STEPHEN JOHNSON: Banning Hizb ut-Tahrir is long overdue — 75 years after attempts at banning Communist party

Anthony Albanese’s move to ban Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir puts him in the same company as Australia’s longest-serving prime minister Robert Menzies who also sought to ban an authoritarian political organisation.

Anti-Semitic, freedom-hating groups have for 75 years openly despised Australia’s way of life and challenged civil liberties.

A High Court challenge on constitutional grounds is also possible, repeating what happened during the early years of the Cold War, with Hizb ut-Tahrir Australia on Wednesday taking down their website but branding the new laws as “tyrannical”.

“Hizb ut-Tahrir will seek to challenge this law and any attempted proscription that results from it,” it said in a statement.

The Communist Party, which a Coalition government sought unsuccessfully to outlaw in 1951, was seeking to abolish capitalism and multi-party democracy.

Like them, Hizb ut-Tahrir — a so-called “Party of Liberation” — also wants to abolish capitalism and democracy. But it goes further, with a plan to replace Western civilisation with a global Islamic caliphate.

Like Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Russian henchmen planning pogroms during the Cold War, Hizb ut-Tahrir is also anti-Semitic and hates Jews.

This pan-Islamist group extends its hatred beyond Judaism to gays, ex-Muslims and non-believers of Islam, or infidels.

Federal Parliament this week voted to create a new proscribed hate-group list, that would ban Hizb ut-Tahrir and the National Socialist Network, a neo-nazi outfit, with the Liberal Party backing this element of Labor’s Combatting Anti-Semitism, Hate and Extremism Bill.

The groups haven’t met the threshold to be included on Australia’s terror list, along with the 31 organisations already there including al-Qaida, which plans and finances terrorism.

While Hizb ut-Tahrir isn’t a proscribed terrorist group that carries out violent acts, it is a political organisation with a vile ideology.

Its global constitution calls for the killing of ex-Muslims — or apostates who have left Islam — with its spokesman in Australia, Uthman Badar, in March 2017 boasting to a Bankstown audience in south-west Sydney: “We don’t shy away from that, we don’t shy away from saying that.”

“The ruling of apostasy in Islam is clear, again that’s one of the things the West doesn’t like so it seeks to change,” he said.

Another leader in Australia, Wassim Doureihi, in 2014 repeatedly refused to condemn ISIS’s murderous campaign in the Middle East, in an 11-minute ABC Lateline interview with Emma Alberici.

This was a precursor to Hizb ut-Tahrir organising mobs outside a Lakemba mosque in 2023 to celebrate the anniversary of the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel by Hamas that killed more than 1200 people.

Calls to ban this group went unheeded, even though Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, was already in the process of outlawing it nine years ago.

Hizb ut-Tahrir has been illegal in Bangladesh, another Muslim-majority nation, since 2009.

It has long been outlawed across the Muslim world in places like Egypt, the birthplace of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, which produced Hamas.

Saudi Arabia, the home of Mecca where Muslims make an annual pilgrimage, has also banned it, as has Turkey, a Muslim nation with a more secular history.

Germany banned it in 2003 while the UK followed suit in 2024, the year Hizb ut-Tahrir in Australia infiltrated anti-Israel protests at the University of Sydney, and set up on campus to intimidate Jewish students.

Despite the evidence, both sides of politics in Australia have been reluctant to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir until Islamist gunmen killed 15 innocent people at Sydney’s Bondi Beach on the first day of a Jewish Hanukkah festival.

Unlike the early 1950s, when the Menzies Government sought to ban the Communist Party, the move to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir is bipartisan, at least when it comes to the major political parties with Liberal leader Sussan Ley in 2026 backing Labor.

Post-war Labor Opposition leaders Ben Chifley and Herbert Evatt had opposed the Communist Party Dissolution Act 1950, regarding it as a breach of civil liberties.

A High Court challenge to the law, backed by trade unions, succeeded in March 1951 with the bench almost unanimously ruling that Parliament could not ban an organisation based on disproven allegations of subversion.

A referendum in September 1951, to allow the government to ban the Communist Party, was narrowly defeated with the yes case getting 49.44 per cent of the vote with Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania voting in favour.

New laws in Australia, giving Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke the power to ban designed hate groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir under the Commonwealth criminal code, could potentially be unconstitutional like those 1950 laws banning the Communist Party.

“It gives far too broad powers to the minister to essentially designate a hate group,” NSW Council for Civil Liberties president Timothy Roberts told The Nightly.

“In constitutional questions, we talk about undue burdens on our freedoms of association and political communication and there’s a real risk that this imposes upon that.

“If we all as a community agree that a group like the nazis, for instance, are terrible, well we’re going to give them an easy win with a Constitutional case if we’re not careful.”

Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act covers insulting, humiliating and offending a group of people, which enabled the Executive Council of Australian Jewry to successfully sue Islamist hate preacher Wissam Haddad last year for describing Jews as “vile” and “treacherous”.

But calls for violence against a group of people, based on their race or ethnicity, mainly fall under State law, with New South Wales laws covering race, religious belief or affiliation.

Until the High Court decides on the constitutionality of new Commonwealth hate laws, making it harder for groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir is a flawed step in the right direction.

A referendum to amend the Constitution to ban it would have more success if there was bipartisan support - which was absent 75 years ago.

Hizb ut-Tahrir’s extremist ideology and actions have been far more pernicious on Australian society than Communist Party members running as trade union candidates during the 1950s.