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June 4, 2026 — 5:00am
For a document that NSW Premier Chris Minns is yet to finish reading, his government is certainly going to the wall to keep secret the review into hate-speech laws by retired judge John Sackar.
If you have kept abreast of the political upheaval that has occupied NSW parliament over the past few weeks – ministers suspended from the upper house, accusations of “unholy alliances” – you will know the Sackar review is at the heart of a lot of it.
On Wednesday, Minns conceded he hadn’t read “the full document”, though he’d “had it explained” to him. The review had “informed” a bill that passed this week, increasing penalties for inciting violence against the LGBTQ community. But the review could also inform other “potential legislation”, Minns said, “and we’ve got every right to ruminate on that”.
It has been sitting on someone’s desk since November. Labor refuses to release it, claiming it is a cabinet document. The opposition and Greens say it isn’t. That stalemate is the reason Labor’s deputy leader in the upper house, John Graham, was suspended from parliament last week.
Whether it’s a cabinet document is certainly up for debate. The government commissioned the Sackar review last year in response to criticisms after it passed new hate-speech laws making it a crime to intentionally and publicly incite hatred because of race.
The new laws – passed after several instances of public antisemitism – went against the recommendation of NSW Law Reform Commission President, Tom Bathurst. He had conducted a nine-month review, which concluded that reforms to existing laws, adding a new offence of inciting hatred, would be unwise. That was because terms such as “hatred” were imprecise, and could mean different things to different people.
Bathurst warned changing the law could have a perverse outcome, making hate speech harder to prove because criminal courts have a higher burden of proof than the civil court where they are usually tested. His report also noted concerns that it would be unwise to make laws affecting only one protected attribute – race – because it would create a “two-tier” model that excluded matters such as religion, sexuality or disability.
The Sackar review was not a secret. The government announced it in February 2025, saying it would review the “sufficiency of criminal law protections against hatred for vulnerable groups in the NSW community”. It has its own website, where the more than 50 submissions Sackar received have been published.
It doesn’t fit the usual definition of a cabinet document, either. It was not a cabinet submission, nor a cabinet agenda, decision or briefing. The review itself would be unlikely to reveal the deliberations of cabinet, unless the government has only got one copy and whoever explained it to Minns has been scribbling in the margins.
And saying a document is under “active” consideration by cabinet doesn’t necessarily make it a cabinet document; cabinet can consider the weather. Nevertheless, the limits to what can be classified a cabinet document are a little fuzzy, and this government is certainly not the first to test the bounds of secrecy that offers.
The real question, though, is why the government wants to keep the Sackar review secret.
We don’t know what it says, but you can hazard a guess. If Sackar agreed with concerns about a “two-tiered” system of hate-speech protections, it is likely his review recommended that different protected attributes should enjoy the same protections under the law. That could open up conversations about religious sermons, and the ability for religious schools to use discriminatory hiring practices based on sexuality. That is the type of debate the government wants like a hole in the head less than a year out from an election.
This week, the government went into overdrive in its efforts to put pressure on the Legislative Council to drop its well-documented uprising, and to deflect the upper house’s arguments about transparency. On Tuesday, Minns labelled the opposition and Greens an “utter disgrace” for “filibustering” and playing “political games” over its LGBTQ bill.
Attorney-General Michael Daley thundered in a press release that the hate-crimes legislation was being “held hostage” by the Coalition and Greens. They had “teamed up”, he said, with Mark Latham to “score a political point against the government”.
“Instead of working with the government to pass greater protections for LGBTQIA+ people, the opposition and Greens have decided to play politics,” Daley said. “This must end.”
That was a ridiculous statement.
Make no mistake, political games are being played. The minority government is increasingly frustrated that its business in the upper house is being stymied by the opposition and crossbench, and points to 28 bills yet to pass. It has passed only 14 bills so far this year, and says its political opponents are running roughshod over its agenda.
But the government’s complaints about the overuse of powers compelling it to release documents are overblown: in this term of parliament, there have been 158 orders for documents; in the last parliament, there were 353.
It’s difficult to swallow Labor’s po-faced insistence that all the game-playing is coming from the other side. Three hours after Daley’s laws-held-hostage outburst, they were introduced in the upper house. They passed later on Tuesday night after the normal back-and-forth of debates and amendments. The Coalition and Greens both supported it.
Labor had walked into parliament on Tuesday expecting the Coalition and crossbench to suspend Graham for refusing to produce the Sackar review, as they had last week. Instead, the upper house decided to seek legal advice to answer whether the document could be kept secret.
If the government really wants to cut the legs out from under the upper house and its demands for transparency, it should release the review.
