David Slucki

Yeah, so the definition question is, it's vexed and it's fraught, and I think necessarily definitions are, you know, they're messy and they're contested, and as a university lecturer and a historian...

know i i'm really sensitive to the fact that the way we talk about things in 2026 you know concepts like anti-semitism or racism or you know other forms of discrimination they're not static so you know consensus is hard to come by in australia we developed um and i was a co-author with a colleague from university of queensland professor kath gelber uh we

worked with a group of eight on a definition that we saw as fit for purpose for the university sector.

And in that case, it was principally around, you know, the question of Israel and discourse around Israel and Palestine.

So this question about harm versus offence that you raise is a really important one, and it's something that we've started writing more and more about in thinking about in a society where free speech is...

if not a kind of legislated value, but an underlying value in our democracy, how do you protect robust public discourse and protect people from harm?

Free speech isn't limitless.

There's guardrails around free speech, and in the case of universities, academic freedom.

In the case of the arts, artistic freedom, right?

There's got to be some guardrails to protect people from harm.

The question is, what is harm?

But often we're talking about, you know, things that exist in the grey area and that's where this gets really difficult.

Yeah, criticism of Israel is really important, as is criticism of Australia, as is criticism of any government, any country.

Where you start to get into these blurry lines, particularly when you're talking about criticism of Israel, is when historically harmful images, ideas, language, tropes start to get wheeled out as part of that and then reproduced.

And on the one hand, it's a criticism of power relations and structures and dynamics, but there's also this sort of fanciful notion, I think, of

really damaging ideas about Jews controlling governments, controlling the levers of power.

There are ideas around, well, why is Israel a subject to criticism that other countries aren't, and why is there this focus and targeting of Israel?

Sometimes I think that's a really good question, the targeting by the Iranian government of its own citizens.

as one example where there was sort of relative silence, I would say.

Sometimes you do wonder why, because there's many tragedies around the world.