TRANSCRIPT - AFTERNOON BRIEFING WITH PATRICIA KARVELAS - TUESDAY, 20 JANUARY 2026

TV INTERVIEW

AFTERNOON BRIEFING WITH PATRICIA KARVELAS

TUESDAY, 20 JANUARY 2026

SUBJECTS: Gun laws and hate speech reform, Royal Commission into the Bondi terror attack

PATRICIA KARVELAS: The Home Affairs Minister is Tony Burke, and he joins me this afternoon. Tony Burke, welcome.

MINISTER FOR HOME AFFAIRS, TONY BURKE: Hi, how are you?

KARVELAS: Really pleased to have you here. Has the recall of parliament in your view been a success? These aren’t the laws you’d prepared for, but will this make Australians safer?

BURKE: First of all in terms of the recall, I think yesterday was significant in its own right. I think the condolence, the speeches, it was an extraordinary coming together of the Parliament, and that mattered in itself.

In terms of what’s come through today and what we expect will happen in the Senate tonight, it is a significant step forward. The gun law reforms effectively mean that the Bondi attackers, for example, instead of six guns, those two people would have had zero. Those reforms are really significant and they matter.

The hate speech reforms are not as strong as the government wanted them to be. For a long time, we’d been called on-- there’d been hate preachers - and it was, “why isn’t it a criminal offence,” including by the Liberal Party calling on us to bring in this sort of legislation. It had the support of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. It would have made a difference, and I am disappointed that it’s not there.

KARVELAS: Do you not – do you concede that it would have had also a chilling impact on free speech?

BURKE: It would have had a chilling impact on racist bigotry.

KARVELAS: And broader free speech?

BURKE: No, I don’t accept that racist bigotry is within the free speech domain. I just don’t. I’ll go through my whole life in Australia without ever receiving racist bigotry. But that’s not true for a whole lot of Australians. And some, but not all of the people who’ve been in the free speech brigade are people who will never have a racist word said against them.

KARVELAS: So, how long till a group like the Islamic group Hizb ut-Tahrir is outlawed?

BURKE: First of all, I’ve got to be careful in how I answer that because of the concept of apprehended bias. I don’t want your viewers to think I’m dodging it; there’s a reason why I answer in this way. For a long time, ASIO had been calling out both them and the Nazis as creating a real risk to community safety without explicitly calling for violence. So, we said we would lower the threshold so you no longer had to be explicitly calling for violence.

The laws that go through today do lower the threshold. They don’t take it as low as we had hoped to, but they do lower the threshold. That means it will – presuming tonight everything goes through – it will become possible to list organisations that are not terrorist organisations but do have a horrific impact on the safety of people.

KARVELAS: So, what does your advice say about whether Hizb ut-Tahrir and neo‑Nazi groups will be proscribed this way as a result?

BURKE: I’ve got to wait until the law is proclaimed before I receive that advice. The order of events is basically, if it gets through the Senate - which I hope it will - it then gets proclaimed by the Governor-General. The department then does the work on working out statements of reasons for organisations, but it can only do that if ASIO starts the process. I suspect they will, given that they’ve already made the call, and the test is similar to what they’ve already –

KARVELAS: So what sort of time frames are we talking about? I know you’re saying – but for people thinking, well, what groups will cease to exist, will have to disband, what are we talking about here?

BURKE: Well, we’re talking about the first step is ASIO. I don’t know how long that will be because there’s a fully independent agency. But if they open the gate, then effectively the department would put together a statement of reasons, they would then test it with the legal entities within government, and it would then be put either to me or to one of my Assistant Ministers for a decision.

KARVELAS: Okay. Given you were very passionate about these laws, will you try to bring them back?

BURKE: I’ve been talking to people about this. I’ve been arguing about we need better protections on hate speech for a variety of different circumstances, probably my whole career. I was in the middle of the debate about 18C of the Race Discrimination Act as well. If we can’t get better protection for the Jewish community in the wake of Bondi, I’m not sure what situation will lead to stronger hate laws in Australia.

KARVELAS: How about the Royal Commission? The Royal Commission will be reporting in December. Does that provide the potential – depends what the recommendations are --

BURKE: It all depends at that point, but certainly, if we needed external recommendations, we had them from the Antisemitism Envoy, which the Coalition had said their commitment was to implement it in full. We had the most horrific terrorist antisemitic attack, where the argument everywhere was, yes, guns were the method that was used but the motivation was deeply rooted in antisemitic bigotry. Even with that, we weren’t able to get there on hate laws.

KARVELAS: So, in terms of that part of the Bill, the hate laws, that section, how would that have stopped the Bondi attack?

BURKE: If you start with what Mike Burgess has always said as Director-General of ASIO. When he raised the threat alert level from possible to probable, he made clear that we didn’t have a particular event in mind, but we were still raising the threat level. Why? Because effectively, when the temperature goes up throughout the community, it makes it more likely that this sort of thing will happen.

Effectively, the idea of the hate laws, particularly in their complete original form, was if you take out the worst actors from the comments that they are making, that helps lower the temperature across the board.

KARVELAS: But it puts it underground still. It didn’t – you can’t legislate your way out of this kind of hatred, can you?

BURKE: Well, that’s right. But if they wanted to be underground, the Nazis wouldn’t have been holding protests outside New South Wales Parliament House. Their preferred organising method is in the sunshine. That’s where they want to be. So, yes, disbanding an organisation doesn’t make the views of those individuals go away, but if they preferred to organise in the shadows, that’s where they would have been, and they weren’t.

KARVELAS: The Queensland government is refusing to support your gun buyback. Tasmania and the Northern Territory are also opposed. What impact will that have on the operation of the buyback?

BURKE: Look, we’ll keep negotiating with the states. With some of those jurisdictions, there are conversations where there may be ways of still being able to resolve it.

KARVELAS: Like, could you give me an example of how you could resolve it?

BURKE: Well, of the three jurisdictions, they’re all in a slightly different place effectively. The Northern Territory, for example, they still haven’t complied with the John Howard rules in terms of the national firearms agreement.

KARVELAS: Thirty years ago.

BURKE: Yeah, thirty years, they still haven’t complied with that. So I get that it’s hard for that jurisdiction to get them over the line. But in terms of the conversations, I deal respectfully with states. I continue to do so. Certainly, Queensland has seen shooting of police officers. They have seen people who should not have had firearms perform horrific actions. I expect there will be community pressure in these different areas as well.

Effectively, I think the most important part of the reforms that we’re doing is actually the extra layer of checking. The legislation that went through – and I was amazed, I thought maybe the Libs and the Nats might amend so that they were just taking out the bits they didn’t like instead of just blanketly saying no to the lot – but one of the things that’s there is the concept that now for the first time the national security intelligence that we hold will be one of the checks in someone getting a firearms licence. Now, why on earth would you say we don’t want that to be part of the checking system in getting a firearms licence?

KARVELAS: The opposition have consistently tried to keep the focus on this phrase, the language of radical Islam, and they say the Prime Minister, you know, has been reluctant to use that language. Is that language you use?

BURKE: The reason that I have always avoided that particular term is the terrorist organisations desperately want to use that term.

KARVELAS: But isn’t it accurate that it is a radical form of Islam that’s aspiring –

BURKE: Well, here’s the thing – the terrorists want the label because they think it gives them legitimacy. That’s in their world. I don’t and that’s why I’ve always been reluctant to use it. Certainly, from their perspective, they believe they are promoting radical Islam. That’s what they believe they are doing. That’s where they are at.

It is also the case, though, that the community has the strongest possible rejection of that because what the community says, the community leaders. They were all at one on this when I came back to Australia - I was overseas at the time of the attack -  and when I got back the next day, the statements were all there, of straight condemnation and of giving the strongest rejection they could, which is to say this has nothing to do with their faith, even to the extent of refusing burial rights – refusing burial rights – for the individual. Now that is the strongest objection, and I’m not sure why I should say something weaker than what they’re saying.

KARVELAS: The Greens say the hate bill will silence legitimate criticism of countries undertaking human rights abuses. Is that a risk?

BURKE: I don’t believe that’s possible in any way, shape or form.

KARVELAS: They also think it could be Islamophobic, that it might open that door. Is that a concern you have?

BURKE: No, I don’t see how that happens at all. I just don’t see how those concerns are there. Effectively, there are always different arguments that are thrown up. I mean, the Greens, in fairness to them, weren’t calling for this the same way to happen in the way that the Libs were calling for it to happen – calling for it and then voting against it, saying we need to split the bill and then saying if we were to split it they’d vote against both bits. I think there’s been a bad faith from the Liberal Party in how they’ve gone about this.

KARVELAS: Well, the Liberal Party did support it. The Nationals obviously have split.

BURKE: Well, not the hate speech part of it.

KARVELAS: Well, the Nationals are now the ones that are objecting to –

BURKE: This is on the hate organisations part of it.

KARVELAS: Yes.

BURKE: Yeah.

KARVELAS: On that split, has that made it difficult to negotiate?

BURKE: No. We’ve dealt with the leadership of the Coalition in terms of dealing directly with the Leader of the Opposition.

KARVELAS: Today, Sussan Ley was putting a lot of pressure on the Prime Minister to apologise for taking too long to announce the Royal Commission. With the benefit of hindsight – and I know that’s a difficult thing – do you concede it took too long, at least in community expectations?

BURKE: In terms of community expectations, people have that view. In terms of the objections and the reasons we were reluctant, it wasn’t until we found a way of avoiding those challenges that we got there. Effectively, the challenges that we were avoiding were real.

There was a real national security challenge that we needed to deal with, and there was a real social cohesion challenge we needed to deal with. The national security challenge that we needed to deal with was the best person is a national security expert, and that was why we wanted the Dennis Richardson work, and we wanted it done fast, which is at a timeline a Royal Commission normally can’t do, and a Royal Commission normally doesn’t have that sort of expertise with a retired judge. But effectively, what we’ve done is bring that work into the Royal Commission, which has fixed the national security challenge.

KARVELAS: But you do accept that in terms of community expectation –

BURKE: No, and I said that. I said that. The second part of the reservation that we had was normally because you’re having it chaired by judges, their view is always make sure that each side of an argument gets equal time. We were worried about effectively the social cohesion when you’re talking about antisemitism of what might be viewed as the other side of that argument, which is a horrible way to even think, would that mean that the Nazis - if they put in submissions - whether they’d suddenly be on television for long periods of time explaining what their views were, which we didn’t want.

What we’ve done is something which has never happened for a Royal Commission before, and it did take us a while to be able to work out how to do it, which is in this thing called the greeting at the front of the letters patent, instead of saying, equal sides to each side of the argument, to actually run it in a way that is mindful of the impact on social cohesion. Once we’d settled those two things, then effectively, the concerns that we had about a Royal Commission were no longer there.

KARVELAS: Tony Burke, thanks for coming in.

BURKE: Great to be back.

ENDS