Australia is right to take hate and extremism seriously. Antisemitism, racism, misogyny, transphobia and homophobia are real, rising and deeply harmful. But good intentions are not enough. When governments respond to social harm by expanding criminal law without addressing how power is exercised in practice, the result is rarely safety. Too often, it is the opposite.
The proposed hate crime reforms currently before Parliament are framed as necessary protections. In reality, they risk entrenching the very systems that already fail women, particularly those who speak out, organise collectively, or challenge dominant power structures.
This is not a theoretical concern. Women know how the criminal legal system works because we are already living with its limits.
For decades, women experiencing violence have been told to report, to trust the process, to rely on law enforcement for protection. Many do. And many are met with disbelief, delay, misidentification or retaliation. The system is slow to intervene when women are at risk, but quick to act when authority feels challenged.
Hate crime laws sit inside this same system.
Expanding offences, increasing penalties, and broadening categories of criminal responsibility does not occur in a vacuum. It happens within institutions that already struggle to distinguish between harm and dissent, between violence and speech, between protection and control.
One of the most concerning aspects of the proposed reforms is the expansion of liability for “leaders” or “preachers”. On paper, this targets extremist figureheads. In practice, it creates wide discretion about who is deemed influential, who is blamed for others’ actions, and whose speech is considered dangerous.
Women’s movements have lived this before.
Feminist organisers, trans advocates, anti-violence campaigners and racial justice activists are frequently framed as divisive, inflammatory or threatening to social cohesion. We already see women reported, doxxed, investigated or silenced for naming harm. Giving the state broader powers to criminalise speech tied to loosely defined concepts of influence or ideology does not protect women. It exposes them.
History tells us that when laws are vague, enforcement follows power.
The same applies to increased penalties. There is no credible evidence that longer sentences or harsher charges reduce hate, extremism or violence. What they do increase is contact with a system that is already over-policed, unevenly applied, and structurally biased.
Women from marginalised communities know this well. Criminalisation lands hardest on those who are already surveilled: Aboriginal women, migrant women, queer women, women with disability, women living in poverty. Expanding the reach of criminal law without addressing these realities does not create safety. It redistributes risk.
There is also a deeper problem here: hate crime legislation is being asked to do the work of prevention without the tools to do it.
Hate is not eradicated through punishment alone. Extremism is not dismantled by sentencing. Antisemitism, misogyny and racism are sustained by social conditions: inequality, disinformation, isolation, economic stress, and the erosion of trust in institutions. None of these are meaningfully addressed by criminal law reform.
We have seen this pattern before. When systems fail to invest in prevention, education, community safety and accountability, they reach for symbolic strength. New offences. New powers. Tough language. It looks decisive. It feels responsive. But it leaves the underlying conditions untouched.
And for women, symbolism is not safety.
Real protection requires clarity, not expansion. Precision, not discretion. Accountability, not authority.
If the goal is to address hate and extremism, we should be investing in early intervention, digital regulation, community-led responses, and civil mechanisms that do not rely on criminalisation as the primary tool. We should be strengthening safeguards against misuse, not weakening them. And we should be listening closely to the women’s sector, which has long warned about how easily laws designed to protect can be turned against those they claim to serve.
This is not an argument against taking hate seriously. It is an argument for taking women’s lived experience of the legal system seriously.
Women do not need more promises of protection that dissolve on contact with reality. We need laws that understand power, anticipate misuse, and prioritise safety over spectacle. Because if hate crime laws expand the reach of systems that already fail women, they will not make us safer. They will simply give failure more authority.