DONALD Trump and Pauline Hanson both fail the tests of logic and history when they call for bans on Muslim immigration because of its “threat” to American/Australian or the American/Australian way of life.

In the case of both countries, freedom from religious discrimination has been among the longest-standing facets of their cultures and way of life.

At their birth, both nations were determined to rid themselves of the religious discrimination against all who were not members of the Anglican Church that bedevilled Britain.

To this day, the British monarch is not permitted to be a Catholic. It was well into the 19 th century that religious tests were held for entry to Parliament, universities and the judiciary.

Australia was determined to have none of that.

During the 1890s constitutional debates in Australia, it was a non-Anglican Unitarian and Tasmanian Attorney-General, Andrew Inglis Clark, who proposed a clause requiring freedom of religious observance.

He was supported by Edmund Barton and Henry Higgins who were concerned that any reference to “Almighty God” in the preamble to the Constitution might be misinterpreted as giving the Commonwealth the power to establish a state religion or to make laws that might discriminate against some religions.

They thought it would be a good idea to make it clear that there would be no established religion in Australia; that Australians would have freedom of religious worship; that there would be no imposition of religious worship; and that there would be no religious test for any Commonwealth office or public trust.

And thus Section 116 of the Constitution came into being.

In the ensuing 116 years, the High Court has ruled on only the first two of those four elements – mainly because no government has been silly enough to impose any requirement for religious worship or impose any religious tests.

But in Hanson’s fantasy world, if a ban or restriction were imposed on Muslim immigration, it would surely run up into constitutional strife. Residency and citizenship have sufficient elements of “public trust” that it would be struck down as an unacceptable religious test requiring that the applicant be any religion but Islamic.

In other cases, the court has unfortunately held that state aid to religious schools and chaplaincy programs do not offend the non-establishment clause; and that any number of claims for exemptions from ordinary law on religious grounds would not fly. It could have given more teeth to the separation of church (mosque) and state by did not.

In any event, Australians saw the wrong of religious preference and discrimination in Britain from the country’s earliest days. We inherited an enormous amount of political, cultural and institutional fabric from Britain, so it is significant that we specifically rejected the idea that one religion (or one branch of it) – Anglicanism – could have a privileged position and those who did not practice it would be discriminated against. They were called Nonconformists.

So, far from tolerance of Muslims being somehow a threat to the Australian way of life, it is, in fact, the very expression of one of the longest-standing elements of that way of life.

The American and Australian rejection of religious discrimination is instructive. Of course, whatever the words of the Constitution said, they did not prevent discrimination on the ground. Catholics were discriminated against until the 1970s, and Australia was the poorer for it. The important point is that societies which discriminate against religious minorities; women; the disabled; or because of sexual orientation deny themselves the talents of great segments of their population.