education; and work focusing on hate speech, online safety and countering violent extremism. The overarching government focus is on social cohesion which has often been interpreted as non-Anglo-Celtic communities shifting to ‘fit in’ or assimilate to the dominant culture to avoid the risk of experiencing racism. The exception to this appears to be the Australia Sports Commission which makes resources and tools available to support sporting codes and community sports clubs to examine their own structures and approaches. Avoiding the R word Limited examples were found which overtly use the word ‘racism’ in policy or program titles and objectives. Exceptions identified in the desktop research were all focused on First Nations communities, again with the exception of the Australian Sports Commission which, through its Inclusive Sport work, includes links to resources explicitly calling out racism (e.g. Show the Racism the Red Card15 and the AHRC Spectator Racism Guidelines16). 4.1.2 Stakeholder interviews Federal stakeholders included departmental staff from four agencies targeted via advice from the Race Discrimination team and the desktop review findings, and seven from the community and academic sectors. Challenges While existing government work was acknowledged, a lack of clarity on how to address racism and associated issues at the national level was nominated by many interviewees as a key challenge. Underpinning this is the pressure of what was described by one participant as ‘a giant tsunami of misinformation, disinformation (and) escalation in a more permissive social media environment (of) forms of hate speech and discrimination’.17 The need to address growing levels of hate speech and incidents driven most recently by a rise in right-wing extremism and nationalistic groups, the Voice Referendum and international crises (e.g., the current situation in Gaza) was identified as creating challenges for government in policy and legislative responses, and reporting. Australian Government | Australian Sports Commission (2024) Anti-racism videos and podcasts, accessed 15 February 2024 Australian Government | Australian Sports Commission (2024) Anti-racism templates and resources, accessed 15 February 2024 17 Federal stakeholder interview (Departmental) 15 16 13