland, they’re moving to ban the things we say to promote the freedom and livelihood of Palestinians, slogans like "from the river to the sea" or "globalise the intifada". They won’t stop this activism, and will probably fuel it. They will only have us developing a kind of doublespeak, dancing under the eye of the state’s censors to say more-or-less the same thing.
In Sydney, they’re bashing pro-Palestinian folk just for coming out to protest a genocidal head of state from visiting our country.
And now, federal police have raided a dive bar in Canberra to rip some posters off the wall, and to investigate whether the owners can be charged under hate laws. The posters are – I say this with all due love, respect and solidarity to the owners – tame. They’re pictures depicting Trump as Hitler and such. Far from the razor’s edge of political radicalism, it’s stuff I would expect to see on the Facebook profile of some sweet old lefty. And yet, our political police have now made an example of this bar. It’s extraordinary to see harmless left political ephemera declared verboten in 2026.
Is it equal, then?
Perhaps we should try true "equality" for all this aberrant political disobedience in 2026.
Rip down every poster from every bar in Australia, and arrest every publican and bartender for a bit while we show all the posters to Jillian Segal.
Arrest anyone who’s done any kind of political speech in the past few years. To be safe.
Make a huge list of every political slogan and logo and and proscribe them all in one big bill to rush through Parliament.
And gaol them all, for a mandatory minimum of a year, along with everyone in the country who professes any political opinion at all in public. White supremacists and environmentalists, pro-Palestinian activists and your mum with her GetUp petitions, LaRouchites and Marxist-Leninists, unionists and business councils, Australian activists Grace Tame and Drew Pavlou. Everyone. Throw us all into detention facilities.
(I only mean that for Drew Pavlou. Literally give him one year, it’ll do him good.)
I, for one, will welcome the opportunity to stop writing about Australia turning into an authoritarian nightmare for a bit. Give my fingers a break.
Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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