South Australia's upper house has passed legislation to ensure hate crimes are better acknowledged in the state's courts.
The Greens bill seeks to amend the state's Sentencing Act to allow individual sentencing factors to include whether a crime was wholly or partly motivated by hatred of a group of people.
"This legislation ensures that when the courts are considering a punishment, they must look at the full extent of the harm done to victims when crimes are motivated by hate or prejudice," Greens MP Tammy Franks said.
"Hate crimes are not new in South Australia, but we still haven't found ways to deal with them properly in our legislation or in our legal system.
"The current inability of our justice system to properly recognise and deal with hate crimes means we are compounding a culture where hate crimes tend to be minimised or dismissed."
The bill will now be debated in SA's lower house.
