There is something almost poetic about a politician being accused of hypocrisy for condemning a theocratic dictator. Yet that is precisely where NSW Premier Chris Minns found himself this week, after a Sunrise panel erupted over his public denunciation of Sydney mosque services mourning the death of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The facts are not seriously in dispute. Minns condemned Muslim mosques in Sydney for conducting services mourning Khamenei as a martyr, amid speculation that Iranian diplomatic staff in Australia had pressured the Shia community to do so. His language was unambiguous. "I think it's atrocious. By any objective measure, the Ayatollah was evil, and I don't think we should be mincing words about this," he told reporters in Sydney.
The Premier did not arrive at that view in a vacuum. Khamenei held power for over three decades and was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths through state-sponsored terrorism campaigns both domestically and abroad, leading an anti-Western alliance comprising terrorist groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Shia militias in Iraq, and Houthi rebels in Yemen. The vigils were not small, quiet affairs. Hundreds of individuals gathered across Australia to mourn, with services held at mosques in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane for a second consecutive night.
The security dimension matters here too. Australia formally listed the IRGC as a state sponsor of terrorism following ASIO's assessment that it orchestrated attacks against Australia's Jewish community, including on Lewis' Continental Kitchen in Sydney in October 2024 and the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne in December 2024, attacks designed to undermine and sow division in Australia's multicultural society. Against that backdrop, Professor Greg Barton, the chair of Global Islamic Politics at Deakin University, said the IRGC had most likely pressured Shia mosques via consular and embassy staff to honour a figure most Iranian migrants regarded as a monster, with some complying out of fear for family and friends still in Iran.
That context is essential. The mourning services do not represent the Iranian diaspora. Academic and former Iranian prisoner Kylie Moore-Gilbert told Radio 2GB that those mourning Khamenei were largely non-Iranian Shia Muslims, urging them to "think about what the Iranian people are telling them" and consider that their Iranian brothers and sisters "would absolutely not want to be mourning such a mass murdering tyrant." Thousands of Iranians celebrated in Sydney's Hyde Park, regarding Khamenei's death not as a tragedy but as a long-overdue reckoning.
So why the accusation of hypocrisy? The Sunrise panel pointed to Minns' own record on community expression and political speech. Minns defended his government's crackdown on protest laws, saying there was a "tinderbox" in the community, after recalling parliament to fast-track changes following the Bondi Beach terror attack that killed 15 people. Those laws included giving police powers to restrict public protests for up to three months following a terrorism declaration, and banning the public display of symbols of prohibited organisations. Critics argued the Premier was selectively comfortable with restricting certain forms of expression while decrying others.
The strongest version of that argument comes from an unexpected source. NSW Greens MP Sue Higginson said she agreed with the Premier's view of Khamenei but did not think it was his position to be making such comments on who people can or cannot mourn. That is a genuinely defensible principle, even if its application here stretches credulity. There is a meaningful difference between a politician expressing a moral opinion about a deceased tyrant and a government using law to prohibit that expression. Minns did the former, not the latter.
The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation is the proper instrument for assessing whether specific mosque activities cross the line from grief into material support for a listed terrorist organisation. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry called for any Australian mosque or centre honouring Khamenei to be immediately subject to a criminal investigation for supporting the IRGC. That is a question for law enforcement, not press conferences.
What the Sunrise debate revealed is a genuine and unresolved tension in Australian public life: how do liberal democracies respond when communities exercise freedoms in ways that honour those who despised those very freedoms? Minns' moral outrage is understandable, and the case for speaking plainly about Khamenei's record is strong. But the Premier's consistency on the broader question of political expression remains a legitimate subject of scrutiny.
The Australian Parliament has given the government real tools to address Iranian regime influence on Australian soil. Using those tools carefully, and consistently, will do more to protect Australian values than any television panel row about who gets to mourn whom.