TRANSCRIPT - MINISTER TONY BURKE - ABC AM - THURSDAY, 15 JANUARY 2026
RADIO INTERVIEW
ABC AM, ISABELLA HIGGINS
THURSDAY, 15 JANUARY 2026
SUBJECTS: Early recall of Parliament, Hate speech and gun control legislation, Royal Commission into antisemitism
ISABELLA HIGGINS: Minister, thanks very much for joining us on the program this morning.
MINISTER FOR HOME AFFAIRS, TONY BURKE: Good morning.
HIGGINS: You've said these new hate speech laws will test constitutional limits and will likely be subject to court challenges. The proposed legislation offers a defence to those directly quoting from religious texts. This has attracted criticism and been described as a loophole, notably by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. Was this exemption included intentionally to offer some freedom of speech protection, or is it an oversight?
BURKE: We, in acknowledging freedom of religion, we didn't want a situation where somebody who is not engaging in hate speech, but is simply quoting religious texts and we didn't want them to be inadvertently caught. That's all being examined now by the Committee and so the Committee report will come back on the best way to go with that. But that's certainly the reason that the government's included it.
HIGGINS: So it sounds like it was intentional, as I said, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry described it as a loophole, misconceived and unnecessary. Do their concerns have to be ignored to make sure that there are those protections there for freedom of speech?
BURKE: The fact that that's their view matters. We also want to make sure that people who are not engaging in hate don't inadvertently get caught up. The reason that it's there is for a good reason and the arguments that are put by the Executive Council of Australian Jewry are well ported to be weighed up by the Committee.
HIGGINS: Another call that's come out of those Committee meetings, both from Muslim and Jewish groups, is a push to expand these laws beyond just racial discrimination, but to also offer protection to religious groups, those with a disability, the LGBTQ community groups that are also targeted by neo-Nazis. There's been some suggestion by your colleagues that maybe this could be looked at after this bill passes Parliament, if it does. Would you support that?
BURKE: We've been careful with this legislation that Parliament's being recalled early specifically because of the Bondi attack and that's why we've dealt with the head of the category, I guess, of discrimination and hate speech that was directly the form of bigotry that was in the minds of the terrorists.
HIGGINS: The National Imams Council have said that they do feel like their community will be targeted by these new laws but that there is no protection from Islamophobia. Do you think it is something that needs to be looked at?
BURKE: Yesterday afternoon I was in the office of Julian Hill, and we had a cup of tea with an Imam and his wife who had been viciously attacked on the streets of Melbourne on Saturday. Good Australians, great people who'd been subjected to horrific bigotry.
The need to be able to confront all forms of bigotry is real and is essential. The Prime Minister has flagged a process going forward to be able to look at the other categories of hate.
HIGGINS: So the time maybe isn't now but you would like to see that looked at in the future.
BURKE: The Prime Minister's flagged that there'll be a process to work through how we would deal with other categories of hate.
HIGGINS: Now these laws would also offer you as Home Affairs Minister the power to ban so-called hate groups. You identified two groups: Hizb ut-Tahrir and also the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network as key targets of these laws. The NSN has now disbanded to avoid arrest. Was that good news for you?
BURKE: Any day the Nazis take a step backwards is a good day. If there was ever evidence that this legislation is urgent and that we've got the balance right in what we've put forward, it's that immediately on seeing it the Nazi's announced that they're going to disband.
These arguments that are coming from the Liberal Party now, having spent week after week calling for the early return of Parliament and saying how urgently we need to legislate, to now say, "Oh no, you're rushing us" is just ridiculous.
We're getting immediate action from some of these groups. A notorious prayer hall has said now that it's permanently closed. The Nazis are taking a significant step backwards. None of this means that the hate in these individuals goes away, but it is making it more and more difficult for them to organise. That's why I can't for the life of me see how the Liberal Party have got themselves to the point where they're now effectively opposing the legislation, and one of their senior figures, Andrew Hastie, is saying we shouldn't be doing anything until the Royal Commission's reported. That's more than a year away.
HIGGINS: Minister, as you say, these laws don't remove the hate from the minds of these people, and some experts warn that maybe inadvertently these laws have pushed those members underground and might make it harder to monitor them.
BURKE: I'd go straight to the testimony of Mike Burgess, the Director-General of ASIO yesterday, where he said that groups may well go underground and that's then their job to monitor them and they've got highly skilled people doing that.
HIGGINS: Do you expect you can get a deal with the Greens to get this through the Parliament on this self-imposed timeline of- by discussing in Parliament Tuesday next week?
BURKE: We could not have been given a more serious impetus for urgent action than the horrors that we saw, and to be able to respond to that we need to be able to deal with the motivation and the method that was used by those terrorists.
They had bigotry in their minds, and they had guns in their hands. We need to deal with the why and the how. The legislation deals with both and we shouldn't be wasting, and I still hold out some vain hope maybe that even the Coalition will not just go into the absolute depths of hypocrisy, and if they won't listen to the government, listen to the claims that they themselves made week after week over the last month. Because all the arguments are there as to why this legislation needs to be passed.
HIGGINS: We'll all be watching their reaction over the coming days. There's also been a lot of discussion about what to do with the footbridge in North Bondi that was used by the gunmen during the Bondi attack. As a Member of Parliament but also a Sydney‑sider yourself, do you have a personal view on what you'd like to see happen there?
BURKE: I accept whatever the families want, but I've got to say I actually had remarked to some people very early on following the attack that I thought we would end up with that bridge being removed.
HIGGINS: Minister, we know it's a busy week for you so thank very much for joining us on AM today.
BURKE: Great to be back, thanks.
ENDS