NSW Premier Chris Minns is easily offended and wants to prosecute one cultural group over another because of what they wear. Andrew Brown with the story.
Wear a keffiyeh to your job at a Sydney public school, and you will be directed to take it off. Wear one to your Year 12 formal, and you will be turned away at the door. Drive to Bunnings in it, and the riot squad will seal the street. Say the wrong four words at a rally and the Premier will send the Crown Solicitor to the High Court to make sure you can be jailed for it.
But an Irishman in a green scarf is not told to remove it. A Dutchman in an orange football jumper is not barred from his formal. A Frenchman in a beret does not get five police cars at the hardware store. One nationality alone has its clothing, its flag and its vocabulary placed under police management, and the government doing the managing put out a press release in March celebrating the keffiyeh as traditional dress.
Nobody in Macquarie Street has explained how a scarf can be heritage on a Monday and a hazard on a Tuesday. They are simply billing us for both.
The fashion police
This is not a few overzealous principals and a nervy police commander. It is a policy. The Department of Education, the NSW Police Force and the Premier’s office have each, separately and in writing, treated one people’s identity as a hazard, and they have done so because the instruction came from above.
That is what discrimination looks like when a government does it.
It arrives on letterhead.
Wasim El-Haj is suing the state. He was a careers adviser at Sydney Girls High School when the acting principal told him in May 2024 to stop wearing his keffiyeh at school and while performing his duties.
His Federal Court claim says he was later told that any symbol of Palestine was regarded as a symbol of conflict. The written direction cited the department’s controversial issues policy and warned against symbols that might stir emotions. Not symbols that had stirred anything. Symbols that might. A man doing career interviews with teenage girls was told his heritage, worn on his shoulders, was a disturbance waiting to happen.
Nobody alleged he had lectured a student on Gaza. Nobody produced a complaint.
The offence was being visibly Palestinian while the world watched Gaza burn.
Keffiyeh culturally significant
The department’s secretary, Murat Dizdar, later conceded in writing that the keffiyeh has cultural significance for Palestinians, then upheld the direction anyway, on safety and neutrality.
Take that at face value. The garment is cultural. It must still come off. Neutrality, as the department practises it, is a condition in which one people’s culture is invisible, and everyone else’s is fine. Wasim’s case will ask the Federal Court whether that survives the Racial Discrimination Act.
The state has not filed a defence, and a judge will settle the facts. The politics are already settled. This is a department that has decided Palestinian identity is a problem to be managed, and it has told its principals so.
It has also shown it knows better. In September 2024, Jad Salamah wore a Palestinian scarf to his graduation at Condell Park High and was barred from his formal for refusing to remove it. He sued. The state denied everything, then settled, then in March published a statement regretting his treatment and naming the keffiyeh as an example of the traditional dress it celebrates.
It took a teenager eighteen months and a lawsuit to extract that sentence. The department is now paying lawyers to argue it does not apply to its own staff. That is not confusion. That is a department that will say whatever a courtroom requires and do whatever the Premier’s office prefers.
Chris Minns’ bias
Let’s be honest about the Premier’s office. Chris Minns nailed his colours to the mast long ago; his alignment is so complete that he now functions less like a Premier weighing competing interests and more like a proxy for one of them.
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His method has been to demonise and marginalise the Palestinian solidarity movement, treating its protests, its language and its public presence as threats to be managed. Organisations championing Israel receive his conspicuous support and his political deference. The contrast says everything about whose concerns he takes seriously and whose he treats with suspicion.
Jewish Australians deserve safety, respect and protection. Palestinian Australians deserve exactly the same, including the freedom to express their identity and to oppose the destruction of their homeland.
A Premier should understand that elementary principle. Minns’s and his government’s conduct makes it increasingly difficult to believe he does.
Minns was elected to represent the whole state. He should start acting like it.
The Bunnings ‘riots’
On 19 May Ibrahim Mouammar, a French polisher who the solidarity movement knows as Bob, drove to Bunnings at Rose Bay and came out to find the street sealed at both ends by five police vehicles and the riot squad. He was told to explain his presence or be moved on. A constable admitted she knew him from the marches.
No charges were laid, because there was nothing. Somebody in the NSW Police Force decided a Palestinian tradesman in the eastern suburbs warranted a riot squad deployment, and nobody above that somebody has said it was wrong.
Since the Bondi Hanukkah massacre in December, in which 15 people were murdered, Minns has moved to criminalise the words “globalise the intifada” and to unmask protesters on demand. Three thousand police met the crowd opposing Isaac Herzog’s visit in February, and the footage went around the world. Minns would not apologise.
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The dawn raids followed. And this week his government gave notice it will intervene in the High Court beside David Crisafulli’s Liberal Nationals to defend Queensland’s ban on “from the river to the sea”, a law that has already put more than 30 people before the courts.
A Labor premier is spending public money to argue that six words deserve two years in prison. He has not found the money for an apology to the people his police beat in February.
The dead of Bondi deserved every vigil and every cordon. They did not deserve to become the pretext for all of this.
The real culture war
Every Australian who has ever been told to go back where they came from should recognise what is happening here. A government has picked one community and decided its ordinary existence is a public order question. If it can be done to Palestinians with a scarf, it can be done to anyone with anything, and the people who built this machinery will not dismantle it when the political weather changes.
Wasim’s answer is worth more than the department’s entire policy manual, telling this writer:
To be offended or feel threatened by someone else’s cultural appearance or dress is the essence of racism.
“It is easy to celebrate diversity when it costs nothing. What matters is celebrating and protecting diversity in times of difficulty. No one should have to censor their cultural identity in case it offends others.”
He wore a scarf to work. New South Wales decided that was too much Palestine for one school. A court will decide whether that is discrimination. The rest of us already know what it is, and we know who wrote the script.
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Andrew Brown is a Sydney businessman in the health products sector, former Deputy Mayor of Mosman and Palestine peace activist