OPINION: Balancing security and individual liberty - when radicalisation becomes a threat to government thinking

We were all radicals in one way or another. Some of us become more radical with age. Tony Abbott's views on abortion (at least as expressed in his book Battlelines) were quite radical for a man who once wanted to become a priest. It's unlikely that today's Murdoch tabloid columnists would have shown as little respect for an official war narrative as Keith Murdoch.

Radical ideas are needed for individual and social reform. But sometimes radical thinking is seen as a threat to all of us, especially when they turn violent. The consensus these days is that the most dangerous form of radicalism is radical Islam. This consensus has a ring of truth to it, though it is also used by anti-Islam radicals with a distinctly sectarian (and at times violent) agenda.

Notwithstanding the rhetoric of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott and his media allies, the Commonwealth has tried its best to avoid pointing the finger. Funding for "deradicalisation" projects has been awarded to a range of organisations from the ethno-religious Lebanese Muslim Association to the non-sectarian People Against Violent Extremism (PAVE) to Centacare in Cairns.

Emphasising the non-sectarian nature of counter-"radicalisation" measures can get you into some trouble, as the Turnbull government recently discovered following the release of its "Preventing Violent Extremism & Radicalisation In Australia" kit which has been sent to school teachers across Australia.

The criticism hasn't just come from the "usual suspects" – civil libertarians, Muslim community advocates and the Greens. Some professional education groups have been critical of the idea that one kit can solve all teachers' problems. Instead, as the Global Learning Centre stated in a recent press release, 

Preventing violent extremism and radicalisation in our students is not about targeting individuals. It's about creating a more cohesive and connected community. This is a challenge that involves us all … Australian teachers are more desperate than ever to develop globally-ready classrooms.

Teachers cannot counter a narrow view of the world unless they have a broader and more cosmopolitan view. Kids need to be taught that being good citizens of Australia and of the globe are not mutually exclusive.

The "kit" (which, according to one of its main authors Emeritus Professor Gary Bouma of Monash University, was never meant to be used as a kit) has also been ridiculed for the examples it gives of "radicalised" young people "cured" of their radicalism.

The booklet distinguishes between mere "radicalisation" ("[w]hen a person's beliefs move from being relatively conventional to being radical, and they want a drastic change in society" and which isn't necessarily bad) and when "it becomes a concern to everybody, including families, communities and law enforcement, if a person begins to advocate or use violence to achieve a political, religious or ideological goal".

The definition of advocating or using violence has been the butt of many jokes on social media, especially the hashtag #freekaren on Twitter, named in honour of the case study "Karen". Karen's interest in environmental protection led her to attend a forest camp where she and others would "disrupt logging activities by barricading areas that were being logged, spiking trees, and sabotaging machinery". Scuffles broke out between her group and loggers, and she was arrested.

The scenario may sound laughable, but the booklet's authors were obviously trying to show that violent extremism can take many forms and may not harm everyone. Unlike Islamist terrorist groups like ISIS and Boko Haram whose targets of choice are almost exclusively Muslims.

But you wouldn't believe it if you believed everything you read about terrorism fed to a tabloid by the former prime minister's office. Tony Abbott just loved talking about the "death cult" that was coming to get us all. It made his government look tough, even if it was accompanied by ridiculous stunts such as the recent Australian Border Force fiasco in Melbourne. It also gave oxygen to far-Right extremists who were rarely seen as a threat.

The Abbott government's policies might be described as a case of "militant democracy", when democracy compromises itself and its values in order to fight its perceived existential enemies. Abbott told Australians they would need to be prepared to enjoy less freedoms to fight terrorism. He used this reasoning to justify citizen stripping and other laws.

At least in his rhetoric, then Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull expressed discomfort with where all this was going. On July 7, 2015, Turnbull lectured the Sydney Institute on "balancing security and individual liberty".

"It is a balance our Government has, I believe, got right," Turnbull remarked. But the expression was wrong. And those with dissenting views were dismissed.

If, as Prime Minister, Turnbull wishes to sell Mr Abbott's militant democracy to us, he needs to appreciate that counter-terrorism isn't just an issue affecting "vulnerable groups". He also must be prepared to be ridiculed. Australians no longer take their liberties lightly.

(Irfan Yusuf is a PhD candidate at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. First published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 1 October 2015)

REVIEW: Hilarious book by an Iraqi-Iranian-Australian artist

What’s it like to live on the fringes of society, to be an outsider. First, second and third generation Muslim of migrant heritage often complain of being marginalised. But what would it be like to be a marginal person in more than one home country?

Osamah Sami’s family knows exactly what this is like. His late father, a religious scholar and leader to a Shia congregation in northern Melbourne, grew up in Iraq as a young man keen on reading foreign newspapers. Tortured by the regime of Saddam Hussein, he fled to Iran.

Osamah was born a foreigner. Despite belonging to the same religious denomination as the Iranians around him, Osamah was an Arab, not a Persian. His mother made him wear a long robe, not jeans like his Iranian friends.

But worse still, Osamah’s family were Iraqis living in Abadan, a border town. He and his neighbours lived under the shadow of Iraqi bombs, mortars, missiles and gas raining down on the city during the 1980’s war between Iran and Iraq. They also suffered from the constant suspicion and prejudice from those deemed more Iranian, more Shia and more Muslim than those who spoke Arabic. The language of the Prophet and the language of the enemy were one and the same.

Things weren’t made easier by the fact that Osamah’s father and uncles were fighting in the Iranian army, possibly against their former Iraqi relatives and neighbours. Amongst the drama and tragedy, the author manages to insert much laugh-out-loud humour.

Indeed, tragicomedy is an appropriate description of the book. Osamah’s childhood reflections of the hypocrisies of Iranian theocracy make an excellent antidote to those who would make us believe that the solution to our woes necessarily lay in the Islamic state. All the religious police in the world could not stop Muslims from identifying more by their tribe or sect. Kurds did not cease being Kurds. Iraqi Shia Muslims were still deemed Iraqis and potential enemies of the state. All this during the age of jihad against thee Great Satan and its cronies.

There were no long term prospects for Osamah’s family. The family moved from Abadan to the university city of Qom, where his father pursued studies to become a religious scholar. Later he was invited to Melbourne to officiate for religious ceremonies. Eventually, the family applied to migrate as refugees.

Much of the book is structured around a visit the adult Osamah made to Iran with his father. They arrived at the city of Mashhad in 2013, enjoyed a traditional falafel roll together and returned to their hotel. Osamah went for a walk while his father quietly moved onto the afterlife. Whilst dealing with his own grief, Osamah also had to deal with Iranian bureaucracy. “Policy is policy,” he would be told whilst forced to leave his Australian passport in the hands of anonymous officials in Mashhad before travelling some 900 km across a huge desert to Tehran.

Good Muslim Boy is a superbly hilarious read that will make you realise that even the most religious place can be filled with testosterone and even an imam’s son can get upto no good while maintaining his father’s affections. Terrific.

(First published in AMUST on 31 July 2015)

OPINION: Why should Muslims speak about terrorism?

It’s a common refrain. Muslims in Australia rarely have anything useful to say about terrorism. Each time the Federal Government decides it wants to add yet another layer to the already bulging layers of terrorism law, Muslims (with a few notable exceptions) seem almost disinterested or incapable of making a sensible contribution beyond boycotting meetings with the PM or complaining about racism. It’s as if they cannot address the changing law itself.

Then again, few other Australians, including our political leaders, have much sensible to say. Perhaps the only sensible thing our Prime Minister has said on the subject was soon after the Martin Place Siege in which three persons (including the gunman) lost their lives.

Andrew Lynch, Nicola McGarrity and George Williams, in their recently published Inside Australia’s Anti-Terrorism Laws and Trials, state that 

... we should be wary of letting those who wish us harm determine how we live as members of a free and democratic society. Abbott acknowledged the limits upon security in a liberal society when he said, in the aftermath of the Sydney siege, that even if Monis had been on agency watchlists and monitored 24 hours a day ‘it’s quite likely, certainly possible, that this incident could have taken place, because the level of control that would have been necessary to prevent people from going about their daily life, would be very, very high indeed.

This makes far more sense than hysterical references to the “Death Cult” or insulting remarks that Muslims need to say their faith is one of peace as if they really mean it. It also underscores just how important the efforts of ordinary Muslims are when they report suspicious persons and activities to their authorities, and when their testimony is crucial to the small number of successful terrorism convictions.

You can’t eliminate risk by throwing legislation at it. The law cannot solve everything. The above mentioned authors note: 

By the end of 2014, 64 separate pieces of anti-terrorism legislation had become law. 

These additional laws and the current raft of citizenship stripping laws would have been unlikely to stop Man Monis from murdering two innocent Australians.

The growing complexity of anti-terror law is such that the average Islamic society or council or federation committee would have little hope of understanding how it all fits together. We can’t expect religious bodies to have much useful to say on terrorism law reform. At best they can (and should) defer this to experts within their communities – lawyers, public policy experts and lobbyists.

And that assumes they all have the same approach to this issue. National security is tied up with other areas of government policy, including foreign policy. It is naïve to imagine that all Muslims in Australia have the same views on, say, the Syrian or Iraqi conflict. Opinions on the Syrian government have been divided within Lebanese Muslim circles since before the Lebanese civil war started in the 1970’s. For many in downtown Punchbowl and Preston, Hezbollah is the enemy when they were once heroes.

Sectarian divisions have turned political. How are these divisions to be managed? How much dialogue is there between Sunni and Shia? Has this translated into a common approach to addressing the issues raised by proposed laws?

Absolute unity isn’t what’s required. We don’t stop celebrating Eid just because we cannot agree on which day to celebrate it on. We shouldn’t have a base approach to civil liberties, democracy, citizenship, national security and foreign fighters just because some of us despise Assad more than others. Even if Muslim bodies don’t feel comfortable talking to the media or the politicians about terrorism, they can still talk to each other and to their members about the issue. And if they then decide to contact their local MP or even a Minister, they can at least honestly say that they have consulted with community members.

(First published in AMUST on 31 July 2015)

OPINION: The fuss over the burqa is out of kilter

 IN ABOUT six months, a cross-party French parliamentary committee of 32 MPs will prepare a report examining whether the wearing of the burqa (an outfit, usually black, that covers a woman's full body, including her face) in public represents a threat to French secularism. They'll also determine whether to ban it being worn in France.

The committee was formed after French President Nicolas Sarkozy addressed the French Parliament on June 22 and described the burqa as "a problem of liberty and women's dignity" and "not welcome in France".

Sarkozy further claimed that the burqa was not a religious symbol at all, but rather "a sign of subservience and debasement", which created "women prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity".

Of course, even if Sarkozy regarded the burqa as a religious symbol, he might still ban it. In the past, he hasn't been averse to banning the open display of religious symbols in French state schools.

Sarkozy was originally behind the push to proscribe the hijab (headscarf) from state schools, only to subsequently oppose specific legislation, introduced in 2004, which saw the wearing of all religious symbols in state schools prohibited.

Many French, and indeed many Australians, find the various shades of religious head covering adopted by Muslim women somewhat troublesome. Women draped in black represent one of the most potent stereotypes of Islam in the West, one reinforced by media images. When one Sydney Muslim man called for polygamy to be legalised, the Herald Sun website carried a photo of two burqa-clad women crossing the street. The website of its Sydney equivalent regularly carries photos of burqa-clad women in any story even mildly related to Muslims. On August 8, 2007, in a story on an investigation into a refugee housing project run by a main Muslim body, The Daily Telegraph showed the image of the top half of a fully veiled woman's face.

It's unclear exactly what proportion of Muslim women wear any sort of head covering when in public, though anecdotal evidence suggests only a minority do. Among those who cover, the vast majority seem to follow the religious consensus and restrict themselves to merely covering all or part of their hair. This can take the form of a more fixed hijab (as commonly worn in the Arab world and South-East Asia) or a loose shawl draped over the head (common in Iran and South Asia).

The vast majority of Muslims in France are from North Africa where the face veil is rarely worn. This naturally raises the question: with such a tiny minority wearing such a veil, why is Sarkozy using his precious time talking about this issue?

Sarkozy's remarks are reminiscent of former prime minister John Howard's frequent references to alleged non-integration of Muslim Australians. Yet in one radio interview Howard declared 99.9 per cent of Muslims were perfectly integrated. I wondered at the time whether his repeated emphasis on the 0.01 per cent non-integrated was little more than an attempt to create an environment where the 99.9 per cent were made to feel uncomfortable.

No women in my family cover their hair. However, my maternal grandfather, who lectured at the relatively liberal Aligarh Muslim University in India, insisted the women of his household practise a form of traditional aristocratic seclusion known as purdah. Though associated with Indian Islamic culture, purdah was also practised in many upper-class north Indian Hindu and Sikh households.

It was common in those days for wealthy women to go out shopping while seated in a special palanquin (called a dholi). This was basically a large, comfortable, box-like structure with plenty of cushions for aristocratic women to laze on while their male servants (or even male relatives) would carry them. The curtains around the box had a screen through which the women could peek and decide which shop they would visit.

Women's quarters in 1950s Aligarh homes were places where women enjoyed themselves, freed of any domestic duties, their husbands or fathers employing servants to perform all cooking and other chores. Men were expected to lavish gifts on their female relatives (and in-laws) using the household income, which women were usually responsible for managing (I'm sure to their own advantage). Men were also expected to do all the shopping for food and other household needs. Women only shopped to buy clothes, jewellery and other luxury items for themselves.

Of course, the situation for the aristocratic Indian woman in purdah was a far cry from impoverished women living in Afghanistan under the Taliban. Purdah did not stop my mother from completing high school and a bachelor's degree. The idea of banning women from education or work would be anathema to most Muslims, including the one in four of South Asian heritage.

France has the largest Muslim population of any country in Western Europe.

By focusing on a tiny minority of Muslim women, Sarkozy risks alienating the majority of French Muslims, including those who agree with his basic proposition that the burqa is offensive and degrading to women.

(Irfan Yusuf is author of Once Were Radicals: My Years as a Teenage Islamo-Fascist, published by Allen & Unwin. First published in the Canberra Times on 6 July 2009)

OPINION: Terror suspects denied the basic rights given freely to others

 

Even those suspected of war crimes get a fair trial and good treatment.

THIS month tens of thousands of Bosnians marked the 14th anniversary of the massacre of about 8000 men at the town of Srebrenica in the Republic of Bosnia Herzegovina in 1995. The Age reported that "every year, more victims' bodies are recovered from mass graves found in the area. This year among the 534 victims, there are 44 teenagers. Four were 14 when they were killed."

Srebrenica had been declared by the UN as a "haven", with a few hundred Dutch peacekeepers "protecting" the area. The International Court of Justice recently ruled that the massacre constituted genocide.

But it wasn't just men who suffered in the genocide. In her 1996 book Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia Herzegovina, American academic Beverly Allen writes of systematic "genocidal rape" of women by soldiers, paramilitaries and even civilians. Many took place in concentration camps while others happened at special facilities set up for the purpose in such locations as "restaurants, hotels, hospitals, schools, factories, peacetime brothels, or other buildings; they are also animal stalls in barns, fenced-in pens, and arenas".

As Allen points out, all such sexual crimes 

"... constitute the crime of genocide as described in Article II of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide". 

Yet Amnesty International noted that following the conviction last week of two Serbs at the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, not a single person has been charged for mass rapes and other sexual crimes by the tribunal. In the case of the two convicted, prosecutors did not even investigate allegations of the abduction and rape of women.

One of the men believed to have orchestrated the Bosnian genocide in the mid-1990s is Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic. He was arrested about a year ago and sent to the UN Detention Unit in the Hague where he faces trial at the tribunal. Karadzic's war cost about 100,000 lives, according to the most conservative estimates.

A CIA report cited by The New York Times estimates his army was responsible for about 90 per cent of all war crimes in that conflict. Yet when one compares Karadzic's treatment in custody to that of thousands of terrorism suspects since the US declared its "war on terror" after the September 11 attacks, one cannot help wonder whether genocide is regarded as a less serious crime than terrorism.

Karadzic deserves a fair trial and humane treatment in custody, and he is certainly receiving both. He has the benefit of more than 30 people assisting him, including attorneys, consultant academics and paralegals, seven of whom are believed to be paid for by the tribunal.

Among those who have helped Karadzic is Melbourne University academic Kevin Jon Heller. Writing on the Opinion Juris blog in January, Heller describes a meeting he and his assistant "Peter" had with Karadzic at the UN Detention Unit, which Heller says is 

"... located in a very nice part of The Hague; indeed, it is abutted by a series of pretty little row houses. As an American, that was a bit of a shock - we hide our prisons in the middle of nowhere, especially those that house inmates convicted of the very worst crimes."

But what of those not convicted of the worst crimes? What about those merely suspected, as opposed to convicted, of terrorism? American prisons may be "in the middle of nowhere", but for years the CIA hid its prisoners in places whose precise location no one to this day knows except the agency, the detainee and his/her torturers.

Heller reports his client wore "casual clothes" and offered him a choice of drinks from "the blue plastic box full of drinks [and] snacks". Compare this to Guantanamo detainees, many of whom were kept in cages or metallic cells 2.4 by 1.8 metres, and dressed in orange jumpsuits, shackles and hoods.

The following scene would be impossible for a lawyer acting for a Guantanamo detainee to imagine: 

"He then gave Peter a Fanta grape soda - his favorite, Dr Karadzic told me - and asked me to choose between that, an orange soda, and a Coke. Following in Peter's footsteps, as I often do, I went grape."

But it isn't just Karadzic who gets the kind of treatment terror suspects can only dream of. Heller cites his assistant as follows: "Peter told me an amazing, and more than a little surreal, story about sitting with Dr Karadzic in the same room and watching Charles Taylor shoot baskets in the exercise yard."

So former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor gets to "shoot baskets in the exercise yard" while most Guantanamo inmates barely get to see sunlight an hour a day.

We don't know about how much sunlight, if any, detainees in secret CIA prisons get to see. And the thousands kept at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, often detained for years before being released without charge, don't even have access to lawyers or an appeal mechanism to challenge their detention. Then there are an untold number of terror suspects whose interrogation and torture is contracted out to foreign governments in a policy of "extraordinary rendition" started by the Clinton administration and continued under President Barack Obama.

Which all goes to show that if you are known to have orchestrated genocide and other war crimes, you can expect somewhat better treatment from the allegedly civilised world than if you are suspected of being on the wrong side of the "war on terror".

(Irfan Yusuf is the author of Once Were Radicals (Allen & Unwin, 2009). First published in the Canberra Times on 27 July 2009)

LAW: Are we on our way to becoming a police state?

The greatest comic cop ever to grace a Hollywood screen was Frank Drebin, lead character in the cult comedy The Naked Gun. Readers may recall a fiery exchange between Drebin and the LA mayor in which Drebin proudly declares: 

"Well, when I see five weirdos dressed in togas stabbing a guy in the middle of the park in full view of 100 people, I shoot the bastards. That's my policy."

The mayor wasn't impressed. 

"That was a Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar, you moron! You killed five actors! Good ones!"

Thankfully our police officers are not as keen to fire at someone in a toga or similar exotic dress. Our police understand that killing or severely injuring a suspect doesn't automatically bring justice to victims. Justice is done in court before a judge (and possibly jury), with police evidence tested by counsel for the accused.

But we are now living in the age of terrorism which, as far as the Commonwealth Parliament was concerned, didn't exist before 9/11. So before 9/11, there was no separate offence or regime to cover terrorism.

Since then, the Commonwealth has been behaving as if more Australians were being killed in terrorist attacks than by sharks or in motor vehicle accidents. The result is that our police and intelligence agencies have been given extra powers.

Extra, unprecedented powers. And then more powers. And if that isn't enough, even more powers. Not only are terrorist acts (defined very broadly in the legislation) criminalised, but so is conduct ancillary to terrorist acts. Organisations that so much as praise a broadly defined terrorist act can be banned without any judicial review. People can be held incommunicado if they are suspected of having information related to a terror offence. Incommunicado. Suspected.

What we have aren't just a few amendments or a new offence. As the Secretary of the Attorney-General's Department noted at a conference in September 2006, what we now have is ...

"a whole new area of criminal law and law enforcement procedure".

With all these additional powers come additional complications for officers on the ground as well as for commanders in HQ. Police officers are seasoned professionals. They are trained to deal with a wide variety of situations. Australia does not need to become a police state for police to earn the respect of communities they work to protect.

However, in their enforcement of counter-terrorism laws, police have made serious errors. These errors were present in the case of Harun Causevic, the accused Anzac Day terrorist, whose terrorism charges had to be dropped for want of evidence.

The unprecedented nature of our new terrorism legal system presents a major challenge to our individual liberties. Chest-beating conservative politicians tend to be keen to forget individual liberty when it comes to criminal law. The racial hysteria surrounding terrorism is such that all kinds of religious observance (even halal meat certification) is treated as a possible avenue of terrorism. If a senior religious scholar speaks of terrorism's "causative factors", he is howled down and lampooned by politicians and pundits who are happy to explain away their own cultural warrior fetishes using the most dubious "causative" explanations.

In this environment of fear and hysteria, and with so many counter-terrorism laws unused, NSW police are being given powers to shoot terror suspects engaged in hostage-style attacks without making some effort to "contain and negotiate". According to some counter-terrorism experts, negotiations don't work with terrorists whose sole aim is to cause as much damage as possible before achieving some kind of demented martyrdom. This betrays a rather simplistic understanding of terrorists and their motives.

And how will police know whether the person they're dealing with is such a terrorist? Is it their shouting "Allahu Akbar" ("God is greater")? Is it by their name? By their holding up a flag that isn't quite the IS flag? Hopefully it won't be that simple, though details of the policy and the training remain under wraps.

And in case you thought this policy and training was in response to the horrific attacks in Paris, AAP reports that 

"senior officers say the new policy and a training program for every officer in NSW has been in the works for several years". 

Indeed, in an interview with Radio 2UE, NSW Deputy Police Commissioner Nick Kaldas referred to the Mumbai attacks, in November 2008, as an instance in which 

"you have a mobile enemy force, which moves through places and kills people … we would be mad to continue to say we will do nothing but contain and negotiate".

Of course, the ideal is to minimise loss of life – including the life of the terror suspect. Terrorists aren't the only people who take hostages or to hold suicidal fetishes while doing so. Our sum total of knowledge of terrorism will hardly be helped if suspects are merely identified and shot dead.

These powers need to be used sparingly, if at all. Guidelines need to be clear, and there is no reason for them to remain unpublished, for the protection of both the public and police officers themselves.

(Irfan Yusuf is a PhD candidate at the Alfred Deakin Research Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. First published in the Canberra Times on 20 November 2015)

POLITICS: At least God has the Commonwealth on His side

 

The 2014 budget hasn't given young and future voters much to cheer about. A swag of youth-related programs have been slashed, especially in regional areas. Often these are places where businesses are shutting doors, where workers are being laid off and where the only jobs available often involve flipping burgers in return for a few dollars.

And if you are unlucky or too depressed to do this kind of work, you may find yourself with no income source for six months. Apart from your parents, that is. Conservatives are all about family values, you know.

You might choose to study. No upfront fees! What a bargain! And enough debt to make getting married, having babies and putting a roof over their head almost impossible.

There was a time when the Liberal Party stood for the "forgotten people", the people who didn't have a union or truckloads of cash and capital to back them up. Vulnerable individuals.

But that seems like ancient history today. There are plenty of vulnerable individuals today, especially with union membership falling. But instead of providing opportunity, modern Australian liberalism is all about kicking vulnerable individuals in the guts.

So to whom can young vulnerable individuals turn? What should they do? Jostle a few past and present female MPs? Hold placards upside down on national TV?

Hiding in the detail of Joe Hockey's 2014 budget is a clue. Young people could do with a dose of good old-fashioned religion. An injection of taxpayer funds to empower God is what's called for.

John Howard injected $90 million into a pastoral care scheme. Howard knew public school teachers were spending too much time sorting out the great unwashed kids whose parents were too selfish to invest in decent grammar school education. Too much money for beer and cigarettes, and not enough for chapel, Latin classes and rugby.

Money for wealthy public schools also got shared among the poor struggling private schools. The result was that all schools could claim funding under the National School Chaplaincy Programme.

The scheme was a huge success. By July 2011, a 28 per cent of state schools had taken the dosh. Writing in Inside Story on July 21, 2011, Monica Thielking and David Mackenzie noted: 

"The initiative had its critics, but generally the education sector welcomed the additional resources."

Also happy were the chaplaincy providers, most of whom were faith-based. Here was a chance to spread the word.

One spokeswoman from ACCESS Ministries was quoted saying: 

"[I]n Australia we have a God-given open door to children and young people with the Gospel. Our federal and state governments allow us to take the Christian faith into our schools and share it. We need to go and make disciples."

This missionary zeal was nothing new. Back in the 1980s my school was making us year 10 boys spend one hour each week for an entire term being indoctrinated by Francis Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live?.

This series of videos presented the European Enlightenment as an atheistic tragedy, the French Revolution as a series of guillotines (OK, he got that one right) and modern "secular humanism" as responsible for everything from the Holocaust to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Schaeffer's solution? Bring God back into public life, into the public square, into government. Spoon-fed theocracy. That's where my parents' school fees went.

Seriously, though, the chaplaincy scheme is a good idea so long as governments recognised that not everyone believes that the Son of God was sent to die for our sins. And that some youth problems are too tough even for prayer.

The very hint of the Commonwealth funding direct preaching in schools (even if this isn't generally the reality) doesn't sit well with voters. Even if Chris Pyne and Tony Abbott scream until the Christ comes home that states and territories are funding less godly counsellors and psychologists.

Which is exactly what is happening. An extra $245 million has been found in the budget for the chaplaincy program. But schools don't have the option of having a not-so-religious social worker to fill the role.

When it comes to our kids' pastoral needs, at least God has the Commonwealth on His side. But not in other areas of school life.

Chris Pyne has already indicated he wants a reviewed curriculum for schools which puts emphasis on Anzac Day and our Western civilisation. God's children mustn't be pacifist and certainly mustn't have a black-armband view of the past, even if His son was a Palestinian Jew.

The culture wars are alive and well in our schools. God help our kids.

(Irfan Yusuf is an author and PhD candidate at the Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University. First published in the Canberra Times on 23 May 2014)