The submission window closes today, 14 June 2026. This post introduces the six submissions made by this author to the Royal Commission, in the order they were lodged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Between March and June 2026, I made six submissions to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. A fifth submission was lodged and subsequently withdrawn prior to publication after a citation verification problem was identified. The remaining six approach the same underlying concern from different directions \u2014 legal, constitutional, theological, empirical, and philosophical \u2014 but share a common foundation: that the relationship between state power and the individual is the primary question any serious response to antisemitism must address, and that the Commission’s apparent direction gets that relationship wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The full text of each submission is available on this website. This post summarises what each one argues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Submission 1: The Robodebt Problem Returns<\/strong> The Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Act 2026, passed in January 2026, inserted new automated classification provisions into the ASIO Act \u2014 enabling computer programs to take “specified assessment action” as defined by ministerial instrument, with no requirement that those instruments be publicly disclosed or subject to parliamentary scrutiny. The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Christopher Jessup KC, warned the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security that these provisions exhibited the same structural features the Robodebt Royal Commission had already found catastrophic: automated decision-making without oversight, reversed burden of proof, and fragmented responsibility that ensures no individual feels accountable for systematic harm. Parliament was told. It passed the provisions five days later. Submission 1 documents the structural parallels between the January 2026 laws and Robodebt, and argues that a government that ignored the Robodebt Royal Commission’s central recommendations before the ink was dry has not learned the lesson it claimed to have learned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Submission 2: The Naturalised Crown<\/strong> The republican debate in Australia has been conducted almost entirely within the terms set by the Australian Republican Movement \u2014 principally the 1999 referendum model and the subsequent Australian Choice Model, both of which propose replacing the Governor-General with an elected or appointed president while leaving the constitutional architecture largely intact. These models share a structural flaw: they address only one of Australia’s seven vice-regal representatives while leaving the six state Governors as appointments flowing from the British Crown. A federation in which the head of state at the Commonwealth level is an elected Australian citizen while six state Governors remain connected to a hereditary foreign monarchy is not a republic \u2014 it is a constitutional hybrid whose internal incoherence would generate ongoing litigation and political instability. Submission 2 argues for a different approach: the Naturalised Crown model, in which an Australian citizen is elected to fill the role currently occupied by the British monarch, changing the character of the Crown at its source and flowing through to all seven vice-regal appointments simultaneously. The submission argues that this model provides stronger protection for social cohesion than either ARM proposal, because it preserves the Crown’s function as the constitutional embodiment of the state’s obligation to all its subjects equally \u2014 which is precisely the function most needed in a period when the state’s machinery is being directed away from that obligation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Submission 3: The Theological Framework<\/strong> Christian nationalist and religious Zionist movements understand themselves as executing a divine program whose completion is both inevitable and obligatory \u2014 the end times, the rebuilding of the Temple, the return of Christ, the prophetic sequence that must be fulfilled. Submission 3 examines these claims from within the scriptural tradition they invoke, arguing that the inevitabilist eschatological framework they rely on is theologically unsound. The submission proposes a reframing grounded in the Genesis 1 Day 6 equality framework \u2014 the simultaneous creation of male and female in the image of God, prior to the hierarchical structures of Genesis 2 \u2014 as the foundational text to which the ministry of Jesus points. This reframing disengages from the determinism that Christian nationalism requires: if the beginning is radical equality rather than ordained hierarchy, the end is not a predetermined military program but an ongoing invitation to begin again. The Star of Bethlehem as Acrux \u2014 a Southern Hemisphere star, visible to the Magi from a southern vantage point \u2014 is examined as part of this reframing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Submission 4: The Secular Version<\/strong> Where Submission 3 makes the argument from within the theological tradition, Submission 4 makes the secular equivalent. It traces how US Christian Zionist theology \u2014 with its conviction that contemporary political events are the fulfilment of end-times prophecy \u2014 drives specific political choices in American foreign policy, which drives the conditions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which drives the global spread of extremist movements on multiple sides, which produces the antisemitic violence in Australia that the Royal Commission was established to address. The submission argues that you cannot understand the Bondi attack, or the conditions that produced it, without understanding this upstream chain \u2014 and that a Commission that examines the downstream effects without examining the upstream causes has not understood what it is inquiring into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Submission 6: How Australia’s Antisemitism Plan Compares to the World<\/strong> Australia’s Special Envoy’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism \u2014 the Segal Plan \u2014 was compared against the antisemitism strategies of approximately 35 countries and international bodies, using a structured graph database built from the source documents. The analysis identifies five dimensions in which the Segal Plan proposes measures without precedent in any comparable country’s framework. Every other country uses public funding to support antisemitism research and education; Australia alone uses funding withdrawal as a sanction for non-compliance. Seven comparable countries explicitly include free speech balancing and proportionality analysis in their antisemitism frameworks; the Segal Plan and the Commission’s interim report contain none. No other country mandates IHRA adoption across all government institutions, screens visa applicants for political opinion, or creates campus compliance machinery administered by a political appointee. The submission also documents that the Segal Plan’s novel enforcement provisions correspond structurally to a Heritage Foundation document \u2014 Project Esther, published four months before the Segal Plan was submitted \u2014 rather than to the European peer consensus the Special Envoy identified as her source. The submission is published as an interactive HTML document with full citation tables linking every finding to its source document and page number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Submission 7: Holocaust Memory Should Restrain State Power, Not Legitimise Its Expansion<\/strong> The final submission makes the constitutional and philosophical argument that holds the series together. The Holocaust was not carried out by private hatred. It was carried out by a state \u2014 through law, bureaucracy, classification systems, enforcement infrastructure, and the obedient compliance of ordinary officials doing their jobs. Hannah Arendt documented this with precision: Adolf Eichmann was not a fanatic. He was a bureaucrat, competently organising train schedules. The lesson is structural. Persecution at scale requires state machinery, fragmented responsibility, and the moral distancing that automation and administrative distance provide. A Commission invoking Holocaust memory while building surveillance and enforcement architecture without adequate constitutional scrutiny has misread the event whose name it invokes. The submission asks the Governor-General to extend the Commission by twelve months, add a new term of reference directing it to examine how state power may itself become an instrument of persecution against minority communities, and review the Commission’s legal and support arrangements through open competitive tender. Two recent court decisions support the constitutional concern: the NSW Court of Appeal has already struck down post-Bondi protest restrictions as unconstitutional, and the High Court has confirmed that the January 2026 antisemitism legislation raises a serious question about the implied freedom of political communication, with a Full Court hearing scheduled for September 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All six submissions are available in full on this website. The series is a work of civic engagement, not legal advice. It is offered in the hope that the institutions of the Crown will recognise in it the values they exist to protect.\ue056\ue03b\ue0c1\ue0fb\ue0f9\ue11d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The submission window closes today, 14 June 2026. This post introduces the six submissions made by this author to the Royal Commission, in the order they were lodged. Between March and June 2026, I made six submissions to the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. A fifth submission was lodged and subsequently withdrawn prior … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2701"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2702,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2701\/revisions\/2702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/7gs.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
(198 pages including annexures)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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(153 pages including annexures)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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(84 pages, 22,477 words)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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(11 pages, 3,347 words)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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(30 pages plus annex, approximately 18,000 words)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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(26 pages, 6,541 words)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n
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