Sanx
16th October 2007, 10:53
No - it's not one of 'those' religious threads.
My other half's just received a letter from The Honourable (I use this both correctly and with great irony) Phil Goff wishing her and her family best wishes for the Feast of Eid; the celebration that occurs at the end of Ramaddan. The letter was addressed to her personally and contained other references to the importance (yadda yadda) of the Mt Roskill Muslim Community, and so on.
Which begged the interesting question: how the hell did Phil Goff know she's a Muslim? She is, as it happens. Maybe not a very good one considering she's living with me before marriage and I met her in a vodka bar, but that's not relevant. She's not a member of any Mosque, doesn't associate with any Muslim groups and other than contact with her family and a few friends, she doesn't really have anything do with any Iranian (her country of origin) groups either.
In fact, the only time she's ever made her religious views public is when she filled in the last census form. But those are meant to be confidential.
So, I called Phil Goof's (damn typos) office to find out how they knew. They told me that the Office of Ethnic Affairs pattern-matches surnames of registered voters. They basically sent out letters to anyone with a Muslim-sounding name. Except my partner's name is not a Muslim name - it's actually Armenian in origin. Pattern-matching is not a very accurate way of ascertaining someone's religion either. Tariq Aziz, former Deputy President of Iraq under Hussain, was actually Christian. Closer to home, the surname 'Hellerby' (as in Hellerby meats) is actually an anglicised version of Hallabi, which in turn was an arab-icised version of Halevi - a Jewish Lebanese name.
So, digging a bit further I called the Office of Ethnic Affairs to find out how they got this information and indeed, whether it was actually true. They denied they keep lists of Muslims or supply other governmental bodies with lists of Muslim-sounding names. So someone's lying.
All in all - it's a little bit worrying. Why would the government be keeping lists of people's religions? Surely, that kinda stuff is meant to be private unless the individual concerned wishes to publicise it.
My other half's just received a letter from The Honourable (I use this both correctly and with great irony) Phil Goff wishing her and her family best wishes for the Feast of Eid; the celebration that occurs at the end of Ramaddan. The letter was addressed to her personally and contained other references to the importance (yadda yadda) of the Mt Roskill Muslim Community, and so on.
Which begged the interesting question: how the hell did Phil Goff know she's a Muslim? She is, as it happens. Maybe not a very good one considering she's living with me before marriage and I met her in a vodka bar, but that's not relevant. She's not a member of any Mosque, doesn't associate with any Muslim groups and other than contact with her family and a few friends, she doesn't really have anything do with any Iranian (her country of origin) groups either.
In fact, the only time she's ever made her religious views public is when she filled in the last census form. But those are meant to be confidential.
So, I called Phil Goof's (damn typos) office to find out how they knew. They told me that the Office of Ethnic Affairs pattern-matches surnames of registered voters. They basically sent out letters to anyone with a Muslim-sounding name. Except my partner's name is not a Muslim name - it's actually Armenian in origin. Pattern-matching is not a very accurate way of ascertaining someone's religion either. Tariq Aziz, former Deputy President of Iraq under Hussain, was actually Christian. Closer to home, the surname 'Hellerby' (as in Hellerby meats) is actually an anglicised version of Hallabi, which in turn was an arab-icised version of Halevi - a Jewish Lebanese name.
So, digging a bit further I called the Office of Ethnic Affairs to find out how they got this information and indeed, whether it was actually true. They denied they keep lists of Muslims or supply other governmental bodies with lists of Muslim-sounding names. So someone's lying.
All in all - it's a little bit worrying. Why would the government be keeping lists of people's religions? Surely, that kinda stuff is meant to be private unless the individual concerned wishes to publicise it.