On October 2nd of this year, parliament officially passed a law that meant that any women wearing the niqab or burqa in parliament house would be asked to sit in a separate glass enclosure.  With the law being immediately frowned on by the federal human rights and race discrimination commissioners, it was only a matter of days before the law was overturned.  However, this short period of controversy has served to reignite the debate on whether Australia should ban the burqa.  Many MPs, like Jacqui Lambie are all behind the ban, even our Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, has called the burqa a 'confronting garment'.  However, I believe that Australia should not ban the burqa and instead learn to accept Middle Eastern culture.  I will support this position by demonstrating the following points: firstly, with globalisation becoming more and more common, Australia needs to make an effort to support diversity and welcome Muslim women into our community as opposed to isolating them.  Secondly, passing this ban would take away one of the basic human rights that allows every person to be able to choose what they wish to wear.  Finally, the burqa is not a symbol of oppression, it is a symbol of equality and Australia's fear of what we don't understand is leading us down a path that will only serve to further widen a gap in society which is already causing conflict around the world.

There is no doubt that with the introduction of the Internet, the world has transformed into a much more global community.  Previously, countries that were close together often had similar cultural trends because they shared their ideas and theories, like Europe or the Middle East.  And yet now scientists and researchers can communicate their different theories from opposite sides of the world with the touch of a button. And Australia has been at the forefront of it all.  We should be proud to be known as one of the most diverse and multicultural countries in world, with Melbourne housing the biggest Greek population outside of Athens and recent statistics showing that 43 per cent of the national population was either born overseas or have one parent who was born overseas.  Australia is a young country, free of the prejudice developed from years of conflict, we have no hateful memories of the religious crusades, which served to cement the enmity between European and Middle Eastern culture.  We are a place where people of all races, backgrounds and religions can come without fear of discrimination or prejudice.  Or at least we were.  There is no doubt that we are a dominantly European culture, but with the influx of immigrants coming to Australian from all over the world, we need to stop thinking of ourselves as predominately European, with predominately western ideals.  We need to embrace this diversity and teach the youth of Australia about all cultures and all religions.  Everyone in this classroom knows when the birth of Jesus is celebrated, it one of the biggest events on the calendar.  But what if I was to ask when the birth of Muhammad is celebrated?  Does anyone know?  I didn’t know until I looked it up: it’s the 24th of June.  Instead of trying to change Middle Eastern culture to make it resemble ours more closely, we need to change our mindset.  With the world becoming more interconnected we need to stop thinking of us and them.  We are now in one boat, as one global community.  Because at the end of the day people only fear what they don't understand and we cannot force Muslim women to change because we are too lazy or too stubborn to educate ourselves and to educate our youth on their customs.  Banning the burqa will not fix the problem; it will inflame it; only education can heal the gap in our society caused by this clash of cultures and help to reinstate Australia as a diverse and accepting nation.

As Australians, we are not only leading the way in religious and racial tolerance, we are also a country which is known for wanting to give everyone a ‘fair go’.  Politically, Australia is focused on giving rights to the little guys, the blue-collar workers and the stay at home mums.  We were the second country to give women the right to vote after New Zealand and we allowed black people, including aboriginals the right to vote six years before the civil rights movement ended in America.  While child labour was going on in England during the Industrial Revolution, Australians were establishing the eight-hour day/five day week and minimum wage.  So why would a country which has pioneered the rights of so many, that has had over a century of democracy, talk about removing one of the fundamental democratic rights of Muslim women who choose to wear the burqa or niqab.  The right to wear whatever a person wishes in public, as long as it’s not inappropriate, is not only a democratic right, but also a human right.  In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights set out by the United Nation, Article 19 states that ‘everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference’.  A burqa and niqab can be viewed as many different things, but at their core they are a way for Muslim women to express their faith and devotion to their religion.   Some claim that burqa wearers are a threat to our national security because they cannot be identified, despite the fact that the ABC reported that ‘no issue has yet emerged with a Muslim woman, or anyone else, wearing the niqab, who has entry to the federal Parliament’.  Tgfhhe NSW’s government found an easy, applicable solution in 2012 that has been proven to work.  This magical solution to the ‘threat’ of women wearing burqas is to simply ask these women to briefly remove their facial coverings temporarily in a separate room for identification purposes.  Women were happy to comply and the issue was solved neatly for the NSW’s MPs.  So why do our leaders in Canberra find it necessary to take away someone’s freedom of expression to solve an issue, which can and has been resolved easily before.

Part of the reason that the burqas are controversial in Australia is that they are a symbol of oppression.  But what you are looking at when you see a burqa is not a symbol of oppression; it is a symbol of equality.  Some say the burqa is a way of degrading women and that even if they say they wear it out of their own free will, women often feel societal pressure forcing them into conforming.  But this is not just the case in Middle Eastern culture.  It is just as prominent, sometimes even more prominent, in Western society.  How many of you shave your armpits and wax your legs?  How many hours have you spent in the mirror, meticulously picking out your imperfections?  How many times have you worried about being too fat, too plain or too flat?  What about the hours you waste away on your clothes, scared you'll look too casual or too formal?  These are all things, which, on the whole, are completely unnecessary but done by western women to conform to societal expectations.  Some Western women don't wax their legs, or care about their eyebrows, but some Muslim women chose to not wear a burqa.  Some Muslim men disapprove of women, who choose not to wear the burqa, but some Western men think that women are ugly if they haven’t got make up on, or haven’t had their eyebrows done.  And after a closer look, it's easy to see why women wearing the burqa feel more empowered than oppressed.  Because when wearing a burqa, it doesn't matter if you're fat or skinny, if you've waxed or not.  How many women in Australia allow themselves to be objectified by men?  When wearing the burqa, it doesn't matter how you look; people can value you for who you are, not what clothes you're wearing or even the colour of your skin.  It equalises all women of all body types and backgrounds, and by forcing women out of burqas you are forcing them out of the 'oppressions' of the Middle East and into the objectification of Western culture.

Australia today is almost unrecognisable.  We may be known for our religious and racial diversity and yet we are contemplating reintroducing religious segregation.  We may be known for leading work in human rights and yet we are considering taking away one of the basic human rights of Muslim women.  We criticize their oppressive culture without thinking about the rampant objectification in ours.  Despite the temptation, we cannot blame all of Australia’s political problems on Tony Abbott.  We all need to take a stand and let the members of Parliament know that we, as Australian citizens who take pride in our country’s reputation and care about the rights of others, will not stand for a ban on the burqas, we will not stand for religious segregation happening right in front of our eyes.  Everyone deserves to choose their own religion and everyone is entitled to choose how they want to express their faith.  Just because Muslim women in Australia are wearing a burqa or niqab in place of a (nun’s?) habit does not mean they should be openly discriminated against.  Our fear of what we are not familiar with should not translate into our legislation.  Our laws should not be a reflection of what we fear but should take into account the rights of all people and give a fair and just verdict.  This burqa ban is not fair and it is not just, it is religious segregation and should not be tolerated.