The Andrews government will move to ban the Nazi salute within months after the gesture was used at a protest attended by neo-Nazis at the weekend.
Victoria’s attorney general, Jaclyn Symes, says the proposed law will take “some work” to get right.
Anti-transgender activists clashed with pro-transgender rights activists outside Victoria’s parliament on Saturday after an event held by the controversial UK gender activist Kellie-Jay Keen. A group of about 30 men from the Nationalist Socialist Network marched along Spring Street, repeatedly performing the Nazi salute.
On Monday Symes said the Andrews government would take “active steps” to ban the gesture.
“The behaviour we saw on the weekend was disgusting, cowardly – a sense of sadness, outrage and disbelief all at once,” she told ABC Radio. “It’s clear this symbol is being used to incite hatred against a variety of people, a variety of minority groups … it’s being used as a recruitment tool.”
The opposition leader, John Pesutto, signalled that the Coalition was open to providing bipartisan support for the reform.
Josh Roose, an extremism expert and associate professor at Deakin University, said that while far-right groups used other gestures like the “OK symbol”, the Nazi salute carried “direct lineage to the Holocaust” and had greater “symbolic and cultural power”.
“They’re also all wearing black but you can’t ban black. The baseline is drawing a big line around the actions of the Nazi in the second world war outlawing that, ” he told Guardian Australia.
Dr Dvir Abramovich, chairman of the anti-defamation commission, who has led a campaign to ban the salute, backed the proposed reform and acknowledged it was “complex”.
He said the government would need to consider if there were any appropriate exclusions for the displaying of the Nazi salute.
“For example, artistic settings or educational settings where you are showing a play or a film. That is a question the government will need to navigate,” he said.
Dr Andre Oboler, the chief executive of the online hate prevention institute, reignited calls for the Andrews government to draft legislation that targeted Nazi glorification rather than specific symbols.
“You can then leave the question of whether something is glorification or not to police and the courts,” he said. “It is what we do for section 18C [of the Racial Discrimination Act]. With racism, we don’t get and prohibit every individual racist gesture.”
Oboler warned that far-right groups would import other gestures from overseas if the Nazi salute was banned.
“Once they ran out of those ones, they would just make up new ones,” he said.
“If we have to go back to parliament to change the legislation every time that happens, it’s just not practical.”
Anti-fascist research group White Rose Society said tackling far-right extremism required “more than kneejerk responses”.
“We need to address the conditions which allow these groups to fester – including a political and media landscape where some of the views they’re espousing are simply presented more politely,” a spokesperson for the group said.
The event has sparked turmoil in the Liberal party after Pesutto announced that he would seek to expel the first-term MP Moira Deeming from the parliamentary party room due to her involvement in the anti-trans protest.
Pesutto said Deeming’s position was “untenable” because of her involvement with speakers at the rally who had been publicly associated with far-right extremists. Deeming was contacted for comment but said she had been advised not to speak publicly before the vote.
Keen has come under fire after a speaker at one of her events quoted Adolf Hitler when speaking about transgender rights.
Earlier this year Symes flagged that the government was considering banning the salute after white supremacists performed the gesture in public, including at a 26 January ceremony for First Nations Victorians.
Last year Victoria became the first Australian jurisdiction to ban the public display of the Nazi swastika. The ban acted on a recommendation from a parliamentary inquiry into the state’s anti-vilification laws, which called for the criminalisation of all symbols of Nazi ideology.
Queensland last week vowed to make it illegal to display Nazi swastika tattoos as part of its ban on hate symbols which it says will be among the strongest in the country.
• This story was corrected on Monday, 20 March 2023. The group involved in the protest at parliament house was from the National Socialist Network, not the National Socialist Movement, which is a separate and unrelated group.
