The government’s response to Islamophobia report is big on lofty ideals, short on details
- Written by: Weekend Times
The Albanese government has handed down its response to its special envoy’s report on Islamophobia in Australia, ten months after it was tabled. Despite some positive steps forward, the response doesn’t go
nearly far enough to address the scope of the problem.
Special envoy Aftab Malik’s report had 54 recommendations for how to tackle Islamophobia. The government has agreed to adopt slightly more than half (35) of them.
Islamophobia takes many forms in Australia. Recent scholarship defines it as anti-Muslim prejudice and racism that affects people’s rights and freedoms across several key domains. These include physical violence, interpersonal prejudice, structural discrimination and social exclusion.
This definition emphasises the link between institutional forms of Islamophobia and the anti-Muslim attitudes held by individuals. It also interprets Islamophobia as a distinct form of racism, which has become more prevalent in recent years as Islamic religion, traditions and culture have become seen as a “threat” to Western values.
Statistics illustrate the growing problem. The Islamophobia Register noted a dramatic increase in reported incidents of Islamophobia from January 2023 through November 2024. There were more than 300 confirmed “in-person” incidents reported to the register, more than double the average of any previous reporting period. There were also 366 online incidents, more than three times the average for previous reporting periods.
And in the Scanlon Foundation’s recent Mapping Social Cohesion Report, 35% of Australians said they had negative views of Muslims in 2025, compared to 27% in 2023. This was by far the highest percentage for any faith group.
Statistics like these show the extent of the challenge facing Muslim Australians in achieving meaningful belonging and equality in Australian society. So, the government response to Malik’s report could not be more timely or important.
What the government is doing right
The government explicitly recognises Islamophobia as a threat to social cohesion and democratic resilience.
It also commits to a whole-of-government response across education, safety and security, community engagement, and institutional accountability.
From the perspective of previous research on diversity, the strongest part of the response is its emphasis on education, institutional reform and the experiences of Muslim Australians.
For example, the government has pledged to implement a dedicated Islamophobia education taskforce to help the education system “prevent, tackle and properly respond to Islamophobia”.
This aligns with evidence showing institutional reforms and intercultural contact between groups can reduce prejudice more effectively than sporadic awareness campaigns.
What the response is missing
However, the way the government links Islamophobia to threats to social cohesion and national unity also exposes its flaws and limited ambition.
This risks framing anti-Muslim racism as primarily a social harmony problem, rather than a matter of citizenship equality and institutional discrimination.
It also ignores racialised forms of governance across the board, in particular in law enforcement and the judiciary.
Such framing places the burden of restoring social cohesion on the victims of Islamophobia themselves. This can happen when Muslim Australians are told they need to “assimilate” better, along the lines of Pauline Hanson’s recent “no good Muslims” statement. Or when Muslim Australians dared to express solidarity with Palestinians during the Gaza war.
Furthermore, as many Muslim community leaders have argued, the government’s response amounted to a limited number of new, genuine commitments. It was largely a grab bag of expansions to existing programs and work already being undertaken by the Islamophobia envoy’s office.
Where to from here?
The government’s response is a significant and long overdue step in the right direction. It’s finally beginning to tackle Islamophobia in a more coordinated manner. This is how racism should be targeted in all forms.
The challenge now is whether the government will succeed in shifting the enduring national narrative around migration, diversity and multiculturalism. Since the Gaza war began, there’s been an emphasis on the buzzwords “social cohesion”, without any detailed plan of how to attain it. The government now needs to drill down on the conditions that produce the feelings of unequal citizenship and lack of belonging among Muslim Australians.
The research I’ve been doing with colleagues in Australia and internationally has shown the solution to Islamophobia doesn’t just entail combating hate, wherever it manifests.
Rather, we need to build a more inclusive infrastructure for Muslim Australians – in addition to all other minority groups – in everything from education to citizens’ rights.
Indeed, education is a key area identified by the government’s response. But we need more than just intervention initiatives and awareness-raising activities in schools. The government must introduce deep, meaningful reform in curricula across all levels of education, in addition to teacher training courses and professional development for education leaders.
We have tested such educational reform across schools in Australia and the results were very promising. But to sustain such work requires significant resourcing and committed leadership from the very top – the federal government.
Fethi Mansouri receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
