Australian premier dismisses calls for headscarves ban

Australian Prime Minister John Howard today dismissed calls from lawmakers within his ruling Liberal Party to ban girls from wearing Muslim headscarves in public schools.

Prominent Liberal Party lawmaker Bronwyn Bishop urged the ban on Sunday and described wearing the scarves as “a sort of iconic item of defiance”.

But Howard, who last week held a summit in Canberra with moderate Muslim leaders in a move aimed at reining in Islamic extremism, said it was not realistic to ban the scarves.

“I don’t think it’s practical to bring in such a prohibition,” Howard said. “If you ban a headscarf you might, for consistency’s sake, have to ban a … turban. It does become rather difficult and rather impractical.”

Bishop, once considered a candidate to become Australia’s first female prime minister, repeated her call for a ban today.

“It has become the icon, the symbol of the clash of cultures, and it runs much deeper than a piece of cloth,” she told Australian Broadcasting Corporation radio.

However, education ministers from states across Australia – who would be responsible for bringing in such a ban – also rejected the proposal.

Carmel Tebutt, education minister in Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales, said students from different nations and beliefs mix well at schools.

“In fact, what I see in our public schools is the great traditions of Australian democracy in action where students work together, where students value each other, they show tolerance, they show respect and they understand the various cultural differences that students bring to the school,” she told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

In Queensland state, education minister Rod Welford, shrugged off Bishop and her comments.

“She’s a caricature of a federal Liberal politician and neither we in Queensland, in our education system, nor indeed most of her federal colleagues will take any notice of the nonsense she speaks,” he told the ABC.

While a ban on headscarves in Australian schools appears unlikely, France enacted such a ban last year.