Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke is giving more background about today’s decision to list neo-Nazis as a prohibited hate group in Australia.
He says neo-Nazis and Hizb ut-Tahrir were the two groups the government initially thought were pushing the law to its very limits, which is why it lowered the threshold to penalise hate groups last year.
“That legislation went through the parliament in January. At the time, the neo-Nazis announced that they would be disbanding, effectively,” he said.
But he argues that didn’t actually happen.
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke. Alex Ellinghausen
“What they did, for want of a better term, was they phoenixed, changed their name, but didn’t change the fact that they were still an organisation and were still engaging in the exact sort of behaviour that met the thresholds for this legislation,” Burke said.
“They thought by announcing that they had disbanded, that they had evaded these laws. They haven’t.”