In July 2025, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Jillian Segal AO, published a Plan to combat antisemitism. The former President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry proposed that she should personally monitor the public broadcasters’ coverage of the Middle East to ensure that they did not propagate “false or distorted narratives”. ABC Alumni strongly contested the idea that the ABC or SBS needed her assistance in implementing their own editorial policies.
We raised similar issues in our submission to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism. And in July this year, following Ms Segal’s evidence to the Royal Commission, we published articles by former Middle East correspondent Greg Wilesmith and by Jonathan Holmes that highlighted the absurdities and the gross inaccuracies that that evidence contained.
But Ms Segal is still pursuing the public broadcasters. Here, Jonathan Holmes examines her latest proposals to prevent the public broadcasters, as she sees it, from fomenting antisemitism by their coverage of conflict in the Middle East.
Jillian Segal AO, Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, is at it again.
Her new document is titled “Combatting Antisemitism: Special Envoy’s Priorities”. It targets many of the same institutions that she claimed were problematic in her original Plan to Combat Antisemitism, issued in July 2025, well before the Bondi massacre – among them, universities, schools, cultural and sporting institutions and the public broadcasters.
She goes further this time, however, in identifying the core problem: “modern, progressive antisemitism.” Progressive activists make antisemitism fashionable, she declares, by “laundering far-left antisemitism and Islamic extremism through a progressive lens, such as social justice and human rights, together with traditional antisemitic tropes, giving fundamentally extremist ideologies an apparently acceptable face.”
As usual with Ms Segal’s “reports”, there is not one single example given, not one footnote or reference, to justify this remarkable and all-embracing claim. We are expected to take on trust that “progressives” who talk about human rights, especially in the context of Gaza or attacks on Palestinians on the West Bank, may very well be giving an acceptable face to antisemitism.
In this they are aided, we are told, by the overly negative coverage of events in the Middle East by Australia’s public broadcasters. That coverage, Ms Segal insists, contributes to the problem of “conflation” – that is, the tendency to blame Australian Jews for the actions of the government of Israel and its defence force.
“ASECA,” writes Ms Segal, “has received many expressions of concern from the Australian Jewish community around reporting by the ABC and SBS. These concerns generally centre on coverage perceived as disproportionate, misleading or inaccurate on issues relating to Israel and the conflict in the Middle East.” [Priorities p 26]
Once again, we are not treated in the Priorities document to a single example of “disproportionate, misleading or inaccurate” coverage on the ABC or SBS. But in her evidence to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism in July, Ms Segal did have one example, which she made much of.
On 20 May 2025, the BBC carried an interview with a senior UN official, Tom Fletcher, claiming that “there are 14,000 babies that will die in the next 48 hours [in Gaza] unless we can reach them.” That was at 5 pm Australian Eastern Standard Time. By 3 am the next morning, the BBC was running stories in which the UN was walking back that claim. But the original, startling Fletcher statement was run on ABC radio later that morning and throughout the day. It was not qualified until 4 pm. The ABC did not fully retract the story for a week.
Jillian Segal and counsel assisting the Royal Commission, Richard Lancaster SC, went into this episode in some detail when she gave evidence on 9 July this year. Segal was able to inveigh against the ABC’s inaccuracy in this instance, and the negative impression about Israel that it left in listeners’ minds.
But where did Ms Segal and Mr Lancaster get the hour-by-hour detail with which they regaled the Royal Commission? Well, from a detailed report compiled by the ABC Ombudsman, Fiona Cameron. A report which found the ABC in this instance to be in breach of its Editorial Policies. The ABC’s Editorial Director, Gavin Fang, admitted later that morning to the Royal Commission that the ABC had made “a bad mistake”.
It would seem to be a classic instance of the ABC Ombudsman doing her job. So why would Ms Segal be calling for an “independent” ombudsman? Presumably because, of the thousands of complaints that the ABC has received about its coverage of the Middle East, most of them complaining about bias to one side or the other, its Ombudsman has upheld precisely four. And the independent backstop that already exists, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), has upheld none.
The Special Envoy does not draw the conclusion that the vast majority of the complaints about bias that the ABC receives, whether from the Australian Jewish community or from those alleging bias against the Palestinian cause, are without merit. Or that most complaints are the consequence of what Professor Terry Flew of the University of Sydney told the Royal Commission was known as “the hostile media effect” – the cognitive tendency of people with strong, partisan views to perceive balanced or neutral news reporting as being biased against their side.
Instead, Ms Segal wants to change the referee, in the hope of getting a different result.
At the same time, she has been gradually changing her demand that ABC and SBS coverage of the Middle East should be “monitored” on an ongoing basis.
In her original Plan, published in July 2025, Ms Segal proclaimed that “the Envoy [that is to say, Jillian Segal herself] will monitor media organisations to encourage accurate, fair and responsible reporting … and to avoid accepting false or distorted narratives.” [p 11]
In January 2026, after the Bondi massacre, Jillian Segal submitted an Action Plan to the government – a document that has never been made public. She also submitted a statement (or perhaps two statements) to the Royal Commission, which have equally been kept secret. So we have to guess at what she is now proposing. She did tell the Royal Commission in July that:
“It was never my intent that I would monitor those organisations; there would be a structure that would … So, the Action Plan sets this out in greater detail and greater accuracy.”
The Action Plan seemed to envision a committee of worthies, appointed by who knows whom, that would monitor the output of the ABC and SBS on an ongoing basis. Commissioner Virginia Bell intervened to ask the Special Envoy directly if it wouldn’t erode trust in the ABC to put beside its governing structure “a committee of individuals including those who have a particular, as it were, bandwagon.”
To which Ms Segal replied: “It could be that the committee doesn’t have particular views … as long as they are people who are aware of an understanding of modern day antisemitism and modern day hatreds.”
Now she seems to have retreated further. In her Priorities document, she calls for
“an independent expert advisory panel appointed by the Australian Government, the ACMA or other independent body, to conduct a retrospective analysis of the public broadcasters’ news, current affairs and online reportage, over a fixed period,
… in the context of matters that may contribute to antisemitism in Australia.” [p 27]
No ongoing monitoring. A review of coverage over a fixed period. By a panel appointed not by the Special Envoy, but by the government or the ACMA. But the goal remains the same. “Somebody needs to do a review of the holistic reporting of a major issue like the war because my contention is that we are dealing with this new form of antisemitism, okay, this conflation”, Ms Segal told the Royal Commission.
And if that “somebody” does a review that does not accord with the Special Envoy’s contention, no doubt she will be calling for a different “somebody” until she gets the review she wants.
Jillian Segal is neither an impartial observer, not a careful one. As we have already pointed out, her evidence to the Royal Commission, so indignant about “inaccuracies” in the ABC’s coverage, included half a dozen inaccuracies and plain untruths. They still stand, uncorrected, in the transcript of her testimony.
That part of the Special Envoy’s original Plan which related to the ABC and SBS was quietly ignored in the government’s response last December. Unless Commissioner Bell endorses Segal’s proposals (which we sincerely hope she does not do), it’s probable that they will be quietly ignored again. But there is nothing quiet about her continued and outrageous insistence that in simply doing their job, Australia’s public broadcasters are contributing to “modern antisemitism”.