A governance of denial : hate crime in Australia and New Zealand

The case studies presented in this chapter complement the model proposed by Mason (2009; see also Mason, this volume) for understanding the criminal law strategies adopted to regulate hate crime. As Mason’s taxonomy begins and ends with the law, a wider variety of examples have been used in this chapter, so as non-legal strategies can also be considered. In this region, New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria are often presented as case studies in hate crime regulation due to the longer history and wider scope of government and community responses. This is especially the case with NSW, where the critical mass of population, combined with deeper cultural and ethnic diversity (primarily as a result of immigration), has necessitated a speedier response from government and led to more cases of hate crime reaching the stage of prosecution or mediation. Rather than re-state the legal and political analysis on the hate crime provisions in NSW, alternative case studies are offered from the margins. Hate crime governance, in these examples, is at the margins of research and scholarship, geography and the criminal justice approaches enacted. These examples also offer important insights into some of the key issues in Australasia, including the relationship between colonisation and hate crime governance, the individual and social attributes recognised and protected under hate crime provisions and the inter-play between, and barriers created by, civil and criminal provisions. When hate crime regulation is considered across the continuum of strategies and within the political and cultural contexts of each nation – especially, the context of colonisation – it is questioned whether the symbolic and justice goals of these strategies are achieved or, indeed, are achievable.