If the royal commission treats antisemitism as a content moderation problem, it will fail to overcome the much deeper social failure antisemitism represents.
The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has been examining the role of social media. Online platforms have changed the speed, scale and visibility of hatred.
They allow extremists to find one another, test slogans, hide behind irony and push prejudice into public circulation at low cost. Platforms can amplify prejudice, reward outrage, make the extreme seem common, make the shameful merely controversial and elevate private bigotry into public performance.
That is not nothing. It turns out the legacy media is good at all that, too.
Yet none of that explains the reservoir of hatred that already exists in our society. When, how, and why did it become socially acceptable to hate people simply for being who they are?
The danger is that the royal commission will end up treating antisemitism as a content moderation problem. If the issue is reduced to algorithms, moderation policies and platform enforcement, the royal commission will miss the much deeper social failure that antisemitism represents.
That failure did not emerge from the darker corners of the internet. The civilising institutions of our society have failed. Schools, universities, political parties, media organisations, religious institutions, professional bodies, and civic organisations all shape the moral vocabulary of public life.
For too long, too many have rewarded the habit of seeing politics through inherited identity, collective guilt, and group grievance. Too many have treated Western civilisation as a structure of domination, reduced individuals to group membership and confused moral certainty with judgment. Our institutions now speak the language of “inclusion” while classifying people by ancestry, power, guilt, and grievance.
That is how obvious bigotry got laundered into acceptable politics. Antisemitism has been repackaged as justice, resistance, decolonisation, and anti-imperialism. The words change, but the old hatred remains; it is now respectable and vaguely intellectual.
Australia is a diverse and mostly migrant society. We cannot define ourselves by shared ethnicity and a long history as many other nations do.
Our common bond must be our shared civic values. The institutions of our society once helped teach those values; public life required mutual respect, restraint, reciprocity, and a distinction between political disagreement and hatred of neighbours.
Those institutions, however, have eroded. Some have retreated from civic formation. Others have adopted the language of grievance themselves.
A free society needs laws against violence, intimidation, harassment, threats and incitement. It also needs room for argument, error, criticism and correction.
The state cannot regulate all aspects of social life. This is especially the case when some now allege that argument and criticism are themselves violence and intimidation.
Free speech does not license bigotry. It gives us the means to expose, confront and condemn it without making the state the final arbiter of opinion.
But free speech will not survive, even as an abstract right, if the institutions that sustain civil speech are eroded. Or even if they are merely silent. A society that forgets how to form model citizens will soon ask the state to form them instead.
A migrant society cannot remain cohesive if conflicts from abroad are imported into domestic life. Australians cannot be proxies for foreign states, armies, governments or historical enemies.
People may care deeply about events overseas. A free society must allow them to criticise, demonstrate, argue, organise and rally. But a civil society requires people to distinguish between political disagreement about events abroad and hostility towards their neighbours at home.
A commercial society imposes its own civic discipline. Under the division of labour, prosperity depends on co-operation between strangers. We buy from, sell to, employ, teach, learn from, argue with, borrow from, lend to and work beside people who do not share our ancestry, religion, politics or history.
Markets do not merely tolerate difference; they penalise the refusal to deal with difference. The employer who refuses to hire a capable worker, the customer who refuses to buy from a reliable supplier, the firm that refuses to serve a profitable customer and the investor who refuses to deal with a competent partner all shrink their own opportunities and impose costs on the rest of us.
“Australia cannot censor, regulate or deport its way back to social cohesion.”
Bigotry is not only immoral; it is bad business. It is an indulgence we cannot afford.
Bigotry narrows trust, assigns collective guilt and tells people that civic membership matters less than inherited identity. It turns neighbours, colleagues, students, customers and business partners into representatives of hostile blocs.
Antisemitism is economically and institutionally destructive because it attacks the habits of trust, contract, reciprocity and peaceful dealing that allow a plural society to become wealthy, peaceful and free.
Australia cannot censor, regulate or deport its way back to social cohesion. The harder task is to rebuild the institutions that make antisemitism socially disgraceful before it becomes a matter for the police, social platforms or royal commissions.
