Nobody elected Jillian Segal. But she wants to muzzle criticism of Israel and is demanding Australia accept her campaign to police every aspect of public life. Andrew Brown.
Nobody elected Jillian Segal. Anthony Albanese appointed her in July 2024. She has drafted a blueprint for policing a nation’s political life.
Her October priorities report decides who may march and whether masked, which academics keep grants, which artists keep commissions, which visa holders stay and who judges the ABC and SBS. One unelected envoy, answerable to no voter, proposing state supervision of what Australians say about a foreign country.
An attack on democracy in the language of tolerance.
The target is explicit. Segal declares progressive antisemitism the most pervasive form in Australia and names its hosts: universities, the media, the arts, human rights groups. Not the far right. The left.
She supplies no data and no method, only an adjective and a list of enemies. The playbook is Donald Trump’s: defund Columbia and Harvard, deport students for their opinions. The Sydney Morning Herald $ gives Segal’s report the full publicity treatment: photograph included, scrutiny sold separately.
Scrubbing the blood from the record
She calls Palestine a gateway issue through which radicals lead moderate Australians towards hatred of Jews. Segal treats Australians’ compassion for the dead as somebody else’s recruitment drive. Apparently the conscience needs supervising. The Jewish Council of Australia calls those claims near conspiratorial.
Pew’s June survey found 79 per cent of Australians hold an unfavourable view of Israel, up from 74 per cent a year earlier. That is not a fringe. It is the country.
Segal treats it as a contagion, four in five Australians as suspects.
A government policing the majority view of a foreign state on that state’s behalf has stopped protecting a minority and started protecting an embassy.
They have every reason.
The Gaza Health Ministry counts more than 74,000 dead, over a quarter of them children. UN agencies say Gaza has the world’s highest rate of child amputees. Israeli intelligence officers told +972 Magazine of a targeting system named Where’s Daddy, which followed a man home so the bomb fell on his family.
The bombs were American 2,000 pounders, dropped on tent camps. Australians watched it on their phones. They needed no radical with a gateway, only eyes. Segal’s definitions exist to scrub the blood from the record: the decaying bodies of children, the stumps where limbs were, the starved infants, the crimes a UN commission calls genocide.
An envoy who wants Australians silent about that is not fighting hatred. She is covering for it.
Silencing Jewish voices too
In March 2025 the AFP exposed the Dural caravan plot as a criminal con job. NSW Police tied fourteen Strike Force Pearl incidents to the same paid organisers, none of whom showed antisemitic ideology. ASIO attributes the Adass Israel synagogue attack to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, through proxies, in an operation that, by the official account, was meant to fake a groundswell of hostility. Paid criminals and a foreign intelligence service lit the fires. Segal bills people marching with prams.
The left she wants policed is full of Jews. On every pro Palestine march I have attended, Jews marched in numbers under the Jewish Council of Australia banner. Its executive director, Sarah Schwartz, answered Segal: “Many Australian
Jews reject the suggestion that our Jewish identities are inseparable from Zionism.”
She calls antisemitism a serious and growing threat and the report “a political manifesto aimed at silencing criticism of Israel,” a dangerous, ideologically driven roadmap that threatens free speech and academic freedom. If opposition to Zionism is an attack on Jewish identity, these Jews are attacking themselves.
Never again means never again
My own godparents were Hungarian Jews who survived the Holocaust. They taught me “never again” means never again, for all people, not only Jews. Stay silent while Palestinians are slaughtered and you spit on the graves of the six million jews killed in the Holocaust. I oppose Zionism and what Israel does in its name. No contradiction.
The report never asks what is already illegal. Every antisemitic assault, firebombing, daubed swastika and incitement to violence is a crime today.
So what are the new powers for? Not crimes. Opinions.
Their purpose is to conflate, sometimes carelessly and sometimes willfully, criticism of a foreign government with hatred of a people.
Page nine assures us the IHRA definition is not legally binding and restricts nothing. Page eighteen wants it given binding character in university disciplinary codes, with research grants terminable for breaching it. Page twenty five does the same to arts funding.
The Segal State, Part 2: the mask, the children, the money and the answer
Criticism of Israeli governments, she says, remains permitted. Israel’s 2018 nation state law reserves national self determination to the Jewish people alone.
Call that unjust, argue for one democratic state with equal rights, urge a boycott of companies profiting from the occupation, and Segal files you as a threat to Jewish existential security. That is politics, not prejudice.
Pages fourteen and fifteen file genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid under language used to paint Israel and its supporters as evil.
In September 2025 a UN commission of inquiry concluded Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. In July 2024 the International Court of Justice found Israel in breach of the treaty ban on racial segregation and apartheid in the occupied West Bank. The children are dead and the people demanding accountability find their vocabulary in the dock.
Her protest proposals borrow abortion clinic access zones and transplant them around institutions without a shred of evidence that marchers harass anyone. She wants faces uncovered and move-on powers for a police force that put Hannah Thomas in hospital and ran undercover escorts for Israeli soldiers at the Sydney Marathon and brutally bashed and peppered sprayed people at Sydney Town Hall.
Eroding civil liberties does not make Australians safer
Who bears the brunt? Not neo Nazis. Palestinian and Arab Australians, Muslims, students, the minorities an envoy against racism is supposed to protect.
Albanese appointed a former Executive Council of Australian Jewry president whose appointment notice cited her chairmanship of the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce. An advocacy group with a Commonwealth letterhead.
This is the “Israelisation of Australia”:
universities, broadcasters, police and migration retooled to guard the sensitivities of a foreign state, and our democracy narrowed to whatever Israel can bear to hear.
Jewish Australians deserve safety. After Bondi that is an obligation, not a slogan. That is why this report is so cynical: it spends the moral capital of a massacre on a political project and makes nobody safer.
Repression does not end dissent. It pushes it to the margins, where it hardens. The NSW Council for Civil Liberties calls it a power grab by the pro Israel lobby.
Eroding civil liberties will not deliver Jewish safety.
The office of Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism should be abolished. Australia does not need an appointee writing loyalty tests for a foreign state. Albanese created this job. He can end it. If he lacks the spine, Parliament should strip its funding. Our conscience does not require Segal’s clearance, and our democracy is not hers to ration.
Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist