Australia’s peak Jewish body has labelled the Albanese government’s plan to combat antisemitism in response to the Bondi beach terror attack an essential “first step”, but some groups have warned the measures will be used as a political weapon to further divide communities.

The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) said the prime minister’s announcement on Thursday “can only be regarded as a first step, but it is an essential one”, but remained critical of the government for not acting sooner.

“We will need to see the details before making an assessment as to whether the measures are likely to live up to their billing,” the ECAJ president, Daniel Aghion, said.

“We warned of the risk of not dealing with antisemitism in this country promptly and effectively after 7 October [2023]. It is an absolute tragedy that it has taken a massacre of Jewish and other Australians for that step to be taken.”

Anthony Albanese promised to crack down further on hate speech and religious preachers who incite violence on Thursday, after days of mounting pressure to take action on antisemitism.

The prime minister, joined by the special envoy to combat antisemitism, Jillian Segal, said the government would adopt 13 recommendations from her July report, including officially adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism. Opponents of the definition say it can be used to conflate antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel.

In response, the opposition leader, Sussan Ley, accused the prime minister of “missing the mark” and announced her own plan that included powers to strip citizenship from dual citizens who engage in terrorist-related activities, deny visas to any person coming from “a terrorist enclave, for example, any Hamas controlled territory” and blocking funding to arts and research projects that support “antisemitic activities”.

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Ley also committed to legislating the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism, while Albanese did not say whether Labor would put the definition into law.

Max Kaiser, executive officer at the Jewish Council of Australia – which was critical of Segal’s report in July – said cracking down on protests and universities risked creating further division.

“Our grief should not be used as a political weapon, nor as an excuse to pursue agendas that divide communities,” he said.

Kaiser said “a law and order response, or top-down response is not actually going to be effective”.

“What we need is solutions that empower grassroots community efforts across different communities and across different faiths and cultures,” he said.

The NSW Council for Civil Liberties said it held concerns the changes could be used to justify preventing pro-Palestine protests against the actions of the Israeli government.

“Endorsing this report at this time is capitulating to those who are trying to conflate what we saw at Bondi with some of our broader questions around [opposing] the actions of the Israeli government, as opposed to being antisemitism,” the council’s president, Tim Roberts, said.

Bilal Rauf, a senior adviser at the Australian National Imams Council, called for a careful and considered approach and warned against adopting “punitive measures or measures which suppress the expression of distress by other communities on very different matters”.

“It could divide and scatter and unwittingly achieve the very object of the people of hate who perpetrated the crime; that is, to divide and create suspicion,” he said.

Prof Kath Gerber, a University of Queensland hate speech expert, raised concerns the adoption of the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism would make drawing the line between antisemitism and legitimate political criticism “very difficult”.

“Australia is unusual in the world. We have civil anti-vilification laws that pretty much no other country in the world has. That means we have to be very clear what the bar is,” she said.

“If we accept something as antisemitism, but it doesn’t cross the legal line into an actionable complaint, then what are we saying?”

But Universities Australia was supportive of the government’s plan, calling it a “strong and necessary step” to end antisemitism.

“Universities are determined to work with the Jewish community, governments, regulators and the taskforce to ensure our campuses remain safe, respectful and inclusive places for everyone, regardless of their faith or background,” UA chair, Prof Carolyn Evans, said.