Scott Morrison almost got it right

What's wrong with his solution? Let me tell the ways.

First, it displays a total ignorance of how Islam actually works. Unlike, say, the Catholic Church, there is no magisterium, no central authority, no creed, no standardisation.

There is no one with the authority to license everyone, or anyone, and no standard to which they can be held.

That leads to the next problem. 'Radical' or 'extremist' Islam is, as the President of Turkey Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan insists, all part of Islam. I prefer to call it fundamentalist Islam, because I think this is more accurate, and more in line with the facts.

If you are a Christian, or Christian-adjacent, you are probably aware that around 500 years ago a number of influential Christians decided that centuries of Church dogma were suspect and that they needed to go back to first principles – their holy book, The Bible. This is what we call the Protestant Reformation.

Fast-forward to today, and in many parts of the Muslim world people also returned to their holy scriptures – the Quran, the Hadith, and the Sunnah – and what they see isn't the same as other authorities see. It can be argued that these people are fundamentalists, like our Protestants, in that they think they are following a purer form of Islam and have returned to fundamentals.

But the fundamentals in Islam are incredibly different to those in Christianity. On the one hand you have Muhammad, the warrior, merchant and conqueror, and on the other the itinerant preacher executed by the state who urged his followers to 'turn the other cheek' if they were hit.

There are passages that can be used to justify what we would call terrorism in Islam, but none in Christianity.

Short of banning Islamic texts altogether, how do you police this? What is licensed as 'true Islam' and what is 'false Islam'? It's a version of the 'no true Scotsman' fallacy.

But does the state even have the power to license religious practice, or require members of that religion to license it? Section 116 of our Constitution reads:

The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth.

Maybe Scott thinks he can get modify this through a Constitutional referendum? I'm pretty sure that would go the same way as The Voice to Parliament, because when you think about it, today the government regulates the Muslims, tomorrow the Christians.