Under the cover-up

A bikini ban for a Ramadan event at a public pool should not be taken lightly as it puts fundamental freedoms of Western society on the line.

A COUPLE of weeks ago a report surfaced about families being ordered to cover up before attending a public event to avoid offending Muslims during next year's Ramadan in August. It involved VCAT approving a bikini ban for a community event to be held at Dandenong Oasis, a municipal pool. Dandenong Council, and pool managers YMCA, successfully sought an exemption from the Equal Opportunity Act to compel ''participants aged 10 and over'' to ''ensure their bodies are covered from waist to knee and the entire torso extending to the upper arms'', and to refrain from wearing ''transparent clothing''.

Controversy erupted: tabloid TV lapped it up, talkback callers fulminated, bloggers pontificated, politicians, including Premier John Brumby, were quizzed. Amid the outrage came the predictable and inflammatory warnings that the ruling was evidence of a sinister plan to ''Islamise'' Australia.

The ruling enforcing what VCAT described as ''minimum dress requirements'' for Muslims was certainly novel. I'm not aware of any other instance in which the tribunal has made a religious dress code mandatory at a public venue - as opposed to a place of worship - let alone at the local swimming pool. In fact, the ruling was so novel that for some it simply couldn't sink in.

Perhaps this is why some of the fair-minded people in my orbit initially doubted the story's veracity. After reluctantly conceding it was indeed true, they still thought the thunderous response over the top. We're talking about a one-off, two-hour event, they argued. It will be held when the pool is closed to the public and normally used for a women-only swimming session, the attendees of which are almost all Muslims. And hey, aren't we all covering up to be sun-smart now anyway? (OK, maybe not in the middle of August.) Let's keep things in perspective, they said.

Well, I agree perspective is crucial. And seen from a wider and deeper perspective, the Dandenong pool episode is neither trivial nor insignificant. It is but one example of human rights laws producing outcomes that restrict rights. It raises tough questions about how far public authorities ought to go in accommodating cultural practices that sit uneasily with mainstream Western values.

And it exposes some disturbing and hypocritical currents in progressive thought, a point best and fittingly made by a Dandenong-based Muslim women's group, set up to help newly arrived Afghan migrants integrate into Australian society. ''I've spoken to a lot of women; they don't want this,'' Women's Better World president Mandy Ahmadi told the Dandenong suburban newspaper, flagging her campaign to overturn the ruling. ''Enough is enough … why run from the Taliban to come to this?''

And yet, as Ahmadi's ''enough is enough'' phrase might suggest, the VCAT ruling was not the first example of authorities bending to accommodate religious sensibilities at Melbourne's public pools. Dandenong is not the only municipality to allow gender-segregated swimming. The practice is now almost routine: a development that has unfolded largely under the public radar and therefore attracted scant debate. Viewed against this trend, the VCAT decision is perhaps less of a leap than it first appears.

First some history. When a proposal was floated in 1992 for women-only swimming sessions at Brunswick Baths, all hell broke loose. Preferential access to public facilities is a contentious subject and for good reason. Women-only gyms, gay bars and men's clubs obviously serve a role in the private sector. And any ethnic or religious group can similarly hire out public facilities for private functions and set whatever rules they fancy.

But municipal services are a different story. Brunswick Council had argued the sessions were needed because many women in the municipality were prohibited, for cultural reasons, from swimming in the presence of men. Councillors also claimed that many other women weren't comfortable using the baths because of ''sexual harassment'' or body image issues.

The then Equal Opportunity Board invited submissions on the proposal and received ''a mountain of correspondence''. Angry scenes played out at town hall meetings. One outraged ratepayer, David Smith, explained that his wife and daughters had found it surprising that women would want to return to an era of segregation.

An issue also emerged about whether single-sex sessions would fully satisfy Islamic requirements for modesty. Sheikh Fehmi Naji el-Imam of Preston mosque was quoted as saying that a conscientious Muslim woman should not be seen in the company of women who did not observe the dress teaching. In other words, non-Muslim women turning up in skimpy bathers would pose a problem.

Cr Cathy Lanigan, described as ''a member of the council's socialist left majority'', was willing to accommodate Sheikh Fehmi's concerns. ''We think the needs of most [of the Muslim women] will be met if non-Muslim women wear either one-piece bathers or a T-shirt over their bikini tops,'' she said.

Interestingly, Lanigan did not dispute a reporter's suggestion that the swimming proposal was part of a ''radical feminist political agenda''. I would have thought bowing to clerical demands on how women of other faiths ought to dress reflected a radical Muslim agenda, if anything. But remember this thread because to some extent we're still tangled in it.

The board rejected the Brunswick proposal but it proved to be a temporary setback for the cause. A few years later, councils renewed the push for segregated swimming, and they commissioned research into their communities to bolster their case. Most councils also sought the less visible - and more politically palatable - option of holding sessions outside pools' normal opening hours.

During the past decade or so, VCAT has approved out-of-hours segregated swimming at many councils. I tried to count how many, but tired of the task after hitting double digits.

There's a degree of fiction here; a legal sleight-of-hand. It presumably would take a brave council, and even braver tribunal, to endorse a ''Muslim women only'' swim session. But most ''women-only'' sessions are conducted with Muslim requirements in mind, even if non-Muslims can turn up and even if, as appears to be the case, a small number do. Most councils base their VCAT submissions explicitly around the needs of Muslim women. (One pool in the municipality of Melbourne suspends women-only sessions during Ramadan because so few women attend at that time.) Nearly all these councils also obtain approval to staff the sessions with women only.

The cultural sensitivity goes further still. A spokeswoman for Brimbank City Council, for instance, said their swimming sessions took place in ''visually secure surroundings''. In other words, there's no danger of women being glimpsed in the pool by passers-by. (Such ''security'' is a key demand of some Muslim communities.) And while every council I contacted denied that dress codes applied during the sessions, some of the responses suggested the issue was murky.

The Brimbank spokeswoman explained that ''participants should be dressed appropriately, as is expected of a centre used by children and families''.

The City of Darebin's acting mayor, Gaetano Greco, was more candid. ''We don't impose a particular dress code,'' he said. ''However, women attending should be respectful of Islamic beliefs.''

I admit to being uneasy about our public municipalities treading so carefully around religious sensitivities, particularly when doing so under the banner of ''women-only'' access, with its (radical) feminist overtones.

But there is another side to this issue because at the centre of this debate are real women whose lives have been improved by these sessions. All very well for the likes of me to lecture about the sanctity of our secular public space, being at perfect liberty to roam through it.

In its 2006 application to VCAT for segregated sessions, Brimbank led evidence about the large number of disadvantaged women in the municipality. Many are refugees and recent arrivals from Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan. They tend to be poor and isolated. The council even produced data showing some residents had a lower-than-average life expectancy. Research had indicated swimming was an activity these women were keen to participate in, and that it would bring health and social benefits. But without segregated sessions, the women would never experience the joys of the pool.

It is a powerful argument in support of women-only sessions. The dilemma is a tricky one, and I don't pretend to have all the answers. But flowing from this is a reasonable question: namely, what's next? If the experience overseas is any guide, we're on a slippery slope.

Britain gives some hint of what's ''next''. Last year, the Telegraph newspaper reported on swimmers being forced to comply with Muslim dress codes during weekly segregated sessions at six public pools. In the most extreme case, Croydon Council in south London instructed on its website that ''during special Muslim sessions male costumes must cover the body from the navel to the knee and females must be covered from the neck to the ankles and wrists''. Some British Labour MPs slammed the dress codes as ''divisive''.

WITH the Dandenong Oasis ruling - which is what came ''next'' here - we're now almost in Britain's league. Greater Dandenong mayor Jim Memeti defended the ruling as part of a council strategy to promote ''greater respect, tolerance and understanding of others''. And yet this strategy is directly contradicted by the demand for ''tolerance and understanding'' being made of one side only, namely the non-Muslims.

The most noteworthy criticism of VCAT came (again) from a Muslim woman, Sherene Hassan of the Islamic Society of Victoria, who feared the dress code would undermine the purpose of the event in fostering harmony. (The media blow-up suggests that she has already been proved right.) Otherwise, the official defenders of liberty and human rights fluffed it. Liberty Victoria said the curtailing of liberty at the public pool was reasonable because the event was to be held out of hours. Human Rights Commissioner Helen Szoke compared the bikini ban to dress codes in pubs. Really? Banishing thongs in pubs is about preserving decorum. But surely appropriate dress at a swimming pool would be, err, bathers?

A request to cover up, however politely made, is layered with intimate messages; about men lusting and women being lusted over, about the dangerous and vaguely shameful nature of sexuality. Such ideas run counter to the West's more than 500-year struggle for individual freedom - including both freedom of religion and freedom from religion - and for gender equality. Our public authorities ought to be pushing back hardest when these values are under threat. Yet this is precisely where they've been buckling under pressure.

The community workers and VCAT officials who sought and made the Dandenong ruling probably congratulated themselves for their ''tolerance''. Possibly there are a number of like-minded people who would happily attend the Ramadan function and dress as a Muslim for the night. And when the party's over, they could go home and spread the message of tolerance to their daughters, who are, one assumes, free to visit the local pool wearing as little or as much as they wish.

But what about the young Muslim girl who is beginning to question some aspects of her religious heritage, and wants the same room to move as the daughters of these ''tolerant'' folk? What if her ideas about how a ''conscientious'' Muslim woman ought to behave differ from those of Sheikh Fehmi? What if she dreams of ditching her burqini for a bikini?

Isn't there at least an argument that all these publicly funded, respectfully modest and ''visually secure'' swimming sessions undermine her bid? And what message does the Dandenong ruling send her? Here are the civic institutions of liberal, secular society effectively saying: your cultural practices are so sacrosanct, so unassailable, that even non-Muslims must comply with them.

Shouldn't they instead be resisting attempts to water down our fundamental human rights, which exist for the benefit of all? We don't have to go the way of France and force people to break out of their traditions and join us by the democratic poolside. But neither should we be blocking their path to greater autonomy in the name of ''tolerance''.

If the Dandenong story made you uncomfortable, trust that instinct. It means the line, to which we've been steadily edging closer, has now been crossed.