Draft revision — 23 August 2026. Every factual claim below has been checked against the primary source documents.
The Segal Plan is not unusual for its length. Australia’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism
runs to 20 pages. Germany’s national strategy runs to 52, the United States’ National
Strategy to 60, and Austria’s to 233. Producing a national antisemitism strategy is
ordinary international practice, and a dozen comparable countries have produced longer ones.
What is unusual is not how much Australia wrote. It is what the recommendations do — and
what they do that comparable countries do not.
This submission compares the Segal Plan against a corpus of 34 peer documents from 31 countries and international bodies: national antisemitism strategies, envoy reports and
special coordinator documents, which are the direct international analogues of the Plan
itself. Five divergences stand out.
The Five Divergences
1. Visa screening for opinions
The Plan recommends that the government “Screen visa applicants for antisemitic views or affiliations, consistent with a risk-based approach” and “Ensure the Migration Act … effectively facilitates visa refusals or cancellations for antisemitic conduct and rhetoric” (Segal Plan, p.13).
No peer document in the corpus recommends anything comparable. Not one. The closest
provisions anywhere in the dataset concern employment permit guidance for migrant workers
and the rescheduling of public examinations for religious holidays — neither involves
screening at the border for what a person thinks.
2. Funding used as a compliance lever rather than a support mechanism
The Plan proposes to “enable government funding to be withheld, where possible, from universities, programs or individuals within universities that facilitate, enable or fail to act against antisemitism” (p.9), and to include termination clauses in “all public funding agreements with cultural institutions or festivals” (p.11).
The international norm is to fund positively — grants for Holocaust education, community
security, curriculum development, interfaith work. Of the 34 peer documents, one
contains a funding termination mechanism: Austria’s, which allows termination of
development-agency contracts for what is rendered in translation as “incitement activities, such as antisemitism” [machine translation from the German original — not checked by a
human translator]. That is a criminal-law standard applied under ordinary contract law, not a compliance test measured
against a definition. No peer applies funding conditionality to individual researchers.
3. The IHRA definition treated as mandatory rather than advisory
The Plan states that “the Australian government should require consistent application and adoption of the IHRA definition across all levels of government, public institutions and regulatory bodies” (p.6).
The peer corpus is strikingly consistent in the other direction. Searching every peer
document for mandatory language around IHRA returns the opposite of what you would expect:
the Czech Republic, the European Union’s own handbook, Italy, Latvia, Sweden and the United
Nations all describe the definition in the same terms — “non-legally binding”. Austria
adds that it “should not be used to restrict expressions of opinion through political instrumentalization” [note: Austria’s strategy is in German; this rendering is a machine
translation and has not been checked by a human translator].
Australia is the only jurisdiction in the corpus proposing to require it.
4. Campus enforcement machinery
The Plan proposes a “university report card” assessing each university’s practices (p.9),
and that “A commission of inquiry into campus antisemitism, including the sources of funding for organised clusters of antisemitism, should be commissioned by the Federal Government if systemic problems remain in universities by the start of the 2026 academic year” (p.9).
Peer countries address campus antisemitism through education, dialogue, technical
assistance and support for Jewish student organisations. No peer document proposes regulatory grading of universities, or an inquiry triggered by non-compliance.
5. Free speech safeguards attached to enforcement
Seventeen of the peer documents that can be searched in English address freedom of
expression directly in the context of their antisemitism measures. Denmark’s states that
“it shall continue to be permissible to criticize the state of Israel — and, incidentally, all other states — if one disagrees with the actions of these states” (p.8). The
Netherlands’ says freedom of expression “is essential and must not be compromised”.
The Segal Plan refers to freedom of expression once, at p.11, in the context of cultural
funding: “While freedom of expression, particularly artistic expression, is vital to cultural richness and should be protected, funding provided by Australian taxpayers should not be used to promote division or spread false/distorted narratives” — subordinating it,
in the same sentence, to the funding condition it introduces. No safeguard attaches to the
Plan’s enforcement recommendations, and the implied freedom of political communication
recognised in Lange v ABC and Brown v Tasmania is not mentioned anywhere in it.
Germany, the stated comparator
In evidence to the Commission on 7 May 2026, the Special Envoy said she had looked at
“the plan in Germany which is quite similar”.
Germany’s national strategy matches none of the four coercive dimensions above. It
contains no funding withdrawal mechanism, no visa screening provision, no campus
enforcement machinery, and treats the IHRA definition in advisory terms throughout — the
Federal Government’s aim being to “pay appropriate attention to the IHRA’s working definition when funding projects”.
Two other claims made in the same evidence can be checked against the documents directly.
The Special Envoy said the US plan “ran to 200 pages”; the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism is 60 pages. She identified the Global Guidelines for Countering Antisemitism as having informed her Plan; that document is 3 pages and contains none of
the Plan’s distinctive provisions. The only document in the corpus of roughly 200 pages is
Austria’s, at 233 — and Austria’s is the one containing the most explicit warning against
using the definition to restrict opinion.
The constitutional question
On 4 June 2026, Chief Justice Gageler heard an interlocutory application in White Australia Party Inc v Commonwealth [2026] HCASJ 17. The Commonwealth did not dispute that the
proceeding raises a serious question as to the Act’s consistency with the implied freedom of
political communication. The application was dismissed, and the Full Court will hear the
constitutional challenge in the fortnight commencing 7 September 2026.
The Commission is finalising recommendations that rest in part on legislation whose
constitutional validity has not yet been determined.
The asymmetry argument
These divergences share a structure. In each, the state acquires capacity — over funding,
over speech, over institutional compliance, over who may enter the country — through
machinery that has no equivalent among comparable democracies, and in one instance through
legislation currently before the High Court.
The question this submission asks is not whether antisemitism is real. It is, and the Plan
is right that incidents rose sharply: the Plan records a 316% increase between October 2023
and September 2024, with over 2,000 cases reported.
The question is whether the response is proportionate to what the evidence shows, and
whether machinery built in antisemitism’s name is calibrated to protect individuals or to
expand state capacity. Enforcement architecture outlasts the government that builds it and
the circumstances that justified it.
Other countries have addressed the same problem without building this architecture.
Education, community resilience, Holocaust remembrance, security funding for Jewish
institutions — that is the international norm, and it is what 34 peer documents actually
contain.
A note on corrections
The version of this submission published in June 2026 contained errors. A verification
review completed on 23 August 2026 matched every quotation in it against the primary source
documents, and found quotations that had been misattributed or misquoted — including a
passage attributed to the Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s chief executive that was
in fact an Amnesty International statement annexed to his evidence.
Eighty-seven corrections have been made. They are published in full, showing the text as
originally lodged beside the corrected text and its source, and a marked-up version shows
every change in place so that nothing can have been altered without record. The review did
not extend to every reference in the submission; what was checked and what remains
unverified is stated in the Notice of Corrections.
The corrected submission is the version linked below.
The document
- Submission 6 (corrected): https://7gs.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/submission6_corrected.html
Each Segal Plan recommendation is set alongside equivalent recommendations from comparable
countries, with direct citations to the source documents. Where Australia’s approach has no
international equivalent, that is stated. The comparison tables can be read without working
through the full text.
The Royal Commission’s submission window closed on 14 June 2026. This document is published
as a public record while the Commission’s final report is pending.
Submissions in this series are available at 7gs.au.
Robert Vose is a Melbourne-based researcher. This is the sixth in a series of submissions to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.