Hate Incidents in Australia Post October 7
Since the Hamas-led murder of 1200 people and the kidnapping of 251 more in Israel on 7 October 2023, and the subsequent war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, there has been a major spike in hate incidents in Australia. This has primarily affected Jewish and Muslim communities. Various other communities have also suffered hate incidents, unrelated to October 7. Recently published reports from affected communities have provided data on hate incidents in Australia since 2022.
Organisations from four communities have produced reports on hate incidents. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the peak national representative organisation of the Jewish community in Australia, has published annual reports on antisemitism continuously since 1990. The Islamophobia Register Australia (IRA), which collects anti-Muslim and anti-Islam incidents, has published five reports covering incidents since 2014. The Asian Australian Alliance (AAA) published two reports in 2020 and 2021 on anti-Asian incidents but has not published any further reports. Call It Out (CIO), which collects incidents against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, has published two annual reports since 2022.
Each community organisation, in their incident reports, utilises: different time frames; different criteria (eg objective v subjective); different categories (eg including or excluding online content as incidents); and different levels of transparency. Despite these differences, some comparisons between the data on incidents can be made.
Anti-Jewish Incidents
The ECAJ Report on Anti-Jewish Incidents in Australia 2024, which covered the 12-month period from 1 October 2023 to 30 September 2024, was released in December 2024. There were 2,062 reported anti-Jewish incidents logged. In the previous 12-month period, ending 30 September 2023, there were 495 incidents logged. In the 12-month period ending 30 September 2022, there were 478 incidents logged. Thus, for the 3-year period 2022-2024, there was a total of 3,035 anti-Jewish incidents logged.
The period covered by the latest ECAJ report (to 30 September 2024) predates, and therefore does not include, the spate of targeted firebombing, arson and graffiti attacks on Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues and Jewish schools and homes and Jewish-owned vehicles in Sydney and Melbourne that occurred after 1 October 2024.
Categories of incidents include physical assault, vandalism, verbal abuse, messages directed at individual people or organisations (emails, posted material, telephone calls), graffiti, and propaganda material (leaflets, posters, stickers etc) directed at Jews.
It is important to note that the ECAJ report does not include hateful anti-Jewish online content as an incident, unless it is a direct threat of violence targeting Jews. The ECAJ report does not include anti-Israel or anti-Israeli incidents as anti-Jewish incidents unless Jews are targeted eg anti-Israel graffiti on a synagogue.
Anti-Muslim Incidents
The Islamophobia Register Australia released its fifth report Islamophobia in Australia Report 5 in March 2025. That report covered the 23-month period between 1 January 2023 and 30 November 2024 and logged 309 anti-Muslim incidents, composed of 124 incidents in 2023 and 185 incidents in 2024. In addition, IRA noted 366 “online incidents” in that 23-month period.
Categories of incidents include physical assault, property damage, discrimination, verbal harassment, non-verbal harassment, and written harassment.
IRA did not publish a report for 2022. Its previous report, covering the two years 2020 and 2021, recorded 40 physical incidents and 50 online incidents, continuing a downward trend in the number of incidents since 2015. Of note, online posts/comments accounted for between 42% and 55% of the total logged anti-Muslim/Islam incidents between 2014 and 2024.
IRA’s latest (2023-2024) report, includes not just anti-Muslim/Islam incidents but also anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab incidents, thus expanding the report to include more than one community. The IRA report states: “Reported incidents at pro-Palestinian protests constituted 8% of the total reported incidents in 2023 … In 2024, incidents at pro-Palestinian protests slightly exceeded 5% of the total … Additionally, incidents involving victims displaying pro-Palestinian symbols accounted for 8% of total incidents in 2023 and rose to one quarter of all reported incidents (25%) in 2024.”
Anti-First Nations incidents
Call It Out, the First Nations Racism Register, was launched in 2022 to enable reporting of racist incidents against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and to collect, document and report on these incidents. Call It Out reports are published by the Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research (based at UTS) and by the National Justice Project.
In its annual report covering the 12 months from 21 March 2022 to 20 March 2023, there were 497 registrations of incidents. In the following annual report, released in February 2025, covering the 12 months from 21 March 2023 to 20 March 2024, there were 453 registrations. This is a total of 950 registrations in the two years of 2022 and 2023.
Call It Out notes that “this is a count of registrations rather than incidents as a single registration can cover ongoing or multiple events, incidents or issues, including those that are structural or ongoing rather than occurring at a single point in time.” In addition, while the incidents have been reported within the specified time frame of each report, the actual date of the incident may have occurred a year or more before the specified time frame (the report form, under “When did it happen?” has a tick-box of “more than a year ago”) thus making it more difficult to determine how many incidents occurred during the specified 12 month time frame.
Categories of incidents include physical abuse, vandalism, verbal abuse, threats or intimidation, bullying, hate speech, stereotyping, graffiti, discrimination, shunning, “didn’t recognise cultural rights”, and institutional racism. Online content is included within most of these categories.
It should be noted that the systemic and structural racism faced by First Nations Peoples can take many forms of institutional and organisational discrimination and disadvantage, without necessarily manifesting as “incidents”. Focusing on incidents therefore understates the prevalence of anti-First Nations racism.
Summary of incidents 2022-2024
Given the absence of complete sets of data for two of the three communities for each of the three years 2022-2024 – IRA did not publish a report for 2022 and CIO has not yet produced a report for 2024 – there are two methods of calculating the summary of incidents for 2022-2024. Both methods are valid.
Firstly, the incident figures in all the available reports covering 2022-2024 can be used to obtain the total number of incidents over those three years, even though not all reports cover all of that period. This would mean having different time periods, within the three years, per community.
Secondly, from the incident figures for each community for only two of the years over the last 3-year period, an adjusted count can be obtained using the latest available reports from each community. This method whilst removing the anti-Jewish incidents in 2022 from the field provides a better comparison between the communities.
Summary 1 (total): For the three years from 2022 to 2024, there was a total of 4,294 hate incidents logged – 3,035 anti-Jewish incidents (in 36 months), 309 anti-Muslim/ Islam/ Palestinian/ Arab incidents (in 23 months), and 950 anti-First Nations registrations (in 24 months).
Summary 2 (adjusted): For two of the three years occurring between 2022 and 2024, there were 3,816 hate incidents logged – 2,557 anti-Jewish incidents (in 24 months – 2023 and 2024), 309 anti-Muslim/ Islam/ Palestinian/ Arab incidents (in 23 months – 2023 and 2024), and 950 anti-First Nations registrations (in 24 months – 2022 and 2023).
Proportionality
The frequency of hate incidents reported by each community varies significantly. To provide some context, the Australian population is composed of more than 25 million people. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 2021 in Australia there were approximately: 100,000 Jews; 814,000 Muslims; and 813,000 people of Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander origin.
Proportionally, using figures in Summary 2 (adjusted), for every 100,000 people in each community, on average annually during 2022 to 2024, there were 2,185 anti-Jewish incidents, 38 anti-Muslim incidents, and 117 anti-First Nations registrations.
The Jewish population figure is recognised as being understated, as many Jews do not write ‘Jewish’ in the census due to a history of persecution. The Jewish Communal Appeal (JCA) in Sydney and Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation (ACJC) at Monash University in Melbourne, have calculated that in 2021, the Jewish population was 117,000 – which is the population figure used in the proportionality statistic above.
Previous study of hate incidents 2014-2021
A previous study of hate incidents in Australia published in June 2023, provided a summary of the incident data pertaining to three communities: Jewish, Muslim and Asian, between 2014 and 2021.
The three sets of publications used in the study were: the Executive Council of Australian Jewry’s (ECAJ) ‘Report on Antisemitism in Australia’ (published annually since 1990); the Islamophobia Register Australia’s (IRA) ‘Islamophobia in Australia’ (four reports published, in 2017, 2019, 2022, and 2023); and the Asian Australian Alliance’s (AAA) ‘COVID-19 Coronavirus Racism Incident Report’ (one report published in 2020 and another in 2021).
The analysis in this study showed that in Australia there were 3,612 logged hate incidents in the seven-year four-month (88 month) period between 17 September 2014 and 31 December 2021. That amounts to an average of 492 incidents per year, and over nine incidents per week.
These incidents were composed of 2,142 anti-Jewish incidents (in the 84 months from 1 October 2014 to 30 September 2021); 929 anti-Muslim incidents (in the 88 months from 17 September 2014 to 31 December 2021); and 541 anti-Asian incidents (in the 15 months from 2 April 2020 to 28 June 2021). As previously noted, anti-Asian and anti-Muslim statistics include online incidents, whereas the anti-Jewish statistics exclude online incidents.
Under-reporting of Incidents
This study only covers hate incidents that have been reported to and logged by the three community reporting organisations. All communities, in Australia and overseas, have the problem of under-reporting of hate incidents for various reasons. Therefore, the number of hate incidents logged by any of the community organisations is only a proportion of hate incidents occurring. In addition, incidents against other targeted communities go unreported due to the lack of an organisation which logs reports for these communities.
Conclusion
In Australia, during the seven years from 2014 to 2021, there was a total of 3,612 reported hate incidents. During the three years from 2022 to 2024, there were 4,294 reported hate incidents. In total, there were more hate incidents reported in Australia in the last three years than during the previous seven years.
The statistics show that 59% of the total hate incidents reported between 2014 and 2021, were against Jews. This figure jumped to 70% of total hate incidents between 2022 and 2024 (which excludes the incidents occurring after September 2024 as previously noted). The Jewish community is one of the smallest ethnic communities in Australia, being only 0.4% of the total population, yet it accounts for 59-70% of all reported hate incidents.
This is not to under-state the prevalence of hate incidents against other communities. During different periods of Australian history, racist attitudes and incidents have waxed and waned against particular communities. In recent times, it is the Jewish community that has been disproportionately affected.
It is incumbent upon governments, police, civil society leaders and others to take effective action against hate incidents targeting any and all communities. Failure to counter the hate and reverse the trend demonstrated in the statistics has already had, and will ultimately have, enormous social and economic costs that will be to the detriment of all Australians, and of our multicultural nation.
