The government created a legitimate comparison when it appointed envoys for Islamophobia and antisemitism, and Muslim communities are entitled to ask whether both responses reflect equal protection.

The multicultural affairs minister, Anne Aly, is troubled by the “consistent comparison” between the government’s responses to Islamophobia and antisemitism.

“First of all, I take a bit of issue between this comparative and this consistent comparison between, what are we giving to antisemitism, what are we giving to Islamophobia. Both are worthy of pursuit in their own right, both the elimination of Antisemitism and the elimination of Islamophobia, and racism in all its forms are worthy pursuits. I don’t want to get into a competitive kind of environment of Islamophobia versus Antisemitism, and I take issue with that.”

Anne Aly cannot refuse such comparison, for many reasons. The most glaring one is simply the fact that the government invited it. The moment it named these two distinct forms of racism and granted each a special envoy at a volatile time, it made its two responses comparable, and it made the difference between them a legitimate matter of public judgement.

Equality is a comparative judgement

Discrimination, unequal treatment, only becomes visible through comparison. You establish unequal treatment by asking how a differently situated group is treated in similar circumstances. The Australian Human Rights Commission’s National Anti-Racism Framework calls for consistency across all forms of racism, a standard that can only be checked comparatively. A minister asking a community not to compare is asking it not to perceive discrimination.

And government has routinely used comparison to measure Muslim communities: their sense of belonging, trust, employment, education, economic participation, and public attitudes towards them, are indexed against national averages and other groups. The Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion reports, conducted with universities and routinely cited in government contexts, are a prime example.

Why, then, is comparison acceptable when it travels downward but impertinent when it travels upward? Government may compare Muslims against the rest of the nation when designing action plans and programs for them. But when Australian Muslims draw the comparison themselves, exercising the ordinary democratic right of telling their government where discrimination sits and where its response falls short, the same act is recast as unhelpful.........

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