Why the secrecy, premier? It’s got our attention

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