Friday, September 15 2006 12:17 Hrs (IST) - World Time -

Sydney: The prospect of home-grown Muslim suicide bombers detonating themselves on rush-hour trains in Sydney and Melbourne has sparked debate on who can settle in Australia and what the terms of admission should be.

Before last year's London bombings the accepted view was that Australia was a model society offering such a wonderful lifestyle that anybody coming would soon subscribe to liberal values like democracy, the rule of law, religious freedom and women's liberation. After all, six million people had arrived since 1945 and there had been no problems integrating waves of English and Irish, Greeks and Italians, Croats and Serbs, Vietnamese and New Zealanders, and most recently Chinese and Indians. But the arrest and jailing of Muslims who plotted terror attacks has brought into focus a failure to accommodate everyone. While there has yet to be an attack in Australia, there is the worry that it is only a matter of time before one occurs. Some Muslims arriving from the Middle East have not settled in. They chose to live separate from the mainstream. Among them are militants who openly reject liberal values, calling for all women to be covered up, for Islamic law to be enacted, and for homosexuals to be driven from the land. "You can't find any equivalent in Italian or Greek or Lebanese (Christian) or Chinese or Baltic immigration to Australia," said Prime Minister John Howard, when calling on all Muslims to integrate.

"There is no equivalent of raving on about jihad," he said. In the 10 years since he became prime minister, Howard has campaigned against the view that citizenship bestows rights but not responsibilities. While increasing the number of arrivals to around 100,000 a year, Howard has urged integration. "Fully integrating means accepting Australian values. It means learning as rapidly as you can the English language, if you don't already speak it, and it means understanding that in certain areas, such as the equality of men and women, the societies that some people have left were not as contemporary and as progressive as ours," Howard said. The Labour Party has come round to supporting the call for integration. Leader Kim Beazley has even gone further than Howard, calling on the government to list Australian values on its visa forms and oblige intending visitors to tick them off. "I firmly believe that Australian values of respect for each other, mateship, fairness, freedom and respect for our laws are the front line in the struggle against extremists and terrorists," Beazley said. With an election due next year, Beazley does not want to be seen as soft on the citizenship issue. The Labour Party will fall in behind Howard's Liberals in supporting new laws that would put hurdles before people wanting passports. It is now three years that permanent residents have to wait before they become citizens, recently raised from two years. There are calls for this to rise to five years. Said Andrew Robb, the parliamentary secretary for immigration: "A new citizenship test is being worked up that would help people understand the society they have chosen to be part of, help them be more aware of their roles, and their responsibilities and their rights. It will demonstrate their commitment to Australia." Robb said the new test would impress on would-be citizens that they must "support democratic rights, the rule of law, and the freedom of religion and that it was illegal to discriminate on the grounds of race, religion or sex". He said proficiency in English would be tested and that there would also be questions on Australia's history. Deputy Liberal leader Peter Costello has even suggested that those who break their promise to live by liberal values could be deprived of their citizenship if they had another country to go to. Silma Ihram, who runs an Islamic school here, sees danger in the push for integration. She worries it will isolate Muslims. "Facing the prejudice of local residents, it is tempting to give into despair and see all the teaching about values and responsibility as useless attempts to solve an intractable problem: the enormous divide between the average Australian and the average Australian Muslim," Ihram said.