From curbing protests to controlling what can be said, state and Federal Labor governments are becoming authoritarian. Next in line is the thought police entering campus, Nick Riemer reports.

In December, the NSW Labor government gave itself the power to ban street marches for an indefinite period. We saw what that meant on February 9 as violent police charged, maced, beat and arrested protesters against Herzog’s visit.

In January, the federal ALP introduced new hate speech laws, which confer unprecedented discretion on the government to criminalise speech and groups to which it objects. Now, in a further stride down its authoritarian road, the federal government is reported to be proceeding with plans for political training for Australian university staff.

According to several recent reports, the federal government has agreed that ‘antisemitism training’ will be a ‘key’ area in which universities’ response to antisemitism will be assessed. University employees will, apparently, be required to undergo indoctrination in the ideology of the pro-Israel lobby, which identifies Zionism and Judaism and treats critics of Israel as likely antisemites.

The training will involve ‘understanding of Jewish peoplehood, their attachment to Israel and identity beyond faith’ – the characteristically unclear phrasing of the government’s ‘Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal, who is responsible for the ‘Antisemitism report card’ plan.

Compulsory training in a political ideology befits a police state, not a notional democracy – a status that Minns, Albanese and the rest of the political establishment are undermining like none before them.

Amidst the uproar over Herzog’s visit, the move has not had the discussion it deserves. Requiring university staff to undergo ‘training’ in the ideology of Israeli apartheid is as unacceptable as it would have been to require training in that of South African apartheid or Hindu supremacism.

Compulsory training in any particular ideology – Zionism, fascism, liberalism – is a body blow against university independence.

Segal’s plan has been roundly criticised by the progressive side of politics, including by Jewish organisations, but has the support of the entire Zionist establishment and the major parties.

The plan was originally devised in mid-2025, but was put on hold after Segal was discredited by revelations of her family’s connections, through generous donations, with the far-right, anti-immigrant group Advance. Now, the ALP appears to be implementing it. Under the obligatory cover of combating antisemitism, the training is clearly intended to further attack genocide opponents in higher education.

The measure shows a flagrant contempt for the basic role of universities in a supposedly liberal society – the necessary cliché that the campus is a place where controversial ideas can be expressed and discussed, no matter what powerful political actors they alienate. Academic freedom is an ideal, not a reality, but it is still an essential principle of true intellectual work.

The extent to which it is observed is an indicator of the overall state of democracy in a country.

Little is currently known about how the antisemitism training will work in practice. Segal’s blueprint is – no doubt intentionally – extremely vague. Regardless of the form it takes, the training is designed to elevate anti-Jewish hate above all other kinds of racism as especially deserving of redress – what other form of racism has its own training? – and to enforce Zionists’ chauvinistic insistence that they are the only Jews worthy of the name.

Both intentions are profoundly racist.

How the training will be assessed is also unclear. We have no knowledge of what the consequences would be for the many university staff who will refuse to participate in Zionist indoctrination. We also have no inkling of the size of the financial penalties against non-compliant universities that Segal, in full Trumpian mode, wants to apply. According to Times Higher Education, they will be ‘significant’.

The current US administration has already mandated widespread student training designed to vilify Palestine solidarity as antisemitic. The Australian proposal of something similar for university staff puts Albanese and his government to the right of Trump.

The government has appointed Greg Craven, the former VC of the Australian Catholic University, as the political commissar responsible for the training and other elements of Segal’s ‘report card’ process.

Craven has pooh-poohed the idea that cracking down on anti-Zionist speech could constitute any threat to civil liberties. The issue, he writes, is fundamentally one of ‘national defence’. Albanese’s new hate speech laws, for example, are needed because our current legal and constitutional arrangements

are based on the assumption that our commonwealth faces no deadly external or internal threats.

Read that again. We are, Craven thinks, essentially at war. This means that we have to be the ones to suspend the basic democratic norms we love so much, because otherwise the jihadists will do it for us. He sees pro-Palestinian critics of the hate speech laws as spreading ‘morally bankrupt intellectual effluent’.

‘A couple of decades’ house arrest for Louise Adler,’ he writes, is ‘appealing’. This is kind of right-wing trolling that, in 2026, equips someone to be entrusted by the ALP with the future of academic freedom in Australia.

Mass defiance of the training is the only feasible response. University authorities certainly cannot be trusted to push back. They have made it clear that they are perfectly willing to turn their institutions into Zionist propaganda mills. Universities Australia welcomed Segal’s recommendations when they were first made in July; the supine Group of Eight has not raised a peep of protest against the political training proposal.

The training will, however, pose serious headaches for university managers. But, far from protesting, they might even welcome the opportunity to discipline Palestine-supporting staff, who are usually also at the forefront of union and other progressive campus activism. Last year’s gratuitous purge of academics at Macquarie University disproportionately targeted Palestine supporters, union activists and women.

As decades of their imposition of cuts and austerity in the sector show, Many Vice-Chancellors and their deputies are more than ready to sacrifice higher education wholesale, at any price. Their rewards are the prestige and salary that come with a career in senior university management.

In this year’s Australia Day honours, Professor Annamarie Jagose, the Provost of the University of Sydney, was rewarded with an Order of Australia medal for ‘service to tertiary education’. She was far from the only university executive to get a gong. Awarding this honour, at this moment, to the second-highest office holder at Sydney, which has led the way in its repression of anti-genocide activism, is not anodyne, and it is hard not to read it as a federal

reward for the university’s readiness to politically and ideologically serve the cause of genocide.

Not content with feting Israel’s bomb-signing terrorist-in-chief, Albanese is also destroying the notional independence of the university system, imposing a political standard to which teaching and administrative staff must conform, and delivering campuses into the hands of a far-right lobby that is milking the atrocity at Bondi for all it is worth.

After Bondi, no authoritarian bridge seems too far for the ALP and Coalition. Crossing dangerous new frontiers in political repression will be the principal legacy of Anthony Albanese and his Labor colleagues. Their reforms threaten to fundamentally alter the character of society, which will become more autocratic, more racist, less rational and less free.

Everyone who supports the reckless and bankrupt Labor Party is accountable.

During the genocide, universities have played the role of being a testing ground for repressive policies that were soon rolled out more widely. Before the NSW government restricted street protests, Australian Vice-Chancellors restricted them on campus. The federal government’s hate speech laws were prefigured by crackdowns on anti-Zionist or pro-Palestinian expression in universities.

Under their supposedly ‘liberal’ leadership, campuses have consistently trialled the next features of the Australian police state. Once Zionist political training has become established in universities,

there is nothing to stop it from being rolled out more widely.

https://michaelwest.com.au/antisemitism-training-labors-march-to-authoritarianism/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.