Canberra

One of Australia’s top universities has let Jewish students down, Education Minister Jason Clare says after an ombudsman’s report criticised its handling of complaints following a pro-Palestine protest.

The National Student Ombudsman concluded the University of Technology Sydney “failed to follow its complaints policy and procedure and did not respond productively to student feedback” after a National Day of Action for Palestine rally prompted complaints from some Jewish students that the protest attendees had singled them out on the basis of their identity.

UTS quickly commissioned an external review following the protest in March 2025 – in which a guest speaker addressed a counter-protester and said “Jews … should feel uncomfortable, … and that includes that fellow over there” – to respond to the risk of harm but its handling of the review and complaints was wrong, the ombudsman said.

“Some Jewish students did not receive a response at all to their complaints about the behaviour at the protest,” the ombudsman’s report said.

“Those who did receive a response received generic responses that did not address their specific concerns.”

The external review was expanded to also focus on an event at the uni in April 2025 organised by the Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) to discuss the effects of the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.

During the AUJS Open Table Discussion event, which had been approved by the university, an unauthorised student protest was also held.

The ombudsman said on Tuesday the “external review wrongly made a recommendation naming AUJS as not following the university’s event organisation processes”.

“Our investigation found that this conclusion was shaped by bias and incorrect information that the external review did not identify, due in part to the university’s design of the expansion of the review”.

The UTS vice-chancellor subsequently published an action plan that adopted all the external review’s recommendations “including a recommendation that publicly and wrongly named AUJS as an example of a group that failed to follow university processes,” the ombudsman said.

It added the university did not “publicly name those who had failed to follow the university’s processes, by organising the unauthorised concurrent protest”.

“The university had a responsibility to oversee the review and identify factual inconsistencies prior to publishing the review’s outcomes,” the ombudsman’s report said.

“We found that it failed to do so, and in the process further alienated Jewish students.”

It added that it was unfair that the university did not give AUJS the opportunity to comment on the external review before it was published.

The  university’s “publication of the recommendation wrongly naming AUJS is likely to have unfairly damaged the reputation of the AUJS student group”.

UTS accepted six of the ombudsman’s seven recommendations including that it should apologise to students for the poor handling of their complaints, make a public apology to the AUJS and review its procedures as they apply to protests.

A recommendation to reconsider its action plan was not accepted by UTS.

Universities need to take complaints of racism in all its forms seriously, the education minister said on Tuesday.

“The ombudsman’s findings show that UTS let Jewish students down,” Mr Clare said.

The National Student Ombudsman was set up by the government in February 2025.

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