Each day as I walked to the front of the class, the grade six boys (the girls of this age were already kept home in the flats) pelted me with pencil cases, books and lunch boxes.  In their Somali culture, a woman was not meant to teach a class like this.

If the boys had forgotten their lunch at home, their mothers would enter the classroom without acknowledging me and sit down with their sons for a chat and to deliver the lunchbox.

I received no support from higher up because no one saw the importance of teaching new migrants that our culture has different rules about the equality of the sexes, (and equality of religions), and that you couldn’t make a female teacher disappear by attacking her or pretending she didn’t exist.

Read more: State funeral offer for Bourke Street victim

Later on when the turmoil began about building a Mosque in Bendigo, I saw no problem with that as long as men and women were treated equally by, and within, the Mosque.  Equal treatment of men and women is part of our culture and our law.  If no one is willing to make a clear point that our nation strives for gender equality and religious equality when refugees first enter the country, then they are forever going to look for ways (knives? bombs? guns?) to try to make their new country follow the culture of their old country.

In the wake of Friday’s Bourke Street attack, isn’t it the time now to teach refugees that we welcome them in, but we do have different laws that they will need to follow if they wish to become a part of our society.  This needs to extend to both our schools and our religious institutions, and it needs to be accepted from Day 1.  We can’t keep pretending that we don’t want to offend new immigrants and thus we have to accept their following cultural and religious laws that are illegal for our other citizens. 

If we don’t make this clear from the earliest possible moment, we can expect them to continue to try to change our culture as soon as they can handle a knife or a gun.

News that children are being taken off Nauru and Manus Island and brought to Australia is of course welcome.  

But two questions need to be answered.  First, will a parent or the parents of a child who arrives be allowed to accompany the child?  And what of siblings?  It would surely be unconscionable if children could only come if their family was left behind.  And if family members come, for how long will they be permitted to stay in Australia?  If the time allowed is limited, where do they go once the time expires?  

Read more: Nauru kids will never settle in Australia

The second question is how will the people who arrive  be accommodated.   We are dealing with people recognised to be genuine refugees who have been traumatised both in their country of origin and in offshore detention.  For their well-being it is vital that they be to allowed to live in the Australian community. 

To send them to a detention centre is just too awful to contemplate.  We would simply be substituting imprisonment on the mainland for imprisonment offshore.

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