Comment on this storyCommentAdd to your saved storiesSave
MELBOURNE, Australia — Displays of Nazi salutes and symbols were banned in Australia starting Monday, with lawbreakers facing 12 months’ imprisonment.
The ban will “ensure no one in Australia will be allowed to glorify or profit from acts and symbols that celebrate the Nazis and their evil ideology,” Attorney General Mark Dreyfus said in a statement Monday.
Displays of Nazism are legally restricted in more than a dozen countries, particularly within Europe, according to Yad Vashem, a Holocaust remembrance center. However, in the United States, a Supreme Court ruling in 1977 upheld the National Socialist Party of America’s right to demonstrate while displaying Nazi symbols under the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech.
The Australian bill was introduced in June by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left government, after incidents where Nazi salutes were used. These included a rally against rights for transgender people in March and an anti-immigration rally in May, both outside the Victoria state parliament house in Melbourne.
In a discussion of the legislation on podcast The Briefing in November, Dreyfus said there had been “unthinkable, disturbing and appalling displays of antisemitic hatred and violence and symbols in our communities” over the past year.
“And in recent weeks, I’m sad to say, we’ve seen a heightening of that kind of unacceptable behavior,” he said.
The internet and covid-19 lockdowns, which were especially strict in Melbourne, where the main protests took place, were factors in a rise in right-wing extremism, according to a 2022 Australian Parliamentary Library briefing to lawmakers on the issue.
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry said there was more than a sevenfold increase in the number of reported antisemitic incidents in October and November 2023, right after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent Israel-Hamas war, when compared to the same period in 2022. There was a 13-fold spike in anti-Muslim incidents over a similar period, according to the Islamophobia Register Australia.
“It ought to be a matter of pride in our country, which is one of the most multicultural countries in the world, that everybody is free to practice their faith, everybody is free to live in our country without fear of discrimination,” Dreyfus said in the November interview.
The federal bill bans public displays of the Nazi salute and Nazi symbols including the Hakenkreuz, more commonly referred to as the swastika; the double-sig rune, associated with the SS; and symbols used by terrorist organizations. It also forbids trading in material that shows prohibited symbols.
It makes a federal crime of what was already illegal in varying degrees under state law in parts of Australia, with exceptions for legitimate religious, academic, educational, artistic, literary or scientific purposes and media coverage.