Grattan on Friday: we don’t need an inquiry into the caravan affair but we do need some answers

By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

The battle to contain antisemitism in Australia finds both sides of politics embracing measures they’d otherwise abhor.

Spectacularly, the government capitulated this week to include mandatory minimum sentences in its hate speech legislation that passed the parliament on Thursday.

That flip flop was done in a day. You need a longer memory to recall the Coalition’s insistence that free speech had to be preeminent over dealing with hate speech.

Way back, when Tony Abbott was prime minister, there was a big (ultimately unsuccessful) push against Section 18C of…

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