The fine print on Herzog's healing visit

First published 10 March

In February, Anthony Albanese invited Israeli President Isaac Herzog to Australia. The visit was framed — by the government and by Jewish community leaders — as an act of comfort. Penny Wong informed us, "This visit is about a mourning Jewish community, and I would ask Australians to recall that." The Executive Council of Australian Jewry said it would "lift the spirits of a pained community."

That framing did its job. Coverage followed it and made scrutiny feel ungracious.

Here is what actually happened.

What we knew before Herzog landed

A UN Commission of Inquiry — co-authored by Chris Sidoti, a former Australian Human Rights Commissioner — found that Herzog had made public statements amounting to incitement, including his declaration that "an entire nation is responsible... there are no uninvolved civilians." Israel has rejected these findings as "distorted and false." The Commission's findings carry no legal force. But Sidoti said publicly that Australia had a legal and moral imperative to detain Herzog on arrival. Amnesty International said welcoming him "undermines Australia's commitment to accountability and justice."

Jewish community opinion was not uniform. Hundreds of Jewish Australians signed an open letter opposing the visit. The Jewish Advocates for Understanding Antisemitism said it "does nothing to support the healing of Jewish communities in Australia." Nine Jewish organisations wrote to the Prime Minister urging him to rescind the invitation, arguing it would exacerbate antisemitism by conflating Jewish identity with Israeli state actions.

The government invited Herzog anyway.

What happened on our cities’ streets

Organisers estimated 50,000 people turned out across multiple capital cities. In Sydney, NSW Police deployed riot squads, pepper spray, horses and kettling against a crowd that included people at evening prayer. Five people were hospitalised.

Greens MLC Abigail Boyd was standing on steps filming — specifically to create an accountability record of police conduct. An officer punched her in the chin. Another shoved her shoulder. Her feet left the ground. She posted a photo in a neck brace and said she was "absolutely shocked." She was considering legal action. The officers knew she was a member of parliament.

Human Rights Watch verified footage of the police response. They described officers punching protesters on the ground and charging people kneeling in prayer. A man was arrested simply for peacefully yelling "shame." A UN Special Rapporteur warned that the protest laws "clearly violate international law" by indiscriminately restricting the rights of law-abiding protesters.

NSW Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon called the crowd "an angry and violent mob." NSW Police said no one suffered serious injuries.

Five people were hospitalised. A sitting MP was in a neck brace.

The legal architecture that enabled it - and the courts’ responses

This didn't happen in a vacuum — and the legal story is worth understanding.

The Terrorism and Other Legislation Amendment Act passed in December 2025, weeks before Herzog's visit, granting police powers to declare protest restrictions for up to 90 days following a terrorism incident. Within hours of the laws passing, Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon declared restrictions across multiple metropolitan areas. The legislative window between passage and deployment was not months. It was hours.

Anti-protest laws of this kind have been invoked before in Australia — for the Melbourne Commonwealth Games and the Pope's visit - sporting events and religious ceremonies. Not, until now, for a foreign head of state travelling under a UN finding of incitement.

Australia has no express constitutional protection of the right to protest. Only an implied freedom of political communication — a limit on laws rather than a personal right. The Human Rights Law Centre’s Protest in Peril report identified 49 laws passed over the past two decades that restrict peaceful protest in Australia. The Herzog protests were not an aberration. They were the most visible deployment yet of a 20-year legislative trend.

The contrast with living memory is worth reflecting on. On 8 May 1970, between 60,000 and 100,000 people occupied the central streets of Melbourne to protest the Vietnam War and conscription — in open defiance of police orders. No one was arrested. No one was charged. The right to dissent was, in practice, treated as inviolable. In 2026, people kneeling in prayer were pepper sprayed under laws passed weeks earlier. The distance between those two moments is not just historical. It is a measure of what has been quietly legislated away.

The NSW Supreme Court subsequently found those laws unconstitutional, ruling they breach the implied freedom of political communication in Australia's Constitution. The people arrested and pepper sprayed at the Herzog protests were subject to laws the court later declared had no constitutional basis.

The secret ASIO meeting

ASIO confirmed, after Guardian Australia asked, that Herzog held a private meeting with Director-General of Security Mike Burgess at ASIO headquarters in Canberra. The meeting did not appear on Herzog's public schedule. Neither did a separate briefing from ASIO's counter-terrorism team. Under Senate questioning, Foreign Minister Penny Wong refused to confirm the meeting, saying questions about ASIO were "often very sensitive."

Senator David Pocock described a foreign head of state visiting ASIO headquarters as "unprecedented."

He's right. ASIO is Australia's domestic intelligence agency. Its legislated purpose is to protect Australia from threats including, explicitly, foreign interference. Engaging foreign heads of state on intelligence matters is the function of ASIS — our foreign intelligence service — or the Department of Foreign Affairs. Bringing a foreign head of state into ASIO headquarters for a private briefing inverts the normal architecture entirely.

The government's defence is that the meeting focused on counter-terrorism following the Bondi attack, and that Herzog was not shown classified systems. A senior intelligence source told SBS there was "a reasonable argument" for it in that context. That may be true.

But Crikey asked the obvious question: if Herzog was here in a purely ceremonial capacity — as the government insisted — why was he given a special briefing by our domestic intelligence agency at all?

What was discussed in that room? We don't know. We weren't told the meeting was happening. Our Foreign Minister declined to confirm it under direct Senate questioning. ASIO confirmed it only after a journalist asked.

That is not how democratic transparency works.

A healing visit?

The visit was described as healing — and for some in the Jewish community, it may have offered that. That is a legitimate possibility and I don't dismiss it.

But healing one community doesn't require concealing a meeting with our intelligence chief from parliament. It doesn't require rushing emergency powers through parliament and deploying them within hours.Nor does it require invoking legal architecture previously reserved for the Commonwealth Games, or a sitting MP to end up in a neck brace. And it doesn't need NSW Police to insist, in the face of five hospitalisations, that no one was seriously hurt.

These are not allegations. They are documented facts drawn from Human Rights Watch, Guardian Australia, SBS, Crikey, the UN Commission of Inquiry and ASIO's own confirmation.

The healing was likely real for some. But the erosion of rights was real for everyone.