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Former prime minister Scott Morrison has called on Australia’s Muslim leaders to license preachers, translate all sermons into English and set up a board to police radicals, in a wide-ranging speech at an antisemitism conference in Jerusalem.
“It is time that Islamic institutions in Australia adopted nationally consistent, self-regulated standards, including a recognised accreditation framework for imams, a national register for public-facing roles, clear training and conduct requirements, and disciplinary authority for their governing councils. This requires a peak body that goes beyond representation to be given the authority and tools to enforce membership standards.”
Morrison argued that “many Islamic states seem to have shown a better understanding of these issues than liberal western democracies,” in policing religious teaching, although he acknowledged “such state centric measures would not always align with the principles of western liberal democracies, in particular freedom of religion”.
Morrison, hailed by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the conference as a “terrific, terrific champion of our people”, said on LinkedIn that “to treat such issues as taboo” would allow extremism to flourish.
This week Attorney General Michelle Rowland wrote to the Australian National Imams Council to assure them the new hate speech laws would not “introduce restrictions on the ability of faith communities to practice and teach their religious and cultural beliefs”.
Muslim leaders in Sydney last month said they’d been warning the police about hate preachers for a decade.
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