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Confronting:

Muslim garb confronting, says Howard

MOST Australians found the full traditional garb of Muslim women confronting, Prime Minister John Howard said today.

But he said there were no plans to ban the head-to-toe costume.

Mr Howard said the experience in France, where schoolchildren were banned from wearing overtly religious clothes and symbols, showed how difficult it was to legislate against clothing.

So it’s the difficulty of framing the legislation that’s stopping us from banning certain forms of dress?

Not confronting:

Abbott withdraws ethnic ‘slur’

“Mr Pakula may be very appealing to Cambodian speaking people who are just two per cent of the electorate of Hotham but they’re 30 per cent of the Labor preselectors of Hotham,” Mr Abbott told parliament.

“I’m reading in The Australian last Friday, he’s (Mr Crean) still got the Greek branches but he’s lost the Spanish branches and he’s lost the Vietnamese branches as well as the Cambodian branches.

“And I couldn’t help but think – are there any Australians left in the so-called Australian Labor Party today?”

Opposition frontbencher Anthony Albanese, whose inner-Sydney electorate of Grayndler has a large non-English speaking population, immediately objected.

“My point of order, Mr Speaker, is for the minister to withdraw that extraordinarily outrageous slur on every Australian who doesn’t have an Anglo-Celtic name in this country,” Mr Albanese said.

“We’ve heard the dog whistle from this mob one after the other, but this minister as usual has gone too far and I ask him to withdraw it.”

Speaker David Hawker said he did not find the comment offensive.

I’m finding this whole week of Federal Parliament quite confronting.

Images (cc) CharlesFred and dlemieux @ Flickr