This week Malcolm Turnbull fielded a question as to whether he supports One Nation’s calls for a ban on the clothing garment known as a “burqa”.
In Australia, where the Centrelink computerised-debt-demand catastrophe has hit pensioners for thousands, where the forced, indefinite internment of refugees in island prison camps is costing billions and where government MPs charge taxpayers to attend apartment auctions, prayer breakfasts and polo games, you’d maybe think there are more pressing issues for the catastrophe-camp-controller-game-boy-in-chief to discuss. Especially when a cool 10kg of taxpayers’ money was laid down by three of his ministers to eat spiced quail at his harbourside mansion.
But no! Senator Pauline Hanson is running around Queensland most strenuously denying using taxpayer funds for state election campaigning, and she’s whipping the far north into a froth about the nefarious influence of the traditional Pashtun clothing that predates Islam, given it’s worn by a fraction of a sliver of a slice of the tiny 2.2% of Australians who are (gasp!) Muslim.
Having mastered the ability to ignore a bleached Great Barrier Reef and the rights of construction workers to a safe workplace, Hanson has also perfected an inability to see the human suffering of welfare recipients or trouble herself with the fate of the unemployed; her loudest policy priority for the election she herself is not actually running in is the banning of burqas in public buildings.
Suddenly, Turnbull himself – who, by the way, is not polling well – has been gripped by Hanson’s concern, and stated there must be “safety first” when it comes to the handful of Australian women who dress in this way. In an interview where he “refused to be drawn” on such trivial issues as how to replace his rorting health minister, Sussan Ley, he totally allowed himself to be drawn on the question of how a robe with an inbuilt hood is a threat to national security. “There are obviously environments where it’s important for people’s faces not to be covered for identity reasons,” he said.
You know, after his capitulations to the right of his party on issues like carbon pricing, the republic, marriage equality and the school safety rights of transgender children, I’d come to think of Turnbull as a bit of a lightweight, but his words have weighed heavily on my mind. I mean, yes, Australian law already makes provision for the respectful determination of identity in these situations, but why speak calm reason and sense to a tense electorate when you can effectively distract everyone into a socially divisive scare?
There are certainly environments where it’s important for people’s faces not to be covered for identity reasons – so as a nation we really should be having a conversation about the appearance of Christmas Santas in children’s hospitals.
Revoking the access to children of religious activists who spruik for a mythical sub-deity that manifests once a year with rewards to believers and punishment for apostates is just “common sense”. Perhaps we should also feel uncomfortable about the proliferation of face-covering that takes place in public schools around questionable rituals such as “Book Week”, the occasional fete and the end-of-year play.
That anyone wearing a helmet is so readily admitted to an emergency ward in a public hospital is unsettling, given that bleeding to death is so effective at masking an evil intent. And as long as we allow men to obscure their faces with beards, our universities will always be vulnerable to the enemies of freedom – enemies who, by the way, are supposedly on the opposite side to the freedom champions telling women what they can and can’t wear, and promoting bans on religious clothing as cover for some old-fashioned religious persecution.
Don’t even get me started about who we let into the post office. Why, in central Melbourne the other day, I found myself totally surrounded by people in sunglasses. I don’t know how anyone summons the guts to lick a stamp.
Please ignore that the burqa’s involvement in Australian crime has been limited to a male thief attempting to disguise himself in one and a distressed woman in one falsely accusing a police officer of racism and receiving a sentence as a result. Ignore that Islamic tradition makes accommodation to the public interest, or that Australia has actually been on the burqa-ban roundabout before, deciding that safety standards – at parliament house, no less – weren’t sufficiently compromised by what a woman was wearing. Ignore that studies in France and Belgium indicate that burqa bans decrease social harmony and increase violence against the women who wear them. And ignore the human rights of women to wear whatever the hell they want to, most of all.
Just make sure you get afraid and stay afraid. After all, in a country where bigots try to bully little girls off billboards, with Hanson off the hook and the prime minister giving into it, none of us should feel too safe.
