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HE NSW government has been accused of politically intimidating Muslims with its proposal to change the law so police can demand the removal of burqas for identification purposes.
A court has heard today that a signature on a racism complaint against a police officer belongs to Carnita Matthews.
The NSW powers, among the toughest burqa laws in the world, are aimed at ensuring police can properly identify motorists and others suspected of committing crimes.
Queensland has already said it has no plans to ban the head coverings and its laws are already adequate.
Under the NSW laws, police can now order people to remove any kind of head covering, including garments such as burkas and niqabs, during routine stops.
However, Hizb ut-Tahrir, a global political movement that wants Muslim nations united under a caliphate, said Premier Barry O’Farrell’s proposal had nothing to do with police matters.
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Related Coverage* Uproar: Muslim ordered off bus
* WA to follow NSW on burqa laws The Daily Telegraph, 1 hour ago
* Top cop swayed me on burqa: O’Farrell The Australian, 4 hours ago
* Police say ‘lift the veil or go to jail’ Perth Now, 8 hours ago
* NSW cops can remove Muslim face veils Herald Sun, 15 hours ago
* Burqas to come off under new laws NEWS.com.au, 19 hours agoEnd of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.
make your own news service on igoogle“For us, it’s a case of political intimidation,” Sydney spokesman Uthman Badar said.
“It’s not a police issue, it’s the fact that a non-issue has been turned into an issue. It happened before with the anti-terror laws and this is doing the same thing.”
Queensland Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson is content with existing police powers in the state, and believes they’re adequate to deal with identity issues.
“I don’t believe personally we need to go down this path in Queensland,” he told ABC Radio today.
“Our legislation is more than adequate, but we will watch with great interest what they do in NSW.
“I have no intention to ask the Queensland Government to do something similar here.”
NSW police are to be given the power during routine traffic stops, if a person is suspected of committing a crime or if they are considered a potential security risk.
If a woman defies police and refuses to remove her veil she could be jailed for up to a year or fined $5500.
In France, where burqas are completely banned in public, women face fines of $202.
The unprecedented laws follow a furore over Carnita Matthews’ refusal to remove her niqab – a full-length covering – when her car was pulled over by police.
Ms Matthews’ conviction for making a false statement was overturned after a judge found he could not prove it was really her who made the statement, because her face was covered.
Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione called for the Government to close the legal loophole that was preventing officers from identifying suspected criminals.
Premier Barry O’Farrell yesterday said there should be no discrimination – in favour of or against – any race when it came to helping police identify people suspected of criminal breaches.
“I don’t care whether a person is wearing a motorcycle helmet, a burqa, niqab, face veil or anything else – the police should be allowed to require those people to make their identification clear,” he said after a cabinet meeting.
NSW Attorney-General Greg Smith is in charge of drafting the laws, which are expected to be introduced when parliament resumes in August.
Not every person who disobeys the police orders will be fined or sent to jail, with first offenders possibly given a warning.
In a situation like Ms Matthews’, a court will be able to apply a maximum sentence of 12 months and a $5500 fine.
Muslims Australia president Ikebal Patel said he supported the new laws but only for law enforcement purposes.
“We are very supportive of any legislation required to ensure the law enforcements are not impaired,” he said. “We would expect that this be done in a sensitive way.”
Police previously had the power to ask women to remove veils during the investigation of serious offences but did not have such powers during routine car stops
I don’t understand why so many people see the handfuls of women in any western country who wear a niqab as a threat. (There are a couple where I live in England, and very beautiful and elegant and polite they are too, always greeting me with a good morning and a smile when we pass in the street = you can see a genuine smile in the eyes, mouth not necessary.) As far as I can see, it’s just moral panic, and pathetic. Borders, serious crime (as if the sort of women who wear them were prime suspects in rape and murder), fine. Otherwise, pfff.
I read a fantastic quote the other day, from a sixteen-year-old white boy in England: “It’s weird not knowing who it is you’re passing in the street, especially late at night when someone might jump you.” LOL. Sorry, mate, there are “types” I’d be a tad more wary of on a dark street.
Meh, making a new law to deal with a situation that occurs in maybe 0.0000001 % of cases seems like overkill and political opportunism to me (it was all over the media here).
Considering that police already have the power to detain somebody who refuses to identify themselves, this law would seem to be a double up. More of the Aussie propensity for creating a law or rule for every conceivable situation.
They should have arrested the bitch and recorded it properly.
I have noticed that since Penta2 has been posting on this site it’s all turned to politics. I thought this site was about travel, but it seems to be turning the way of black flag. But I heard about this new law and then seeing the illogical arguments on this site saddened me even more.
Please let us stay of the politics and be focused on the travel, the articles, and the photos. I like this site let us not ruin it.
As a police officer said the other day, What is the point of having a photo on your drivers licence if you can’t identify the person. Discrimination my ass, show us your face, to confirm you are the holder of the licence then on your way. Where is the discrimination in that?
I used to ride a motorbike, I knew that I had to take my helmet off so the police could identify me, even if I shocked with my good looks. Seems like common sense to me. Hopefully this will be the last comment I make like this. Cause I have broken my own law, Don’t talk politics.Orion: I’m going to take this on, to try to lay it rest, see if we can have it all out and be done with it, so everyone can move on.
I’ll start with the particulars of this thread. Why would ROB have posted this article, which is not about travel or photography but about an aspect of Australian politics that echoes what’s been happening in other parts of the world, if he didn’t want to start a discussion? He knows it’s a much debated subject, he knows I’m looking in regularly again, he could guess I would bite, so it’s not an illogical inference that he was hoping to drum up a bit of controversy or interest at least, since this forum has not been as lively recently as it once was.
Now Q. When he posted his first reply, about the BNP, it’s hard to see that he was being anything other than deliberately provocative (as well as illogical – and plain wrong in what he said about my stated position on an unrelated issue). I didn’t respond and I’m glad he deleted it. I didn’t see the next one. I hope his deletions means that he’s thought better of that approach. If people insist on letting their bile from the flag spill over to here, surely that’s their problem, not mine?
Now more broadly. When I had to re-register because there was a cock-up with my old registration, I discussed with Lee whether to take a different name or not, because we were both (I imagine) aware that some people can only see the name and not the posts as they are, what I actually write. We agreed that for honesty and transparency’s sake, it was best to keep Penta, for the time being at least, to see how it goes.
He welcomed me back, with reservations for all I know, and ROB has shown a willingness to engage, for whatever reason, even though he left the BFC because of me (or so I was often told). I’ve mostly just lurked here and posted only very occasionally, precisely because I didn’t want this site to be damaged because of my presence as well. Lee and ROB could have asked me not to re-register, but they didn’t. It seems they were prepared to give it a try at least. So that’s the owners.
Now to the posters who object to my presence and want to carry on here as they did at the flag. If that’s the way it’s going to be, then I shall have to try another name. But I fear that flipflop, as a moderator, will immediately “out” me, so it would be rather pointless; the mud-slinging would start again anyway. I might point out that on the flag I did, as an experiment, have another identity for a while, which no one noticed; 40 or 50 posts, the same sort of thing as “Penta”, and they were treated just like anyone else’s: taken for what they were, agreed or disagreed with normally, no accusations of extremism, gross illogicality, bigotry, appeasement of Islamist terrorism or any of the rest – the experiment thereby showing what I expected, that it wasn’t what I wrote, but the baggage that came with “Penta” that was the problem. Then I went travelling for a few weeks, forgot the password and couldn’t get on again. A pity, as it might have been the solution. Next time I tried, I hadn’t even managed a single post before flipflop exposed the name, so that route to peace was closed.
And while I’m on flipflop, I’ve noticed that he’s holding back at the moment. I appreciate it. If he was responding, I’m sure he’d say, “Here we go again, making it all about her.” This time I am, and deliberately. But only because Q and then Orion made it so in this thread and I’m taking the opportunity to confront the elephant in the room – I hope for once and all. I wish he would grasp that I don’t want it to be all about me, I’ve never wanted that, I loathe the way he and others insisted on always personalising everything. I tried everything I could to make it stop, responding as politely and calmly as I could manage, ignoring them, addressing only the most serious lies and slanders, but they refused to let it be. If flipflop is showing that he’s prepared to give it a try here, then I welcome it. If he doesn’t bring up the past or repeat his previous calumnies, then I won’t either: we have a deal.
I didn’t want to go into my ban from the BFC, but I think, seeing as I’m putting it all on the table, perhaps I should. As well hung for a sheep as a lamb. I think it’s pretty well known that there was a long-running campaign to drive me off, which was bound to succeed once the campaigners decided that anything went, including some shocking slander and outrageous behind-the-scenes foul play (no pun intended). I had been warned what was coming, that it would be dirty, ugly and no holds barred, that what I did or said would make no difference to the outcome, and so it proved. But the acute distress caused in pursuit of the ban, including in the last month a threat (and not an empty one) to bring me and my family to financial ruin through a spurious but inevitably exceedingly expensive lawsuit, was going too far and astounded even me, who had weathered a lot of sheer viciousness for a long time already. Incredible-seeming, but true, and verifiable; it was an easy jibe to call me paranoid, to accuse me of playing the victim, but some people really were out to get me. I’m undoubtedly best out of it and unutterably relieved never again to have to have any contact whatsoever with people who would stoop so low.
The manner of the actual ban (which, as you can imagine, came as something of a relief after all that) was nothing like as described on the forum, where the explanation given was wrong or grossly misleading in every single item. (Some people have been copying the relevant posts to me.) But as I hadn’t broken any of the extra rules imposed (in fact I’d welcomed them enthusiastically since, if obeyed by all parties, they would have put an immediate stop to the attacks on me by the lead campaigner), invention was necessary to justify the ban publicly.
The actual reason given to me, when I asked, made me laugh out loud. I quote:
“As rationale for your ban I refer you to the relevant parts of the terms of reference of the forum:
‘You agree not to post any abusive, obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening, sexually-orientated or any other material that may violate any laws be it of your country, the country where “The Black Flag Cafe©” is hosted or International Law. Doing so may lead to you being immediately and permanently banned …’
Irony is not dead. If these terms of reference had been applied to any of a number of posters, with the sanction of a short timeout for any breach, the problem of the vicious rows could have been resolved at a stroke at any time in the last few years and the forum could have regained its former generally good-humoured, wide-ranging free-for-all, which was what we all enjoyed, even without having to go to such insane lengths to ban me. Never mind. It’s all over, thank God. And I sincerely hope that that forum will now recover its glory days in my absence.
So finally, back to here. I can leave altogether if Lee and ROB want me to, or just stop posting. (Given the choice between those two only, I’d prefer the latter, because I hope that, in time, a few of the people I had enjoyed a long friendship with at the flag, with occasional, or in some cases regular, correspondence through PMs, might drop in and we can restore here the contact that’s now forcibly ended there. If that happened, it might boost traffic here too, you never know.) Or I can re-register in another name. Or we can drop all the nonsense and behave like the grown-ups I like to think most of us are.
That’s my piece. Please forgive the length. I await instructions.
So, your real reason for sudden interest in this previously spacker-free forum is exposed – “Penta” can right the wrongs (perceived by her, and her alone) of the other place. It’s got nothing to do with ‘politics’ or whatever here, which before this were argued out with maturity or laughs, but not for oneupmanship or personal aggrandisement, or some inexplicable internet crusade. A few posts USA-bashing – no change there – then when the bait is taken, by orion who doesn’t know the weird spiteful person behind the “Penta” persona, it’s straight into huge posts trying to re-ignite feuds that were rightly put to bed on the BFC. Way to go fuckwit.
This is my last post here as long as you’re on this board, hope you enjoy it you fucking creep
Bye
Penta2 it was not meant to be any attack on you, I just noticed that it was becoming like the other site, I don’t know what happened to you over there. I left the BF a long time ago. Then late last year I rejoined and was kicked off cause I called the owner a dhimmi. I like this website. I just don’t like politics on forums. You can talk all the politics you want, I won’t be joining any of the discussions anymore, and if I have to put up with people like flipflop I won’t post anything unless some one needs advice about traveling or photography, and then only if I can give them advice.
I just wish people would rub along together.
The very essence of a web forum is that it invites, even encourages, people to air their views and opinions. But it seems that some people cannot handle the fact that others might disagree with them and they subsequently resort to abuse and threats. It’s boring and is the reason I do not frequent the BFC any longer. I gave up posting on the BFC a long time ago because it simply became too tiresome. If PBs starts going the same way, I’ll just mark all posts read without actually reading them and let people hurl abuse at each other whilst I blissfully go on my way.
For the record, Penta, you have never given me any reason whatsoever to have a problem with you. I have always found you to be polite, civil, articulate and reasonable, and I never gave it a second thought when I helped you with your login password a while ago.
I do not agree with the way that forum users treat you, but it’s your fight and I think you’re more than capable of standing up for yourself, so I’ll just quietly observe for now.
Having said that, I do wonder if Flipflop will tire of playing with his train-set on his own, and choose to bring it back before long.And as for politics on the forum… I do not get involved in heavy political conversations, as politics generally do not interest me, but I recognised long ago that politics and world travel are inextricably entwined and travellers are very often politically minded people.
I do not see how a forum that deals with travel in unusual places, including conflict zones past or present, cannot be a hotbed of political discussion on a regular basis.Thanks,
Lee.
@Penta2 wrote:
and be done with it, so everyone can move on … the opportunity to confront the elephant in the room – I hope for once and all
I’m done.
I’m sorry flipflop’s not grasping the olive branch.
To go back on topic, sort of – there’s a nasty smear campaign underway in France against Martine Aubry, candidate for the socialist nomination for president, accusing her of being an alcoholic, and her husband, Jean-Louis Brochen, of being an Islamist. Why? The hijab thing again.
In 1993, before France’s law banning religious symbols in schools, Brochen defended schoolgirls threatened with exclusion for wearing headscarves and a Jewish boy who wore a skull cap. Brochen, a staunch secularist, has said it was a lawyer’s role to defend all sorts of cases.
De Villepin, who was so brilliant in the UN debate about Iraq all those years ago, has come good again:
The former rightwing prime minister Dominique de Villepin, who also has ambitions to challenge Sarkozy for the presidency, said rumours about Aubry were “scandalous” and “foul” and warned that no one should play dirty politics.
Update on niqab law in France: police wrongly levying on-the-spot fines (then overturned), no successful prosecutions (which will anyway be appealed to Strasburg as it contravenes European human rights law), and increased personal attacks on women on the street. Even seen purely as a way for Sarko to gain extra right-wing votes, it hasn’t worked. Pointless, discriminatory, xenophobic crap of a law.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/19/battle-for-the-burqa
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