Nazi salute to be punished with jail time under Australian hate-crime laws

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/06/nazi-salute-jail-australia-passes-hate-crime-laws/

38 comments

  1. ***The Telegraph reports***:

    Australia has passed tough anti-hate-crime laws, including mandatory jail time for giving a Nazi salute in public, in a bid to tackle a recent surge in anti-Semitism.

    The laws will impose minimum jail sentences of 12 months for hate crimes and displaying hate symbols, and six years for those found guilty of terrorism offences.

    “I want people who are engaged in anti-Semitism to be held to account, to be charged, to be incarcerated,” Anthony Albanese, the prime minister who had initially opposed mandatory minimum sentences for hate crimes, told Sky News.

    The government’s hate-crimes bill was first introduced to parliament last year, creating new offences for threatening force or violence against people based on their race, religion, nationality, national or ethnic origin, political opinion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and intersex status.

    Recent months have seen an escalation of attacks on synagogues, buildings and cars of Jewish community members across the country, including the discovery of a caravan laden with explosives with a list of Jewish targets in Sydney.

    Mr Albanese has been criticised by the centre-Right opposition party for being weak on crime and failing to address the rise in anti-Semitism.

    The Liberal-National coalition began calling for mandatory minimum sentences to be added to the hate-crimes bill last month.

    Tony Burke, the home affairs minister who introduced the amendments enabling the provisions late on Wednesday, said the changes were the “toughest laws Australia has ever had against hate crimes”.

    The state of New South Wales, where most of the anti-Semitic attacks have taken place, said on Wednesday it would also strengthen its hate-speech laws to reflect those already in place in Western Australia and Victoria.

    **Full story:** [**https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/06/nazi-salute-jail-australia-passes-hate-crime-laws/**](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/02/06/nazi-salute-jail-australia-passes-hate-crime-laws/)

  2. Dealing with far right is fine – it must be done, but what about the far left? You know, those, that also burn down the synagogues, attack Jews a shout “from the river to the sea”? Somehow Australia doesn’t seem to care about those.

  4. The Trump administration may soon, through pressure or request, seek to weaken or update that law.

  5. Well done, Oz! Few more countries need to grow a pair!

  6. Let’s be honest. If most of our grandfathers caught some cunt out there giving the nazi salute it would have been lights out. I love how these fuckers want to wave the flag of patriotism yet argue that this kind of shit is acceptible. The greatest generation are rolling over in their graves.

  7. wonderful. shame that Liberal party (right wing) had more balls than Labour.

  9. Good on them. Too bad America didn’t have enough of a spine when the Neo-Nazis crawled out of their shit-stained beds in their cousins basement and started doing it in our streets. Maybe we wouldn’t be in so much trouble now if we had shown those fuckers decades ago that thinking you’re “superior” to people because of the colour of your skin, or anything else you were born with for that matter isn’t fucking acceptable in society.

    Aussies stay cool as fuck. And do your duty to prevent the rise of your own lunatic faction.

  10. Just execute them. They’d do the same to anyone not nazi

  11. My great grandpa fixed planes that killed the nazis. Nazis deserve no mercy

  13. I’m no Australian….but wouldn’t a public ass whooping be enough?

  15. Neo-Nazis and antisemites should just cope and accept that Jewish people are better in building and rebuilding civilization than their kind. 

  16. can they now include the waving of American flags–especially those with Trump on them–as equivalent to the waving of a nazi flag?!!

  18. As it should be everywhere in any country that wants to protect itself from the evils of unchecked and free rampant bigotry

    Soon have places forgotten the horrors of what this type of rhetoric is capable of

    Dont tolerate intolerance…

  20. That salute is very much a hate crime, it means you support genocide, you support destroying entire groups of people.

    Charging someone with a crime for doing it is fair.

  21. So if someone accidentally waves his hand in the wrong direction and gets reported to the local KGB outlet that’s guaranteed jail time for the poor bastard? Marvelous. Firing squads coming next and then gulag.

  22. GOOD. Let’s cut this shit out here and now. 

  26. I don’t get the point. The nazis aren’t going to disappear just because they can’t do the salute out in public. Let them make fools of themselves.

    Freedom of speech and expression protects you from legal repercussions, not social ones. As another commenter said, a public ass-whooping should be enough.

  27. Meanwhile chanting, ” gas the Jews” is just fine, nothing to see here.

  28. So it’s ok to flip someone off as a gesture. I do a similar motion that could be construed as the same. If a gesture offends you this badly, you have more serious issues and need to stay off social media websites.

  31. Rather legalise vigilante justice whenever someone is caught doing it. Punching Nazis in the face should never be illegal.

  32. Does this mean Elon can never come to Australia without being arrested?

  33. Can’t we just create huge camps and put all the nazis in there, do the exact same thing they did to millions during WW2, and ask the ones who survive if they still like nazis?

    Some people can’t learn from books and need examples.

  34. This is the way. Vigilante justice emboldens opposition. A nazi doesn’t deserve your outburst, they deserve to be forgotten about in a prison cell

  36. +1 – How this wasn’t written into the articles of surrender and applied world wide, or something, is insane. What’s even more insane is that we’ve come around to a time where they feel like they can be out in the open and safe.

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