Daniel Hurst, Michael Safi and Helen Davidson
theguardian.com, Thursday 2 October 2014
Visitors wearing facial coverings will be forced to sit in a separate area of the public gallery shielded by glass panels
Visitors wearing hijabs outside Parliament House in Canberra on Thursday. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP
The Australian parliament will force visitors wearing facial coverings to sit in a separate area of the public gallery shielded by glass panels.
Critics argue the new security rules send a signal of intolerance to the Australian public.
The “interim decision”, which follows calls by several government members for a general ban on wearing the burqa in Parliament House, comes at a time of heightened community tensions in Australia – driven partly by an increase in the terrorism alert level from medium to high.
The security rules stop short of a full ban on the wearing of the burqa, but “persons with facial coverings entering the galleries of the House of Representatives and Senate will be seated in the enclosed galleries” behind glass panels. These elevated, shielded areas are where school groups often sit.
“This will ensure that persons with facial coverings can continue to enter the chamber galleries, without needing to be identifiable,” the Department of Parliamentary Services said in an information circular emailed to parliamentarians and staff on Thursday.
The Speaker of the house, Bronwyn Bishop, and the president of the Senate, Stephen Parry, approved the immediate changes “in light of the increased threat environment”.
The Australian Greens expressed outrage, arguing “the people’s parliament” had decided to turn Muslim women into “second-class citizens” at a time when they were already receiving increased levels of abuse from other members of the public.
“We’re at risk of creating some form of Muslim apartheid right now,” said a Greens senator, Richard Di Natale.
The Greens leader, Christine Milne, said the new parliamentary rules were unnecessary because all visitors already had to pass through security screening on entry to the building.
Milne said warned of risks to the “social fabric” of Australia, urging people to consider the racial tensions that led to the Cronulla riots in Sydney in 2005. “This decision gives a signal to the whole country that it’s OK to treat Muslim women as second-class citizens, and it is not. It is wrong,” she said.
The decision came a day after the prime minister, Tony Abbott, said he found the burqa to be “a fairly confronting form of attire” and he wished it was not worn, although Australia was a free country and it was “up to the citizens of Australia to decide what they should wear”.
The Labor opposition leader, Bill Shorten, called on Abbott to stand up to “a noisy few” government members who were “fanning the flames of this prejudice”.
“A true leader has a responsibility to build unity and cohesion, not division and exclusion,” Shorten said in a speech to parliament on Thursday. “Diminishing the real and important security debate to a conversation about an article of clothing diminishes us all and it makes Muslim women a target for bullying and intimidation.”
Shorten said of the new parliamentary rules: “I am not sure why a person needs to be kept behind glass once they’ve been identified and security screened.”
The human rights commissioner, Tim Wilson, said there was “no justification for undermining religious freedom” when people had already passed through parliament’s security checkpoints.
Tim Soutphommasane, the race discrimination commissioner, agreed. “No one should be treated like a second-class citizen, not least in their own parliament,” he said.
The chief executive of the Arab Council of Australia, Randa Kattan, said the “absolutely outrageous” measure reflected “conflicting messages coming out of Canberra”.
“The prime minister says on one hand that he wants everyone on ‘Team Australia’, but at the same time, we see something like today’s decision,” she said. “It isolates women ever further. It’s a clear message that women in society are targeted, and Muslim women more so.”
Kattan said that fear was being “whipped up” and had left some members of her staff who wore the hijab worried about travelling around Sydney. “We’re all for national security, we all want to feel protected, but it’s coming at the expense of innocent people,” she said.
Maha Abdo, the head of the United Women Muslim Association, said the rule change was a “joke” and sent a message that “this piece of cloth, or Muslim women’s clothing, is associated with terror and security threat”.
“Are they responding to a genuine threat here?” she said. “Why are we giving this any time?”
Abdo said there was deep frustration among women in the Muslim community at being targeted by senior government figures, but there was also “a feeling of sympathy because our government is so pathetic”.
Tony Burke addresses parliament
Labor’s finance spokesman, Tony Burke, told parliament on Thursday all MPs must play a leadership role in promoting social cohesion, noting that Islamic community members had received abuse and death threats.
“We need to make sure that the people who are receiving hate … know absolutely that Australia says that they are part of this country and we unequivocally stand together,” he said.
The Department of Parliamentary Services said in a statement there was no change to the existing policy of not requiring people to prove their identity in public areas of the building.
But it said the chamber galleries had “always been treated as a special part of the building” and there were “longstanding specific conditions of entry relating to standards of dress, behaviour and items permitted in the chamber galleries”.
The statement said there were other changes to security arrangements. Visitors entering any of the private areas of the building would have to be “positively identified by “parliamentary security staff on entry to the private area”.
“If the visitor wishes to enter they will need to temporarily remove any item that obscured their facial features to allow a security officer to verify their identity,” the statement said.
“If for any reason a person is uncomfortable or unable to remove their facial covering, the security staff will handle this issue sensitively, in a private area and in a culturally appropriate manner.”
The department declined to clarify what constituted facial coverings.
The Labor Senate leader, Penny Wong, asked the president of the upper house to explain the reasons for the decision “and why there has been no consultation in relation to these changes with senators”.
Parry replied that it was an interim decision which would apply “until we get a firm set of advice from some key agencies” including the Australian federal police and the intelligence agency ASIO.
“If people don’t wish to be readily identified in the galleries of each chamber they may use the galleries that are fully enclosed in glass,” he said.
“One of the key reasons for this is that if there is an incident or if someone is interjecting from the gallery, which as senators would know happens from time to time, they need to be identified quickly and easily so they can be removed from that interjection. Or if they are asked to be removed from the gallery we need to know who that person is so they can’t return to the gallery, disguised or otherwise.”
