TOLERANCE, understanding and mutual respect are the basis of any successful and diverse society.

But at what point does a nation reserve the right to put up its hand and say that certain practices are not welcome and should not be tolerated?

The benefits of migration to Australia cannot be overstated. We would not be as economically rich or as culturally interesting a nation without the input of so many people from disparate backgrounds who came here with nothing and signed up to Australia's values by working hard and respecting the rights of other people in the community.

The last point is an important one. I strongly support multiculturalism, but have issues with those who argue that it should be framed around an uncritical level of tolerance for the customs and beliefs of every group of people which settles here, regardless of whether they jar with our own values.

The reverse should be true. For multiculturalism to work, it should have a base-line expectation that if you want to live in Australia you have to embrace our baseline values. They are liberal values, secular values, a belief in equal opportunity for both men and women.

One of the more disturbing stories I read on this issue occurred in the NSW city of Newcastle a few years ago. It had come to the attention of the local health authorities that some African refugee families were trying to circumcise their daughters in accordance with fundamentalist Islamic views.

There was a serious discussion about whether it would be best to let these families have the operations performed safely on their daughters, rather than running the risk of backyard procedures by community doctors. It was in my view the most abysmal form of white flag thinking.

A clearer and more appropriate response would be to state bluntly that female genital mutilation is an abomination and a crime, and to let these families know that if they persisted, they would be not be getting help from the Health Department but visited by the police to be charged with assault, and the Department of Community Services to lose custody of their children.

The issue around whether hijabs, burqas and head coverings should be legal has polarised many democratic countries with significant Muslim immigrant populations. I rather hope that with time these practices will fade as populations become more integrated and more liberal. Also, some of the anti-burqa commentary has been beyond hysterical, with MPs such as a NSW Christian Democratic Party MLC memorably stating that burqas could be used by ladies of the Islamic persuasion to hold up banks.

One such bank robbery actually did happen, in Wollongong, but when the coppers asked the bank robbers to remove their clobber, it emerged the occupants were actually two blokes from Colombia (and presumably Catholic).

A ban might be heavy-handed and counter-productive, but that said, it is hard not to regard the religiously-mandated wearing of any of this gear as medieval nonsense which is all about the oppression of women. It also reflects the absurd view - best evidenced by Sydney Muslim cleric Sheik Taj el-Din al-Hilaly's reference to women without scarves as "uncovered meat" - that men cannot be expected to control their urges if women do not remain covered up.

But if countries such as Australia are not going to ban the wearing of this garb, surely we are not going to allow a situation where Islamic organisations here can insist that other people should wear it? From what has been reported, that is the situation at one of Australia's biggest Islamic schools - the Islamic College of South Australia - where the dress code requires that all female teachers must wear head scarves. One teacher has taken court action for unfair dismissal over her failure to abide by the rule.

It emerged this week the school is still demanding that female staff must wear scarves, even though there are divergent interpretations of Islam as to whether it is compulsory to do so - and more importantly, even though in Australia there is nothing in the law which gives you the right to tell workers what they should or shouldn't wear on religious grounds.

The fact that this school has not said a single word about its policy makes it hard to speculate as to what is going on. Its refusal to do so only compounds the sense of remoteness from society's mainstream.

My point is this. In Australia, religion is something we do out of hours, a matter of personal choice. It's not the basis of the political system or the legal system and it most certainly should not be the basis of anyone's employment conditions.

Like any school, this college would be receiving funding from the Government, probably both the state and federal.

If that is the case, it should not get another cent until such a time that it recognises that this is Australia, not Afghanistan, and women here can dress however they like.