Ex-adviser sees echoes of 2017 in Australia’s current Islamophobia debate

JAKARTA, Indonesia (MNTV) — The recent debate surrounding Australia’s Islamophobia envoy struck a deeply personal chord with one former multicultural policy adviser, who says the frustrations expressed by Muslim communities echoed concerns he had encountered nearly a decade earlier.

Reflecting on an ABC report about delays in implementing the envoy’s recommendations, he recalled being particularly affected not by the policy discussion itself, but by the emotions underlying community responses.

“I had heard that language before,” he wrote, referring to expressions of fear, exhaustion, alienation and concerns about the possibility of “another Christchurch.”

Writing for Magdalene, Carl Gopalkrishnan argued that many people across the region would recognize patterns that Australians often struggle to acknowledge openly. Communal tensions, racial politics, securitization and political hardening rarely emerge overnight, he said. Rather, they develop gradually through shifts in public discourse and social attitudes.

The reflections drew heavily on his experience in Melbourne in 2017, when he took a secondment to the Islamic Council of Victoria as a senior policy adviser. At the time, he was working in multicultural policy and had little direct experience with Muslim community organizations.

Initially, he viewed the secondment largely as an operational assignment. “I honestly thought I was helping with a staffing issue, which sounds absurd to me now.”

Muslim communities at the time were under intense public scrutiny amid terrorism-related incidents, security operations and widespread debates about integration and Australian values. 

He believed his role would involve helping to navigate policy challenges and improve communication between communities and government.

Instead, the experience transformed his understanding of Islamophobia.

One incident remains particularly vivid. At a state government gala dinner, two senior officials learned of his secondment and reacted with what he described as visible alarm.

“They looked at each other almost in panic. ‘Why didn’t we know about this?’ someone blurted out before catching themselves. I remember thinking, know about what exactly?”

The atmosphere in Melbourne during that period was highly charged. Public discussions frequently centered on extremism, counterterrorism and Muslim communities. Looking back, he believes many Muslim organizations were attempting to explain a phenomenon that broader society often overlooked: that the normalization of suspicion frequently precedes acts of violence.

A defining moment came during the controversy over “safe spaces” in 2017. A reference in a submission on religious freedom was interpreted by sections of the media as advocating protected spaces for extremists, a characterization he says bore no resemblance to the submission’s actual intent.

“I still remember seeing my words splattered across the front page of the Herald Sun on the tram home and thinking, ‘This is not happening.’ Suddenly, counter-terror conversations became personal.”

Stereotypes 

His interactions with Muslim communities consistently challenged prevailing assumptions. 

“There were iftar dinners, families, young people, devout and non-devout Muslims all facing the same tsunami of hate every day for months and years at a time,” he wrote. 

“There were workers trying to hold communities together while being publicly spoken about as if they were security problems first and human beings second.”

Far from reinforcing stereotypes, the experience fostered enduring friendships and a deeper sense of empathy.

“Against that landscape, oddly, I had never felt so embraced by a community in my life.”

He says the secondment fundamentally altered his understanding of both Muslim communities and Australia itself. 

The reflections also carry a broader warning for regional observers.

While many analysts in Asia view Australia primarily through the lenses of strategic competition, elections and security partnerships, he argues that another Australia exists beneath those narratives: multicultural, multifaith and deeply connected to Asia through migration, family ties and shared social experiences.

Those communities, he says, are often absent from regional discussions despite being among the groups most directly affected by rising social tensions.

An analysis by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies has suggested that growing Islamophobia in Australia is increasingly viewed in parts of the region as a question of social cohesion and governance rather than merely domestic politics.

He argues that multicultural Australians should not be treated as a footnote in the Asia-Pacific story. When public discourse becomes increasingly racialized or securitized, many Asian-Australians and Muslim diaspora communities can feel psychologically isolated, discussed primarily through the language of national security and political conflict rather than through their lived experiences.

The memory of the Christchurch mosque attacks looms heavily over his concerns. “Christchurch did not emerge from nowhere,” he wrote. “It followed years of escalating suspicion, humiliation, media distortion, and public hardening that many people inside multicultural communities recognized long before the wider public did.”

He warned that anti-Muslim prejudice has become so embedded in parts of Australian public life that many people no longer recognize it. “Once fear becomes the primary framework through which entire communities are interpreted, complexity collapses. Human beings disappear behind abstractions.”

In his view, the frustrations expressed by the Islamophobia envoy and Muslim communities today are not simply demands for policy action. They represent a broader appeal to preserve social trust before fear and suspicion become entrenched. “The recommendations should be implemented urgently,” he argued.