There's still a long way to go

Sigh.

There have been all sorts of distressing stories on the news here in the last few days. The kind of stories that make me question our culture and wonder if there's something I can do to make a difference to it.

The opposition leader in one of our States has just resigned in disgrace after making a drunken racist comment about the wife of his recently retired political rival. A couple of days later, when the media pressure hadn't let up after his resignation, he tried to commit suicide.

I'm not going to write about that story just now. I'm going to write about a story that was almost a non-story.

What definitely WAS a story, yet again, was Muslims and terrorism. We had various politicians trying to top each other in the patriotism stakes, telling Muslims that they needed to learn and adopt 'Australian values' or get up and leave.

Never mind which values those are. I take it they're talking about things like compassion and tolerance and our disdain of class barriers. As opposed to our ridiculous propensity for drunkenness and celebration of all the worst excesses of masculinity.

Following on from that, a bright young right-winger said we should ban headscarves in public schools. To be fair, she did also say ban skullcaps and large crucifixes, to appear even-handed and to copy the French. But most of the reporting concentrated on the headscarves.

(The French have quite deliberately separated church and state for centuries. We have prayers when Parliament is opened. It's not really the same situation, people. And what is so terrible about cultures 'clashing' anyway? How we about teaching children to understand that not everyone is the same as them and not everyone thinks like them? Maybe they won't behave so insensitively when they grow up and travel overseas.)

The Prime Minister quickly came out and said no to a ban on headscarves. Worryingly, he said it wasn't practical, rather than saying a ban would be wrong, but at least he said something.

It's what he did that wasn't reported very much that really caught my eye though.

Whether it was just fortuitous timing, or whether he had already decided he needed to boost his multicultural credentials (there was a summit with Muslim leaders recently as well), the Prime Minister visited an Islamic school within 24 hours of the headscarves story gaining momentum.

The fact that he couldn't pronounce the headscarf-wearing teacher's name, I can forgive. I doubt I could get her name on the first go either. But a moment later he also asked her "how long have you been out here?"

To which she replied in her perfectly Australian-accented voice "I was born here".

That's it in a nutshell. Despite all the rhetoric, all the statements of tolerance, the leader of our nation sees a woman wearing a headscarf during an unscripted moment and assumes that she's an immigrant. Because she couldn't possibly be a native Australian, despite her accent.

I've wanted to talk about this with the people around me, but I've felt constrained from making a big thing about it. I keep wondering whether they'll even understand my problem with it. Clearly someone on one TV station understood it's significance, as they slipped it into the wider story about the Prime Minister disapproving a ban on headscarves. But I suspect it passed most non-Muslims by completely.

It's the message that's been sent to Muslims I worry about. A message that no matter what platitudes come out of our mouths when everybody's looking, what we really think is that 'you don't belong'.

I'm afraid they'll believe it.