Australian Prime Minister John Howard yesterday dismissed calls from lawmakers within his ruling Liberal Party to ban girls from wearing Muslim headscarves in public schools.
Prominent Liberal Party lawmaker Bronwyn Bishop urged the ban on Sunday, described wearing the scarves as "a sort of iconic item of defiance." But Howard, who last week held a summit in Canberra with moderate Muslim leaders in a move aimed at reining in Islamic extremism, said it was not realistic to ban the scarves.
"I don't think it's practical to bring in such a prohibition," Howard said. "If you ban a headscarf you might, for consistency's sake, have to ban a ... turban. It does become rather difficult and rather impractical."
Bishop, once considered a candidate to become Australia's first female prime minister, repeated her call for a ban yesterday.
"It has become the icon, the symbol of the clash of cultures, and it runs much deeper than a piece of cloth," she said.
However, education ministers -- who would be responsible for bringing in such a ban -- also rejected the proposal. Carmel Tebutt, education minister in New South Wales, said, "What I see in our public schools is the great traditions of Australian democracy in action where students work together, where students value each other, they show tolerance, they show respect and they understand the various cultural differences that students bring to the school."
In Queensland, education minister Rod Welford, shrugged.
"She's a caricature of a federal Liberal politician and neither we in Queensland, in our education system, nor indeed most of her federal colleagues will take any notice of the nonsense she speaks," he said.
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