For obviously superficial reasons, I’ve always associated Belgium with expensive chocolates, rather than political acts of bravery. That changed with its decision to ban the burqa. For a tiny country to be prepared to publicly reject this symbol of oppression gave me great hope that other open societies like ours could follow suit.

Since then, of course, an Australian MP, Senator Cory Bernardi, inflamed the Muslim community by describing the burqa as the “preferred disguise of bandits” in the wake of it being used by an armed robber in a Sydney shopping centre.

Notwithstanding the Senator’s cultural foot-in-mouth routine, far greater politicians have also expressed opposition, such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who described the burqa as a “sign of subservience” and said that, in France, “we cannot accept that women be prisoners behind a screen, cut off from all social life, deprived of all identity”.

And so it should be in this country that a stand is taken to expressly reject the eye-slitted, head-to-toe covering that renders a woman a shapeless non-person. On the basis of human decency and basic equality between the sexes, that position would seem a no-brainer but incredibly such a move is seen by some as intolerant.

What is it about the Australian condition that makes us feel as though we have to continuously apologise for who we are and what we stand for? Tolerating the burqa is not about multicultural harmony, it merely allows us to turn a blind eye to subjugation.

Liam Bartlett in the Sunday Telegraph, 30 May 2010