TRANSCRIPT - MINISTER TONY BURKE - ABC RADIO NATIONAL - MONDAY, 19 JANUARY 2026

RADIO INTERVIEW

ABC RADIO NATIONAL

MONDAY, 19 JANUARY 2026

SUBJECTS: Parliament recall, hate speech laws, gun control reforms.

ISABELLA HIGGINS: Minister, good morning. A big ahead, you're back in Canberra. You've been personally involved in crafting this legislative response to the Bondi terror attack. Are you personally disappointed to be back in Canberra, knowing this Bill had to be split, amended and is still looking for support?

MINISTER FOR HOME AFFAIRS, TONY BURKE: Well, I'm certainly hopeful that we can bring the Parliament together, certainly today on the condolence motion, I've got every confidence that the Parliament will be at one.

But you've then got to start to turn it into action, and the point we've been making the whole way through is that to respond to Bondi you need to deal with the motivation and you need to deal with the method; we need to deal with the why and the how, and that means laws that deal with hate and laws that deal with guns.

HIGGINS: And you've got the support from the Greens for those gun reforms.

BURKE: That's right.

HIGGINS: When we spoke last week you said you held some vain hope that the Coalition would support these hate speech laws. Do you still hold that hope?

BURKE: Well, certainly there's parts of it that they had called for that they're now not supporting, and I would find it bizarre if their original call to split the bill was so that they could oppose it twice, like that would just be an extraordinary situation if that's where all this goes. Everything they've been calling for says they should now be turning up and voting for it.

Obviously, the government wishes that we had had support to be able to criminalise some of the worst forms of antisemitism. The Coalition decided that they wouldn’t support that. Now we've got - I read in the papers today - on the listing of organisations, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry are calling on people to pass that part of the Bill, and the Neo-Nazis are calling on people to oppose it.

I, for the life of me can't see in that binary why people wouldn't be simply backing the legislation.

HIGGINS: The Prime Minister said without those racial vilification laws that had been stripped out, he wasn't entirely confident that the Jewish community would be protected from antisemitism. Does that mean that these laws fail to deliver on their core promise?

BURKE: Oh, they don't deliver everything that we wanted them to; that's the simple fact. That's what happens when part of the legislation is withdrawn. But the reason for that happening lies at the foot of the members of the Liberal and National parties who only a few weeks ago were calling for tougher laws on hate and tougher laws on people who spout antisemitism.

They're committed to opposing that, that's where that is; Parliament has to deal with whether you have a majority or whether you don't.

So the next issues are whether or not hate organisations can be banned.

HIGGINS: There was some concern, not just from within the Parliament, but also from religious groups, from community groups, legal experts about how these laws would impact freedom of speech, freedom of religion. Is that not evidence that perhaps more time, more consultation was needed to get this right?

BURKE: Well, first of all on more time, the Liberal Party had called on us to sit before Christmas to introduce hate laws, so –

HIGGINS: But the Coalition didn't set the timeline, this is the Government's timeline. Was it too rushed; was more consultation needed?

BURKE: No, no, what I'm saying is the key people who were saying this is happening too quickly are the people who were calling for this to happen last year. In terms of the—

HIGGINS: But there were some religious leaders, legal experts, who also described this as rushed who said more consultation was needed, it wasn't just the Coalition.

BURKE: And a large number of those people who were calling for further amendments were doing it on the basis that they were wanting the hate laws to apply to more categories of people, not no one.

When you talk about freedom of speech- I know some people just take the freedom of speech side of the argument, but I've got to say, I am yet to believe that freedom of speech is about racist bigotry. Racist bigotry can be completely debilitating, and the pathway from extreme racist bigotry to violence is a very short path.

HIGGINS: Minister, I'm just going to move us on to the gun control reforms, which do look like they've got support to pass the Parliament, but a challenge ahead still with that, with States like the Northern Territory, Queensland, Tasmania pushing back on jointly funding the gun Buy-Back Scheme. Can you get those States on board?

BURKE: There's always a negotiation with the States, I don't doubt that the vast majority of states will have a very high level of goodwill on this, and there will be conversations about the breadth and the structure of the buy-back.

The most important thing with the gun reforms is when I'm asked the question, if these had already been in place, would the two gunmen at Bondi have been able to have the firearms that they had, the answer is no. It's not that they would have had four instead of six, they would have been eligible for none.

HIGGINS: So will the Government foot the whole bill for those States who are refusing to pay up? I mean the Howard Government did wholly fund the 1996 Buy-Back Scheme?

BURKE: As I say, negotiations with the States are standard, but I don't doubt the goodwill in making sure that there's an appropriate firearms response, and I'm confident that we'll get there with the states.

HIGGINS: Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke. Thanks very much for joining us from Canberra today.

BURKE: Great to be back on the program, Isabella.

ENDS