The Bondi Beach attack of 14 December 2025 forced a reckoning that many Australians had been quietly avoiding. Antisemitism was not, it turned out, a relic of European history or a pathology confined to the political fringes. It was here, active and emboldened. The question that followed — “what must we do about it?” — has since animated parliamentary inquiries, legislative proposals, and now a Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion led by former High Court Justice Virginia Bell.

The Centre for Independent Studies has been engaged through the antisemitism research program led by the Culture, Prosperity and Civil Society program. The CIS’s work on antisemitism has been driven by the conviction that the health of a liberal democracy depends less on the architecture of its laws than on the vitality of its civil society.

This conviction runs through our most recent work on institutional resilience under conditions of moral and political stress, and it connects this project to the Centre’s civic pluralism series – Fractured Loyalties, The Ties That Bind, and Drawing the Line – each of which has explored the conditions under which pluralist societies hold together.

Antisemitism functions as a diagnostic. It is not merely an offence to be regulated or managed; rather, it is a signal of deeper institutional failure and a warning that the mediating structures once capable of transmitting civic norms across generations have been weakened, captured, or hollowed from within.

Dimitri Burshtein’s new report is a significant contribution to this ongoing work. Burshtein takes that diagnosis seriously and develops it with rigour and force. His argument is, at its core, Burkean: the informal sanctions of a healthy civil society are more powerful, and more durable, than any legislative remedy the state can devise. In making his case, Burshtein draws on comparative evidence from Germany, France, and the United Kingdom to demonstrate that the demand for more hate speech law is itself a symptom of institutional failure rather than a remedy for it. When communities lose the capacity to enforce shared norms, they reach for the state. But the state is ill-equipped to cultivate the virtues it has displaced.

This does not mean legal indifference. Violence, incitement and intimidation must be prosecuted firmly, a point about which Burshtein is clear. What his report resists, rightly, is the conceit that moral and cultural problems can be resolved by what Burshtein calls the ‘legislative fantasy’. The report also asks harder questions about institutional capture — in universities, the arts, the legal profession and the media — that deserve far greater scrutiny than they have received.

These are not peripheral concerns; they are central ones. If the commanding heights of Australian cultural life have been systematically oriented against our liberal democratic inheritance, then the challenge of antisemitism cannot be separated from the broader challenge of civic renewal. That renewal is the real work before us. In his new report, Dimitri Burshtein helps make the case for why.

To read the paper, go to www.cis.org.au

The Legislative Fantasy. Hate Speech, Culture and Institutional Failure by Dimitri Burshtein