ISLAMIC EDUCATION NOT HELPING MUSLIM AUSTRALIANS GET JOBS

By Neville D'Cruz

MELBOURNE, Feb 25 (Bernama) -- Islamic schools in Australia may be
compounding the difficulties Muslim Australian-face in getting jobs, the Sydney
Daily Telegraph said, quoting Professor Riaz Hassan, from the Flinders
University in Adelaide.

When families send their children to Islamic schools they may be excluding
them from the usual job networks found among public school and other private
school communities, the newspaper said.

Several Islamic schools in Australia have students from Malaysia.

As unemployment is twice the rate for 19 to 24-year-old Muslim Australians
compared with non-Muslim Australians, this makes it less likely they will find a
job, according to Professor Hassan.

And the more marginalised young Muslim Australians become, the professor
argues, the more likely they are to be vulnerable to radical religious views or
otherwise reject mainstream Australian aspirations.

Professor Hassan raised his concerns when the Daily Telegraph education
writer Maralyn Parker recently interviewed him about a paper he presented at
last year's National Centre of Excellence for Islamic Studies Australia
conference on the 2006 census data.

When he crunched the numbers from the census he came up with some unexpected
figures, Parker said.

Muslim Australians are more likely to be university educated than non-Muslim
Australians. Twenty one per cent of Muslim Australians have degrees compared
with 15 per cent of non-Muslim Australians -- a statistic which challenges the
stereotypical view of Muslim Australians.

But the bad news is that higher achievement in education does not translate
into jobs, Parker said.

In the 19 to 24-year-old bracket the unemployment rate of Muslim Australians
is 18 per cent, compared with 9 per cent of non-Muslims.


And it just gets worse from there. The older Muslim Australians become the
more likely they are to be unemployed than non-Muslims. By age 65 it is four
times more likely.

In all other socio-economic comparisons, Muslim Australians fare badly. They
are less likely to own their own homes and more likely to live in rented
premises.

The most shocking statistic is that 40 per cent of Muslim Australian
children live in poverty -- about twice the rate for non-Muslim Australian
children, Parker said.

"This is a huge problem. When poverty and unemployment become endemic within
a community it can lead to complete alienation from a society. We have seen the
results of such alienation in riots in France and in Britain," the report says.

In the 2006 census there were 340,391 Muslims in Australia. About 38 per
cent were born in Australia, followed by Lebanon (9 per cent), Turkey (7 per
cent) and Afghanistan (5 per cent). Only 1.7 per cent of the overall Australian
population are Muslim, but a staggering 40 per cent of Muslim Australians are
under the age of 20, compared with about 27 per cent of the non-Muslim
population.

Parker said the first two Islamic schools in Australia were established in
1983. Today there are 30 Islamic schools across the nation, 13 in NSW, with
controversial plans to build more. Islamic schools had proliferated along with
other faith-based schools under the Howard government's generous funding
arrangements.

So far the Rudd Government has not tightened regulations about establishing
new schools and has not indicated it has plans to do so.

However, Professor Hassan's concerns make it even more imperative for Muslim
parents to consider carefully their choice of school, and for governments to
examine future plans for new schools.

-- BERNAMA