A personal view of Australian and International Politics
Contemporary politics,local and international current affairs, science, music and extracts from the Queensland Newspaper "THE WORKER" documenting the proud history of the Labour Movement.
MAHATMA GANDHI ~ Truth never damages a cause that is just.
Tens of thousands of coins will be released commemorating First Nations land rights. (Supplied: Royal Australian Mint/AGNSW: Mervyn Bishop)
In short:
The Royal Australian Mint is releasing a new coin to honour key moments in Indigenous land rights.
The 50-cent piece features Vincent Lingiari's outstretched hand alongside a gathering of Gurindji people.
Tens of thousands of the new coins will be circulating.
A new 50-cent coin has been released into circulation, marking two defining moments in First Nations land rights.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised that this article contains images and names of people who have died.
The
coin depicts the 1966 Wave Hill walk-off, where Gurindji man Vincent
Lingiari led about 200 Aboriginal stockmen, workers and families in
strike action.
What began as a
protest over poor wages and conditions at Wave Hill station in the
Northern Territory became a lightning rod for the national land rights
movement.
The Gurindji strikers at Wattie Creek, led by Vincent Lingiari. (Supplied: Brian Manning)
Nine
years later, then-prime minister Gough Whitlam ceremonially returned a
small portion of Gurindji land and poured a handful of soil into
Lingiari's hand.
The photo — taken by Mervyn Bishop, a renowned First Nations photojournalist — became a defining image in Australian history.
The
following year, the landmark Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern
Territory) Act 1976 was passed, the first Australian law that allowed
traditional owners to make a title claim.
The
Royal Australian Mint's new 50-cent coin was designed to commemorate
both anniversaries and celebrate the courage of the Gurindji people.
"I
think this coin is a stand-out for collectors because of how important
this story is," the mint's director of museum and public engagement,
Stuart Baines, said.
"It's
a really beautiful coin and it's really trying to tell a story of
equality and that real Australian notion of a fair go, but as we try to
extend that to our First Nations people,"
he said.
The
design features Lingiari's outstretched hand alongside a gathering of
Gurindji people, with the word 'Unity' inscribed at the bottom.
Vincent Lingiari makes an address after then-prime minister Gough Whitlam returns Aboriginal land at Wattie Creek in 1975. (Supplied: National Library of Australia)
'Story, history, legacy'
The mint worked with the Gurindji Aboriginal Corporation to create the coin.
The corporation's director and traditional owner Roslyn Frith took part in the historic events as a child.
"Unity is Gurindji's strength," Ms Frith said.
"This coin design represents the proud Gurindji people's story, history and legacy.
"The Gurindji people have come a long way and as Vincent Lingiari said, 'let us be mates.'"
The coin celebrates the courage of the Gurindji people. (Supplied: Royal Australian Mint)
The new coin was released into circulation on Thursday.
The mint is also featuring the design on 6,500 silver proof coins and 60,000 collectable coins in cards.
Mr Baines said he hoped the coins sparked public curiosity about an important piece of Australian history.
"We really encourage people to actually start looking for these coins in their change," he said.
"There will be tens of thousands of those in circulation."
Meta has joined the growing list of tech companies whose AI agents have gone rogue during safety testing. (Reuters: Manuel Orbegozo)
In short:
Meta
has reported one of its AI models hacked another company during
cybersecurity testing, taking advantage of a misconfigured training
environment that mistakenly gave it access to the internet.
The
AI model involved was reportedly Meta's Muse Spark 1.1, which the
company has touted as its most capable model for real-world coding and
agentic tasks.
What's next?
The
incident will fan concerns about how increasingly capable AI systems
can be contained, after similar incidents at rival companies Anthropic
and OpenAI.
Facebook's
parent company Meta says one of its AI models hacked another company
during cybersecurity testing, fanning concerns about how developers can
contain increasingly capable AI systems after similar incidents at
rivals Anthropic and OpenAI.
The
incidents at Meta and Anthropic stemmed from configuration errors that
inadvertently gave their AI models access to the open internet.
The
breaches highlight growing concerns that advanced AI systems could pose
new cybersecurity risks, and will likely intensify US government
efforts to improve AI safety as companies race to develop more capable
models.
Meta
said it was investigating an incident in which a misconfiguration by
Irregular, an independent company that conducts cybersecurity
evaluations, inadvertently gave one of its models internet access during
a testing.
The model
"exploited a security vulnerability in a third-party service, in a
manner similar to previously reported instances with other companies",
Meta said in a statement.
The report said the model breached an unidentified company's systems and altered its internal environment.
A spokesperson for Irregular told the Reuters news agency that the incident was the "exact same evaluation-environment issue that was already disclosed by Anthropic last week" and did not involve a "sandbox escape or a sophisticated cyber action".
"There
are no current open issues. Irregular is developing a white paper to
share best practices for containment and securely running cyber
evaluations,"
the spokesperson said.
The
recent breaches have stirred concerns among US politicians about
whether increasingly capable AI models could be used to conduct or
facilitate cyber attacks.
A
group of Republican state attorneys-general has asked OpenAI to preserve
all potentially relevant documents related to its model's attack on AI
firm Hugging Face.
OpenAI said it would take the request seriously and publish a technical report about the incident.
Earlier
this week, the White House invited leading AI companies, including
Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, to meet with officials to discuss a
newly finalised voluntary cybersecurity testing framework for advanced
AI models.
The Trump
administration discussed unpublished testing rules with company
representatives, and told AI developers that open-weight AI models, such
as Meta's Llama and Nvidia's Nemotron, will not be subject to its
planned voluntary safety testing regime.
Skippy the Bush Kangaroo was required viewing in most households when it aired from 1968. (Supplied: New Holland Publishers)
Ian Collis was a young boy in the late 1950s when his neighbours bought a television.
Collis,
the author of Retro Television: What We Watched Back in the Day, used
to gather with his siblings by the window to catch a glimpse of what the
family next door was watching.
"If
you opened our bathroom window and you could tilt your head just at the
right angle, you could see through their side door and you could watch
them watching the telly," Collis said.
"So, there was me and two older siblings and all three of us would be perched … trying to watch … the telly."
It didn't take long for his parents to decide that it was time to buy a television of their own for the household.
"Mum and Dad are going, 'This is ridiculous,'" Collis said.
"We've got to get these kids out of the bathroom."
Retro Television by Ian Collis is out now. (Supplied: New Holland Publishers)
Retro
Television is an illustrated pictorial history of what we watched
during the first 25 years of TV in Australia, including Skippy, I Love
Lucy, The Sullivans, The Brady Bunch, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Addams
Family, to name a few iconic shows, as well as coverage of the 1969
moon landing.
Arriving at a
time when people are grappling with another new technology — artificial
intelligence — Retro Television takes readers back to the arrival of
what was then a "new medium" that changed popular culture forever.
The
book has archival photography, behind-the-scenes imagery and anecdotes
such as when Countdown host Molly Meldrum told Prince Charles that he
had seen "your mum" while in London.
The future King politely replied, "Are you referring to Her Majesty, The Queen?"
The then Prince Charles on Countdown with Molly Meldrum. (Supplied: New Holland Publishers)
It's a chance for people to reminisce, says Collis, and for younger people to get a glimpse of how things used to be.
"I think we got our first TV in 1960," Collis said.
"We loved it because as a household we never had a car.
"We would walk from our home to the nearest cinema, which is probably about a half an hour walk.
"But now to be able to enjoy watching these shows … in the inner sanctum of your home was brilliant."
He said back then a black and white television was about 10 times the average weekly wage.
"So, if you had a TV in your home, you became a very popular person in that street," he said.
"You'd have neighbours dropping in that you hadn't seen for a while."
Ian Collis says as a child he would try and catch a glimpse of his neighbour's TV through a window. (Supplied: New Holland Publishers)
Despite the expense, TVs in those days didn't necessarily work particularly well.
"You'd have the little aerial on top of the TV and sometimes you couldn't get that right,"
Collis said.
"And
then if you were lucky enough to have a remote control for the TV, so
you wouldn't have to get up out of your seat, which would be very rare …
it would be on a long cord.
"And sometimes it wouldn't work, so you'd have to get up anyway and change the channel.
"We were probably a typical family. There was five of us. There was one TV.
"It got that competitive [over] who would watch what."
The book features The Sullivans, one of the staples of early Australian TV. (Supplied: New Holland Publishers)
Collis says everything had to be watched live.
"There was no recording capability, there was no streaming, there was few channels,"
he said.
"And if you really like the show, you had to be there that night to watch it, otherwise you missed it.
"So, if it was a series, you didn't want to miss anything."
What we watched
Mainstream
television came to Australia in September 1956, when Bruce Gyngell
famously took to the screen to say: "Good evening, and welcome to
television" on the now Nine Network.
Before streaming, television brought Australians together around a small screen.
Collis,
who is a rugby league historian, vintage photo collector and the author
of more than 30 books, says Australians were mostly fed American
content on TV, and we lapped it up.
"Mostly they were Westerns, detective shows, or comedies or variety shows from America," Collis said.
"And we imitated them in so many ways because in the 50s and 60s we were still predominantly an outside culture.
I Dream of Jeannie was another popular show. (Supplied: New Holland Publishers)
"We wanted our dog to be like Rin-Tin-Tin or Lassie.
"We wanted to maybe fly like Superman or be the hero that Zorro was.
"We cheered for the underdog in shows like The Adventures of Robin Hood.
"And we couldn't get enough of the singers from America — Frank Sinatra, Patti Page, and our own Johnny O'Keefe."
He says Americans have always been really good at selling their content and sometimes that starts with a good jingle.
Many Australians remember The Brady Bunch from their childhood. (Supplied: New Holland Publishers)
"If
someone gives you a rhyme or a jingle, whether you agree or disagree
with it, it definitely can stay with you longer," Collis said.
"So, we had shows like Green Acres, 77 Sunset Strip through to Gilligan's Island. These shows had really good jingles.
"And apart from that, we love the show. We love the tunes."
Australia content with our content
He said it was a real treat to watch Australian-made shows like Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, which was groundbreaking.
"Just to be able to see any Australian content was great," Collis said.
"But
to be able to talk to a kangaroo and get an answer, and the answer from
the kangaroo was always the same … that was a very popular show."
Actors Ed Devereaux and Garry Pankhurst with Skippy. (Supplied: New Holland Publishers)
Other
Australian shows mentioned in the book include The Sullivans, The Paul
Hogan Show, Division 4, Matlock Police, Bellbird, Hey Hey It's Saturday,
Play School, Graham Kennedy's In Melbourne Tonight and Countdown.
"That [Countdown] was one of the really early shows that showcased a music video," Collis said.
"And Molly [Meldrum] got a lot of careers up and running."
Collis says through the years sport would come into our living rooms too.
"Starting in the early-ish 60s, you could watch it," he said.
"AFL, rugby league, soccer, cricket. ABC had a lot of cricket. Cricket was extremely popular."
Hey Hey It's Saturday host Daryl Somers with Big Bird. (Supplied: New Holland Publishers)
Collis is looking forward to people taking a nostalgic look back as they flick through the book.
"You watch TV these days and half of us, while we're watching TV, we're fiddling on our phones," Collis said.
"We're doing multiple things.
"People
can reminisce and look back or people that are a little bit younger can
gain a little bit of insight into what we did enjoy back in the day."
Retro Television by Ian Collis published by New Holland Publishers is out now.
Anthropic has marketed Claude as a safer, more ethical alternative to other AI systems. (Illustration via Reuters: Dado Ruvic)
In short:
Artificial
intelligence firm Anthropic says its Claude AI model hacked into three
external companies during safety testing after it was mistakenly
provided with internet access.
The
announcement followed a similar incident in which an OpenAI model
exploited a zero-day vulnerability in its testing environment to escape
and hack into AI firm Hugging Face.
What's next?
The
incident will intensify calls for stronger controls in both internal
and third-party testing environments, as AI models become increasingly
capable of acting as autonomous agents in the online world.
Artificial
intelligence firm Anthropic says its Claude AI model hacked the systems
of three external organisations during testing, days after rival
company OpenAI revealed a rogue agent had gone on a days-long hacking spree at AI firm Hugging Face.
Claude
gained unauthorised access to the other companies' systems during
cybersecurity evaluations after a misconfiguration allowed the models to
reach the internet from testing environments that were supposed to be
isolated, Anthropic said in a statement.
The
AI firm did not name the three companies involved but said it had been
in contact with two of them and was working with them to patch their
systems, while continuing to reach out to the third.
ABC News Daily takes you inside the race to stop rogue AI.
The
incidents were identified after Anthropic reviewed its logs from more
than 140,000 cybersecurity evaluation tests, a process it launched
following OpenAI's disclosures.
The
tests in question involved tasking Claude with a "capture-the-flag"
challenge, a method for assessing the cybersecurity capabilities of AI
models.
In a capture-the-flag
challenge, the model is primed with a fictional scenario and told it
must recover a piece of secret information (the "flag") from a different
machine.
"In
all cases, Anthropic's evaluation prompt specified to Claude that its
environment was a simulation and that it had no internet access,"
Anthropic said in its statement.
"Due to a misunderstanding between us and our evaluation partner, this was not the case, and internet access was available.
"Because of this, when Claude's search led it to real systems on the open internet, it treated them as part of the exercise."
The
fact that Claude was mistakenly provided with internet access, rather
than configuring its own access, means the incident could be considered
less serious than last week's breach at OpenAI, in which a model
exploited a zero-day vulnerability to escape its own testing environment.
The
company also said that in one of the three hacking instances, involving
an internal research test model, the model realised it was accessing
real online systems that were not part of the simulated scenario, and
ceased its attack.
The incident
has nevertheless intensified calls for stronger guardrails on the AI
sector, as AI models become increasingly capable of acting as autonomous
agents in the online world.
Luke Irwin says autonomous AI remains "something of a Wild West". (Supplied: Aegis Cybersecurity)
Luke
Irwin, CEO of Brisbane-based cybersecurity firm Aegis, said both the
Anthropic and OpenAI incidents demonstrated the emerging risks of
autonomous agents, in particular.
"These systems do not inherently possess ethical or legal judgement," Mr Irwin said.
"If
an agent concludes that the most efficient way to achieve its objective
is to compromise another organisation's systems, it may attempt to do
precisely that."
Mr
Irwin said designing effective safeguards ultimately required AI
companies to anticipate the full range of actions an AI model might
take, which could become an "extraordinarily complex exercise" when
systems were capable of identifying methods their designers did not
anticipate.
"At present,
autonomous agents remain something of a Wild West. The technologies,
governance models and controls required to manage them appropriately are
still being developed," he said.
"There remains a strong argument for keeping a human in the loop [before AI agents are able to perform consequential actions]."
Joseph
Miller, the UK director of global protest group PauseAI, also pointed
to Anthropic's admission as evidence AI companies were pressing forward
without proper guardrails — highlighting, in particular, the fact that
some of the incidents occurred months ago.
"If
not for OpenAI's disclosure, Anthropic may not have realised for
several months longer that its models were hacking into real companies
during testing," he told the ABC.
"The
model that did cease its attack could really have had human-like
morality instilled into its behaviour — or it could simply be better at
showing its creators what they want to see."
CEO Dario Amodei (left) founded Anthropic after clashing with OpenAI's Sam Altman over AI safety. (Supplied: Futures Forum)
It
recently clashed with the US government over the potential use of its
technology to power autonomous weapons and mass surveillance, leading US
President Donald Trump to issue a directive to federal agencies to cease all use of the firm's technology.
However,
the company has also been criticised for changes to its data retention
policies, as well as its public campaign against so-called "open
models", which critics say appears designed to limit competition and
pressure governments to introduce regulations that work in its favour.
The
ABC recently informed staff it would allow its journalists to access
Anthropic's general Claude model to assist with research and
administration from September, while reiterating that AI would not be
used to draft or write articles or scripts.
Andrew
Charlton announced that the government had commissioned CSIRO to
actually test ways to make sure that AI acts in ways that humans want,
even when it's making decisions by itself. (ABC News: Matt Roberts )
The AI industry has just had its Sarah Connor moment.
In
the 1991 classic Terminator 2, Connor spends the movie becoming
increasingly desperate to convince people about the impending threat of a
rogue AI.
Now, it seems many
people who work, research or pay close attention to AI are feeling the
same way. Not because of a time-travelling robot Arnold Schwarzenegger,
but because of a shocking disclosure from one of the world's leading AI
companies.
Last week, OpenAI
announced that two of its models had hacked into the servers of another
AI company called Hugging Face, unbeknownst to it.
OpenAI said it had given its models a test inside of a closed environment to see how they would perform.
Rather
than do the challenge as expected, OpenAI alleges the model broke out
of its enclosure and hacked into Hugging Face, which it believed held
the answers to the test.
Hugging
Face has so far reported no real damage from the intrusion, as it
continues to investigate whether the data of its customers or other
businesses was affected.
It's
tempting to shrug this off as a weird, one-off event that sounds more or
less like the plot of a handful of 90s sci-fi films with beefcake
stars.
But, like Sarah Connor's pleas, it's not crazy to take this seriously.
The AI industry has just had its Sarah Connor moment. (Supplied: Carolco Pictures)
You don't need to trust AI companies to take this seriously
Even
those people who are reluctant to believe the accounts of two companies
who could benefit from the tale of all-powerful AI, there is mounting
evidence that AI is capable of breaking out of its cybersecurity
guardrails and enclosures.
Leading
AI company, Anthropic, the developer of Claude, warned in April that
its cutting edge model was capable of breaking out of the isolated
enclosures if asked to.
The UK
government's AI Safety Institute found AI models would "reliably" escape
these so-called sandboxes and, separately, would choose to cheat at
tasks by doing unauthorised and harmful acts.
The major players are taking it seriously. Hugging Face reported the incident to the FBI.
We're taking it seriously too. Last week, Australia's new AI Safety Institute briefed federal departments about the incident.
Australia's cyber intelligence agency, the Australian Signals Directorate, has put out a public warning about the event.
"The
findings provide an important insight into the future capabilities of
highly capable AI systems and reinforce the need for robust security,
governance and oversight mechanisms in the deployment of advanced cyber
capabilities, as well as strong cyber security fundamentals," the
warning read.
Translation from government speak: This is real, you need to start getting ready.
Last week, OpenAI announced that two of its models had hacked into another AI company's servers, unbeknownst to it. (Reuters: Dado Ruvic)
Why this isn't the normal story about the risks of technology
We're all well-acquainted with considering the potential risks of technology.
This
is usually about intentional use, like the existential threat of
nuclear weapons, or the unintended consequences of use, like with leaded
petrol and some pesticides.
When
it comes to AI, there's another new category of risk: what happens if
AI chooses to do something harmful of its own volition?
Almost
every task we give to AI involves a cascade of other smaller decisions,
particularly as we expect it to be smarter and more context-aware like
real people.
Asking AI to write
a cold email could require your AI assistant bot logging into your
email, reading previous emails, researching the topic, looking up the
recipient, the list goes on.
One
of the major tasks for AI companies is "alignment", which is the task
of creating AI that will pursue goals in a way that won't cause harm or
involve unethical behaviour.
The
risk is that a misaligned AI model might do things that an ordinary
person would, perhaps even going to superhuman lengths, to achieve a
task.
Like what if AI decided
the way to write the perfect cold email would be to research the family
members of a recipient to seem familiar, or to fabricate a
heart-breaking personal anecdote, all with the goal of getting the
recipient's attention?
That's something that (most) people wouldn't do naturally. The challenge is that AI doesn't have a "human nature".
More
than two decades ago, philosopher Nick Bostrom took this concept of an
AI pursuing a goal to its logical conclusion with the thought experiment
of super-intelligent AI bot tasked with making as many paper clips as
possible.
The AI, he reasoned,
might soon go to extreme lengths to maximise its paper clip outputs:
gobbling up as much of the earth, then space, as it can to use its
resources.
When humans realised
what they had created and tried to thwart it, the AI could see humanity
as an obstacle to its goal and decide that it made sense to eliminate
them too. Soon, the universe might be forcibly turned into one big paper
clip factory.
From what we
know, OpenAI's Hugging Face incident wasn't a case of someone
maliciously misusing AI to cause harm. It was just trying to do its
version of making more paperclips.
Could this be Australia's wake-up call?
It's
hard to find a silver lining in a story that is more or less the
realisation of a truly dystopian fear. But if you squint, there is one.
Much
like the paper clip scenario, the philosopher and research community
that has spent decades thinking about AI has another useful term: the
"warning shot".
It's the idea
that there could be some kind of event that captures the world's
attention and raises awareness about the potential risks of AI.
There is a hope that this incident could be a warning shot about the capabilities of these AI systems.
As previously mentioned, Australian officials have been taking this seriously.
Some
politicians are too. Earlier this year, the government officially
launched the AI Safety Institute to identify and prepare for risks like
that. A few weeks back, Assistant Minister Andrew Charlton was perhaps
the first Australian government minister to deliver a speech on the
topic of misaligned AI.
Charlton
announced that the government was taking it so seriously that it had
commissioned CSIRO to actually test ways to make sure that AI acts in
ways that humans want, even when it's making decisions by itself.
Last
week, the lead researcher, CSIRO's research director Professor Liming
Zhu, told me that there's a growing realisation about this challenge.
"It's very difficult to control a very powerful and smart AI system," he said.
This
shows the government doing more than paying lip service to AI safety
and is dedicating resources to tackling this challenge.
That being said, a six-month research program isn't going to prepare us for the present risk.
Nor
is the government's "Australian standards" that won't even be
introduced until next year — an epoch in terms of the pace of AI
development.
In
the 1991 classic Terminator 2, Sarah Connor spends the movie becoming
increasingly desperate to convince people about the impending threat of a
rogue AI. ((SOPA images))
Far-fetched scenarios become reality
When
asked about the incident on ABC's Insiders on Sunday, Prime Minister
Anthony Albanese said it was "why we need to have Australian standards
for AI". But it's not clear what, if any, AI safety obligations those
standards would place on AI companies.
What
the OpenAI Hugging Face story shows is that Australia and other
countries can't just trust these companies to regulate themselves.
We
don't even have the most basic framework for placing obligations on
companies who are responsible for producing tools with potential for
harm.
There are more rules in
Australia that regulate opening a cafe or pouring a beer than for the
operation of cutting-edge AI systems.
An
AI company like OpenAI would have to disclose if a server in their data
centres fell over near a worker or an employee got an electrical shock
from their computer, but not if a rogue AI broke out of their systems.
Other
jurisdictions like the EU and California have introduced rules that
would, at the very least, force these companies to disclose serious
incidents risks from AI like this.
To
grasp the risk: what if OpenAI's models had wreaked havoc inside
Hugging Face and caused actual damage? Or it had decided the answers to
its test were in the servers of the Department of Defence? Or that the
best way to complete the challenge was to turn off the computers by
shutting down the electrical grid?
These scenarios sound far-fetched, but until about last week, "rogue AI hacks another company" sounded that way, too.
The fact that OpenAI only realised that its AI had done this days after the event shows a shocking lack of security.
The warning shot has been fired. And we can't wait on Arnie to come save us.
The phrases "globalise the intifada" and "from the river to the sea" were outlawed in Queensland earlier this year. (ABC News: Liana Walker)
In short:
A
group of pro-Palestinian protesters have launched a High Court
challenge against Queensland laws that banned the phrases "from the
river to the sea" and "globalise the intifada".
More than 20 people have been charged under the laws, which carry a maximum jail sentence of two years.
What's next?
Constitutional
law expert Anthony Gray believes a High Court challenge to Queensland's
hate speech legislation has a "chance of succeeding".
A
group of pro-Palestinian protesters have launched a High Court
challenge against Queensland laws that banned the phrases "from the
river to the sea" and "globalise the intifada".
The
two phrases have been deemed antisemitic by the government and many
Jewish organisations and have been outlawed when used to menace or
offend someone.
Both of the contested phrases have been commonly used by pro-Palestinian protesters.
More than 20 people have been charged under the laws since they took effect in March.
The laws carry a maximum jail term of two years.
According
to filings lodged with the High Court last week, the activists allege
the legislation is invalid because it infringes on the right to
political communication.
The Queensland government has been contacted for comment.
It has previously defended the laws and argued in favour of their validity.
In April Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie said the laws defended against "venomous, poisonous rhetoric".
Seven protesters have signed the filings, including Remah Naji, a spokesperson for the Justice for Palestine group.
Four
of the signatories Stephen Werner Heydet, Edward Joel Matthew Carroll,
Katherine Mary Dennehy and Samuel Woripa Watson — were arrested and
charged under the laws, according to the documents.
Each are accused of displaying or saying the banned phrase.
The High Court challenge was filed by activist Remah Naji and six other protesters. (ABC News: Lucy Loram)
One
of the other applicants, James Frances Hillier, alleges he was told to
withdraw some of his artwork that contained the banned phrase after
being contacted by police in March.
The
group claims neither of the banned phrases have a "fixed meaning", an
"inherently antisemitic or racist meaning" or an "inherently violent
meaning".
The filing lays out 12 alternative meanings of "from the river to the sea".
The
filing alleges the ban causes inequality or discrimination because it
seeks to criminalise one perspective on a "political controversy".
The group also argues it imposes a burden on the implied freedom of political communication in the constitution.
Jewish
Board of Deputies president Jason Steinberg said he and other Jews felt
unsafe when hearing the banned slogans chanted at rallies and protests.
"We
have people who will not come into a central business district when
there is protests on, when they know that there is going to be this kind
of antisemitism on our streets," he said.
A 'chance of succeeding'
Constitutional
law expert Anthony Gray believes a High Court challenge to the state's
hate speech legislation has a "chance of succeeding".
He said the High Court had already recognised Australians have an implied freedom to communicate about political matters.
"On
one view, the two phrases that have been banned are communications
about something that is broadly political in nature," Professor Gray,
who was not involved with preparing the challenge in any way, told the
ABC.
The Bond University expert
characterised the state government's legislation as "unusual" because
it criminalised specific phrases and sought to outlaw one particular
viewpoint.
He added that the
nature of the phrases also added to the difficulty of banning them, as
some people who used them may not have any "bad intentions".
The
court could also consider whether the state government could
demonstrate the legislation was necessary to protect some groups from
suffering harm, Professor Gray explained.
