If you want to know why the Australian Liberal Party is where it is read Scott Morrison’s piece on fundamentalist Islamic terrorism in The Australian last Tuesday.

Great analysis, and then a brain fart of a solution.

His point was that the Islamic community has to take some responsibility for recent acts of terrorism. Not that the community is collectively guilty for them, but that they arise from a form of ‘radical’ or ‘extremist’ Islam, and that can best be policed from within the community.

About time someone said that. He had belled the cat.

But then came the clanger – he’s going to fix the problem by regulating it!

He writes:

Over the past decade, countries such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt and Jordan have reasserted authority over religious teaching, licensed imams, disrupted extremist funding and revised curriculums to remove antisemitism. The UAE has gone further, excluding universities for scholarships it believes contribute to radicalisation, including in the UK!

Let’s license imams and school curricula. Morrison even left it open that these measures could be extended to Christian churches as well.

It is time for nationally consistent, self-regulated standards: recognised accreditation for imams, a national register for public-facing religious roles, clear training and conduct requirements, and enforceable disciplinary authority. Religious education should promote coexistence, reject antisemitism explicitly, and be transparent. Safeguarding, financial accountability and scrutiny of overseas funding must also be strengthened.

And:

Where similar weaknesses exist in other faiths, including my own, the same standards should apply. And where safeguards are absent, public funding and tax concessions should not be automatic.

At that point I remembered he was the Liberal Prime Minister who, during Covid, presided over the greatest circumscription of civil liberties in the history of the country where he talked a good liberal human rights game, but never brought it to the match.

What’s wrong with his solution? Let me tell the ways.

First, it displays a total ignorance of how Islam actually works. Unlike, say, the Catholic Church, there is no magisterium, no central authority, no creed, no standardisation.

There is no one with the authority to license everyone, or anyone, and no standard to which they can be held.

That leads to the next problem. ‘Radical’ or ‘extremist’ Islam is, as the President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdoğan insists, all part of Islam. I prefer to call it fundamentalist Islam, because I think this is more accurate, and more in line with the facts.

If you are a Christian, or Christian-adjacent, you are probably aware that around 500 years ago a number of influential Christians decided that centuries of Church dogma were suspect and that they needed to go back to first principles – their holy book, The Bible. This is what we call the Protestant Reformation.

Fast-forward to today, and in many parts of the Muslim world people also returned to their holy scriptures – the Quran, the Hadith, and the Sunnah – and what they see isn’t the same as other authorities see. It can be argued that these people are fundamentalists, like our Protestants, in that they think they are following a purer form of Islam and have returned to fundamentals.

But the fundamentals in Islam are incredibly different to those in Christianity. On the one hand you have Muhammad, the warrior, merchant and conqueror, and on the other the itinerant preacher executed by the state who urged his followers to ‘turn the other cheek’ if they were hit.

There are passages that can be used to justify what we would call terrorism in Islam, but none in Christianity.

Short of banning Islamic texts altogether, how do you police this? What is licensed as ‘true Islam’ and what is ‘false Islam’? It’s a version of the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy.

But does the state even have the power to license religious practice, or require members of that religion to license it? Section 116 of our Constitution reads:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

Maybe Scott thinks he can get modify this through a Constitutional referendum? I’m pretty sure that would go the same way as The Voice to Parliament, because when you think about it, today the government regulates the Muslims, tomorrow the Christians.

There appears to be an assumption that Christian ministers already have to be licensed by their denominations in some sort of way. This is not correct. Most denominations have their own internal licensing, but Christian ministers don’t have to belong to a denomination.

Jesus wasn’t licensed, and just like him, it’s possible for someone to proclaim themselves a follower of his and set up their own church. As long as they can fill the collection plate and keep food on their table, they will be able to keep preaching.

And if you could license preachers to prevent ‘hate speech’ who would define that?

At the moment under the new Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Bill 2026 hate speech is speech that leads to harm defined as physical injury, violence, threats of violence, intimidation, coercion, destruction of property, serious psychological harm, and encouragement or normalisation of violence.

This is harm in respect to groups and members of groups defined by race, religion, nationality, national origin, and ethnic origin. There was a proposal to include LGBTIQA+ as well. These bills have a habit of mission creep. How long before these attributes are included. Gender might be included as well.

Has Morrison thought that what might be used to nullify some Islamic theology might also be applied to stop Christian churches from preaching their traditional values? We all saw what happened to Israel Folau over an Instagram post where he reproduced a passage from the New Testament.

What Morrison proposed is conceptually flawed and dangerously open-ended, but that’s not the biggest problem. The Liberal Party is supposed to be the party of the individual and the party of small government. It’s the party of free speech. It’s the party of hard truth.

The test of what can and can’t be said has to be judged by what people do, and how they interfere with others’ rights, not what they say. It’s not a matter of theology, but of hard evidence.

The Islamic community might be the best-placed to ferret out disseminators of hate, and if they won’t, then the state will have to. That doesn’t mean giving the government greater powers, that means using the ones they have now. It means using human intelligence assets who can infiltrate these communities, as they infiltrate other communities.

It also means using the bully pulpit. At the moment we have seen claims made by organised Islamic groups that calling on their community to do more amounts to an allegation of collective guilt and ‘Islamophobia’. This must be addressed, as it would not hold true for other communities. Either the federal government addresses this, or the Leader of the Opposition and others with influence will.

If terrorism has nothing to do with Islam, then the Imams have to explain why of the 33 banned terrorist organisations in Australia, 24 have a connection to Islam, three are ethno-nationalist, and six are neo-Nazi. Or that between 1979 and 2021 there have been 48,035 Islamic terrorist attacks worldwide killing 210,138, representing approximately 35 per cent of terrorist attacks worldwide and 55 per cent of terrorist deaths. Christians, Buddhists, and Hindus barely register in the statistics.

We also know from polling in the UK that, for example, 29 per cent of British Muslims have a positive view of Hamas, 39 per cent don’t believe Hamas committed murder and rape on October 7, and 45 per cent think Jews have too much power over the UK government.

I can’t give you the figures for Australia because no one has done the polling, but do you think they would be significantly different here? And if they aren’t, which community do you think is best positioned to deal with the problem – the Islamic one, or the broader Australian community?

At the end of the day this is a social problem more than a legal one, and we all bear some responsibility, not just Muslims, to root it out. At least Morrison spoke out. I wish he had done so more wisely.