I haven’t read the decision yet – if I get the chance to do so next week, I may post about it – but the ABC article linked above gives the court’s reason for dismissing the appeal as being that the school “was not suitable for the rural nature of the land.”
What I want to draw attention to, though, is comments like this (from the ABC article):
Residents said Camden was addressing a problem that was facing many Australian communities, and that had been unfairly labelled as racist and bigoted.
I don’t think it’s unfair to label a community as racist when residents say things like this (also from the ABC article):
with one local resident saying there were fears public Christmas decorations would no longer be allowed because of cultural nit-picking.
Another resident told the court that Islam requires its followers to seek world domination.
Those are racist, Islamophobic views. It may not be the entirety of the community that is expressing those views, but nevertheless, those views are being expressed in the community. Therefore, the community is at least partly racist and bigoted.
Now, the Land and Environment Court may well not have taken such concerns into account – it shouldn’t have, they’re not relevant, and since the Quranic Society is apparently not planning to appeal, my assumption is that it didn’t (at least, not explicitly – as I said, I’m still skeptical about the “not consistent with rural nature” reasoning).
So the decision itself may not be racist.
But it appears that the community in Camden IS.
H/T: stephiepenguin
I think the ‘rural nature’ is a bit of a furphy. What do they think all the other houses/businesses/schools in Camden are built on. Where do they think new building blocks come from? Unfortunately this is a win for the racist/bigoted elements in Camden. I’m sure that there are some lovely people in Camden who wanted this school to go ahead and had no fears if it did. Unfortunately they were shouted down.
Oh, absolutely. I went into “rural nature” in a bit more detail in the older post. (In particular: my understanding is that the proposed site is next to the new high school – built 5 or so years ago, maybe a bit more – a little way out of town; the high school was built on rural land and must have something in the vicinity of 900 students itself.)
But I still reserve my judgment (ha! lawyer pun!) about the court’s decision until I’ve actually read it. The fact that the Quranic Society has indicated that it will NOT appeal suggests that there may be something reasonable in the judgment.
well, i’m really agree with that, it is camden