After years campaigning against antisemitism on campus, Shadow Education Minister Julian Leeser has pulled no punches in again calling for an end to antisemitism in Parliament this week.
Mr Leeser, who took over the Shadow Education portfolio last year, introduced a private members Bill in 2024 seeking a judicial inquiry into antisemitism on Australian campuses delivered a condolence motion for victims of the Bondi Beach killings on Monday calling for major changes to address antisemitism.
Mr Leeser said change needed to begin “with tackling three groups where antisemitism has taken hold,” including neo-Nazi groups, radical islamists and the ‘cultural left’, including the arts and universities.
“It is the universities where Jewish students are harassed and Jewish academics deplatformed,” Mr Leeser said.
“It is the conferences where Jews are silenced, shut down and humiliated and called “mutt” and where the term “Zionist” is used as an insult.
“In all of these places, we have witnessed a failure of moral leadership.”
Antisemitism on campus has emerged as a key issue for both Labour and the Coalition in the wake of the Bondi attacks, with Education Minister Jason Clare and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese launching a taskforce led by David Gonski to provide advice on the best way forward to prevent, tackle and respond to antisemitism.
Minister Clare has made it clear that more regulation is on the way to punish universities that fail to act in recent interviews and is intent on strengthening the controls available to the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) – a reform announced months before the Bondi massacre, but attracting a lot more public attention since. Additional scrutiny will also fall on the work of former ACU VC Greg Craven, who was commissioned in November to develop an antisemitism report card for universities.
“Jewish students have been made to feel unsafe, pure and simple,” Mr Clare told Sky News yesterday.
“And I've said to Vice Chancellors, “That is not on. You have to implement your codes of conduct”. But what's been made clear to me through all of this is that the university regulator needs more powers.
“You know, they've got the power at the moment to shut a university down, but it's very unlikely they're ever going to shut down a university with 60,000 students.
“They've got that sledgehammer, but every other power's a bit of a feather, and so they need other powers and penalties to be able to act where universities don't.
“I've committed to introduce legislation to do that, but I've also written to the Higher Education Standards panel, asked them to review the threshold standards, which are the rules that universities need to comply with, to make sure that they're meeting the requirements they need to when it comes to antisemitism and racism more generally.”
Whether the VET regulator ASQA will get the same power boost remains to be seen – for now both sides of the aisle are firmly focused on demanding university leaders demonstrate campus reform.