Two envoys were appointed to advise the Albanese Government on hatred harming their communities. Jillian Segal handed over her report on antisemitism in July 2025; within months, the government adopted all thirteen recommendations and forty-nine actions, including university funding cuts and new deportation powers. It has real teeth. 

Aftab Malik handed over his report on Islamophobia two months later, in September 2025. It took the government ten months to respond, and only thirty-five of his fifty-four recommendations survived. The two that would have created genuine accountability, an independent review of counter-terrorism laws and a commission of inquiry into anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab racism, were dropped entirely.

This is not a story about bureaucratic delay. It is a story about what kind of participation Australian institutions are actually willing to tolerate.

Griffith University’s Halim Rane recently pointed out the difference between the government’s response to the two reports — ‘eliminate’ antisemitism but ‘combat’ Islamophobia. What would it genuinely take to eliminate Islamophobia. It is a fair question, and the Segal-Malik gap answers part of it: eliminating Islamophobia would require treating Muslim Australians’ concerns with the same institutional urgency as everyone else’s. At present, it does not.

Ed Husic’s experience offers the same lesson from a different angle. As Minister for Industry and Science, he was widely credited with pushing Australia’s technology and AI agenda. None of that mattered when Labor rebalanced its factions after the last election; he lost his cabinet seat to a factional ally, not for any failure in the job.

Months later, at Labor’s National Conference, when he tried to bring a resolution on Gaza to the floor for an open, democratic vote, the same machinery that removed him from cabinet denied his motion a seconder. Delegates never got the chance to debate it, let alone vote on it.

Husic did everything the “work inside the party” strategy asks of Muslim Australians: perform well, stay loyal, use the proper channels, wait your turn. It protected neither his portfolio nor his motion. As The Muslim Vote put it, when a party suppresses debate on Palestinian suffering and then asks Muslims to stay loyal because sympathetic figures remain inside it, representation starts functioning as a substitute for power rather than a path to it.

Gaith Kayrem in his substack article  made the broader point precisely: the Albanese Government is right that democratic institutions need protecting from polarisation and declining trust, but that cannot be achieved through participation alone.

Participation only has democratic value if it retains the capacity to change outcomes. Whether the question is structural Islamophobia, Australia’s posture on Israel and Palestine, or whatever contentious issue arrives tomorrow, the test is the same.

None of this means Muslim Australians should abandon engagement with the political process altogether. It means recognising the difference between being heard and being able to change what happens next, which requires Muslims to build enough independent organisation, community power, media, and political leverage that mere participation is no longer treated by Labor, or by anyone else, as the ceiling.