I was pleased to host my first JCCV Plenum on Monday night, and what a turn out we had!

I would like to welcome three new member organisations to the JCCV: C-Care, Melbourne Jewish Charity Fund and WIZO Victoria. The JCCV looks forward to working closely with them, and our other member organisations, on events, initiatives and programs in the future.

Our panel discussion at the Plenum looked at Antisemitism and the Law in Victoria.

Monash University human rights expert Professor Melissa Castan, Victoria Police Assistant Commissioner Chris Gilbert and barrister Rachel Walsh all generously shared their expertise.

The audience heard that Victoria has laws available to combat antisemitism but they are complex and not used often.

Prof Castan opened proceedings with a crash course on the legal framework that protects Victorians against racism. 

Assistant Commissioner Gilbert said the complexity of the laws around antisemitism – and other prejudice-motivated crime – means police need regular training and education.

“It is great to have the laws and great to have the policies, but our people actually need to understand what they are encountering,” he said. 

Responding to incidents of concern to the Jewish community, including the violent protest at Princes Park, Caulfield last November and the removal of Jewish individuals from a pro-Palestinian demonstration outside the Melbourne Town Hall in February, the Assistant Commissioner said police were not there to take sides but to avoid a violent outcome.

“We are merely making sure that if these two groups come together and there is violence, that is an outcome that is (a) really unnecessary and (b) something that could have been prevented,” he told the audience. “So we will step in at different times and say ‘please, this is going to end really really badly we need you to leave, please leave’. No one is being charged with anything in those circumstances.”

Walsh, a barrister with an interest in public law, talked the audience through some of the findings in the antisemitism case brought by former Brighton Secondary College students. The judgement in this case, she said, will help Victorian courts better understand what antisemitism is.

But she said it is a challenging area to litigate. “It takes a lot of preparation legally, it takes a lot of time and effort, and therefore money, to run these sorts of cases, but if they are prepared and if the investment is made, they can actually be successful and they can actually deliver quite groundbreaking law and therefore achieve quite groundbreaking protections for community.”

Legal claims in this area, Walsh added, are best made on a coordinated and strategic basis. She added that there may be legal opportunities provided in the Brighton Secondary College judgement, to litigate around discrimination that is anti-Zionist.