The racial hierarchy of the Australian government’s response to its envoys’ recommendations leaves Muslims unprotected by the law.

Ten months after Australia’s Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, Aftab Malik, released his report and its 54 recommendations, the Albanese government has finally responded — a delay the envoy himself criticised, warning the government not to wait for another Christchurch.

The government’s response gathers at the softest end of what he proposed: a review of the national curriculum for racial and religious tolerance, an Islamophobia Education Taskforce, expanded police community liaison teams, mental-health supports and multicultural grants. The more structural and state-related recommendations were rejected or deferred:

endorse Recommendation 16 of the Australian Human Rights Commission’s National Anti-Racism Framework, and conduct an independent review of counter-terrorism laws, policies and practices;

establish an advisory panel of representatives from diverse Muslim communities, to provide insight into the potential impacts and unintended consequences of new counter-terrorism legislation;

endorse Recommendation 14 of the same Framework, and implement religious discrimination protections at the federal level; and

establish a commission of inquiry into anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism, with terms of reference examining their extent, drivers, causes, impacts and experiences.

The accepted measures are not worthless. But the question is: why is the government reluctant to take note and do something about the structures that Muslims, scholars and the envoy himself, say help produce Islamophobia?

How the envoys’ terms of reference set the limits

Part of the answer was visible before either envoy reported. As I have pointed out from the onset, the two envoys’ terms of reference were embedded in a social cohesion agenda born of the War on Terror that has targeted Muslims for two decades. Those terms restricted Islamophobia to interpersonal discrimination and positioned Muslims’ safety as a contribution to Australia’s social cohesion and stability, while framing antisemitism as a national security risk, with Jewish safety an end for itself. The government’s responses to both envoys affirmed this distinction.

For more than two decades, scholars have documented the harms of the counterterrorism measures institutionalised through the US-led Global War on Terror, with Muslims profiled at the centre of their targets and governed as a suspect community. Those harms reached Muslims everywhere: an estimated 4.5 million killed, with no accountability, in the post-9/11 war zones of Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond; Palestinians enduring genocide in Gaza; and Muslims in the West living under suspicion and the disciplinary weight of ‘deradicalisation’ agendas, often disguised as social cohesion.

Against that record, an independent review of counter-terrorism legislation, and an advisory panel through which Muslim communities could communicate its ‘unintended consequences’, are modest proposals. But it seems the government finds them too radical.

Of course, a government that continues to view Muslim communities primarily through the framework of social cohesion as a national security threat cannot easily concede that Islamophobia is embedded in its counter-terrorism apparatus.

Because Muslims remain a ‘suspect community’, any structural protection or review that might limit the state’s own security powers to surveil and govern Muslims reads as an impossible ask.

The same machinery, a new assignment, the same target

Yet the very national security apparatus that........

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