I love Australia. I’ve lived here all my life. But in the past decade a few things have had a negative impact on my enjoyment of this beautiful place. Let me list just a few.

• People being stabbed in the name of a religion.
• People being held hostage – same motivation.
• Plans laid to blow people up.
• Fortunes spent each year by governments to keep a lid on zealotry.
• ‘Experts’ telling us people who do these things are mentally unstable, marginalised or poorly educated, even when that is clearly not the case.
• Needing to be ‘alert’ but not ‘alarmed’ to potentially catastrophic threats.
• People who refuse to stand  in court.
• Special treatment and dedicated religious amenities for some at public facilities.
• Women shrouded in garments testifying to their status as mere possessions.
• Being called upon to know the difference between a burqa and a niqab, when each is equally offensive.
• Watching a publicly funded broadcaster accept and implicitly endorse arranged and consanguineous marriages.
• Being distressed by bollards sprouting in public places.
• Having to pay extra for everyday food because manufacturers are held to ransom.
• My taxes being given to a specific community to encourage participation in a sport.
• Having my bag and person searched at public events.
• ‘Honour’ killings.
• The unlawful practice of female genital mutilation.
• A welfare system that indulges the practice of polygamy.
• Witnessing the subjugation of women and a veritable Stockholm Syndrome among oppression’s defenders.
• Watching my government fete a minority community, but only one minority community.
• Taxi drivers who decline to carry guide dogs for religious reasons.
• People seeking to advance the secular authority of their religious laws, rather than accepting the law of the land.
• Being told that Islam is basically the same as Christianity when it is the diametric opposite.
• Being told by ‘experts’, especially those seeking further grants, that deradicalisation works when it obviously does not.

I don’t want to accept these things. I don’t want to accept that a small, noisy, discordant minority is changing the way I live, and changing it for the worse. And I particularly will not accept that a concern for women’s rights and being appalled by clerics who call for the death of homosexuals makes me “intolerant” or consumed by bigotry.

Oh, and one last thing: I loathe being smeared with that ridiculous confection “Islamophobia” when I suggest that, as a secular Western society, we should never, ever tolerate the intolerant.