In 1983, I was a freshman at the University of Sydney. Student protests were a given in those days, and one of the biggest names on campus for radical activism was Anthony Albanese.
In July of that year, Albo was one of the student leaders who occupied the university’s iconic clocktower, protesting about whether the political economy course should be freed from the grip of the economics faculty. No doubt a very important issue, but likely a long way short of genocide.
The same Albo, in 2026, now says he “utterly condemns” a recent incident at his old university. Wow, must be something pretty bad for the old student warrior to be so upset. What was he criticising as “an absolute outrage“? In the recent student council elections at Sydney University, the activist group Solidarity ran its candidates under the banner “Globalise the Intifada”.
The prime minister wasn’t alone in his moral panic. The university’s vice-chancellor, Mark Scott, declared his profound disappointment and threatened disciplinary action against the candidates.
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Scott followed up by announcing that he had asked the Crown Solicitor for formal advice on “whether these issues constitute any breach of the NSW Crimes Act”, as well as the NSW Electoral Commissioner on “appropriate criteria and principles for the naming of groups contesting elections”.
That’s not all. The university paper Honi Soit reported the institution’s Senate has allegedly discussed taking the handling of students’ representative council elections away from the council altogether, as well as heavily restricting on-campus campaigning and restricting in-person voting.
The near-hysterical reaction to the use of the three words — described by NSW Premier Chris Minns as “hateful, violent rhetoric” and Education Minister Jason Clare as “hate speech” — foreclosed any actual conversation. But let’s just focus on what the grievance entails.
This can be found in a formal statement from the University of Sydney, which concludes that “threatening and intimidating behaviour has no place at the university”. This echoes Minns’ diagnosis: “there is no question about the distress it causes members of the Jewish community”.
“Globalise the Intifada” is a slogan, popularised in the West in recent years but with no significant history of use in Palestine or by Palestinian activists. My team and I have been exploring its roots for the High Court challenge we’ve brought against Queensland’s recent law that has criminalised using the phrase “menace” or “offend” in that state. NSW has intervened in the court case in support of Queensland, indicating that Minns still wants to criminalise the same phrase in his state, as he promised back in January.
The roots of the phrase aren’t deep, so it’s interesting why it has been singled out as language so dangerous, so harmful, that it must be eradicated. The actual words, like all words, have no single meaning. “Intifada” is a contested term, in Arabic literally a “shaking off”. In Palestine, it connotes the two uprisings against the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (both illegal under international law). In Israel, it means unprovoked Palestinian violence targeted at Israelis and therefore Jews. Thousands of kilometres away, for Australia’s Zionist lobby groups, a call to “Globalise the Intifada” is largely interpreted as an incitement to violence against Jews, everywhere — in short, antisemitic terrorism.
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There is ample evidence that the phrase upsets some Jewish people. I’ve personally seen no evidence that anyone has been saying it for the purpose of inciting violence, or that its use has incited anything at all. Is it “threatening and intimidating”, per se, for these words to be seen? I struggle to see how, but it is, as I said, contested.
However, no contest is allowed at the University of Sydney. There has been no discussion, debate or even polite consideration at Australia’s oldest institution of higher learning. The conversation began with its conclusion: this is antisemitic hate speech, and its utterance justifies calling in the cops and potentially ending decades of tradition of student democracy.
It is a fascinating incident of these past three years of finding antisemites under the bed that ground zero for intolerance of support for the Palestinian cause (let alone the cause itself) has turned out to be the very place where intellectual freedom and the contest of ideas are supposed to be most championed and protected: the university.
Why this is so deserves its own thesis. It’s certainly apparent that the people in charge of our universities, such as Mark Scott, have a tenuous grasp at best on why their own institutions exist. His words echo those of the state’s political masters and speak volumes as a result.
As for Albo, it’s not hard to imagine what he’d say these days to his younger, firebrand self.
