Labor is attempting to mobilise ethnic communities against the Liberal Party's latest push to water down legal protections against hate speech enshrined in section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act.

An opinion piece by Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has appeared in Chinese and Arabic-language newspapers and Jewish publications, claiming changes to section 18c are "a vendetta driven by ideology, a nonsense fixation of the extreme right wing of the Liberal Party".

The blistering attack was published in Wednesday's edition of El-Telegraph, Australia's main Arabic-language newspaper.

A backlash from ethnic communities was largely responsible for Tony Abbott deciding not to push ahead with diluting the discrimination protections in law in 2014.