Hazara Nation

ABOUT 200 Camden residents cheered wildly as their council formally decided to reject an application for an Islamic school in their area last night.

Dressed in a hat decorated with Australian flags and a long yellow dress, a resident, Kate McCulloch, emerged from the meeting declaring a victory for "decency" - and insisted Muslims were incompatible with the local community.

"The ones that come here oppress our society, they take our welfare and they don't want to accept our way of life," she said.

But the Mayor, Chris Patterson, was at pains to stress that the refusal of the application had nothing to do with the seething religious tensions that have underpinned much of the debate.

Police blocked off the street outside the hall last night and about a dozen security staff kept guard inside the meeting. But no supporters of the Islamic school turned up and the crowd inside was unanimous in its opposition.

A council report recommended that the application be refused after more than 3000 submissions had been received from the public. The vast majority opposed the development. "Racist is just a word," Ms McCulloch said. "I have many English, Irish, Greek and Italian friends. I even have a Turkish friend who opposes this."

Cr Patterson pointed to a report from council officers showing the proposed development was flawed on environmental and planning grounds. These included inadequate public transport to the site, in Burragorang Road at Cawdor, and fears that it might be contaminated by hazardous materials. Cr Patterson insisted the ruling was "on planning grounds alone". The council criticised the proposed developers, the Quranic Society Dar Tahfez El-Quran, for not responding to questions concerning the impact on the local environment. The society's spokesman, Jeremy Bingham, was not at the meeting and was unavailable for comment.

If the council had no cultural concerns, residents did. One, Simon McCarthy, said: "I've been rolled before and we came out here for the quiet life. The fact is that Camden has been a strongly white community for a long time and the people here are scared. I'm not a racist person - that's just a statement of fact."

Addressing the meeting, the Camden Macarthur Resident Group's spokesman, Andrew Wannet, said there had been "name-calling and abuse for anyone who opposed this development, even likening us to Nazis". Opposing residents' wishes were Muslims, the Greens and the "politically correct".

"They should apologise to the people of Camden for bringing the area's good name into disrepute."

Laurie Armstrong said he did not oppose a school, but it was the wrong site. The road was too small and "a couple of hundred cars" every day would "be an absolute nightmare", he said.

Leichhardt Council, meanwhile, met last night to discuss the closure of a photographic exhibition about Palestinian refugees at the council library this month. A local pro-Palestinian group, Friends of Hebron, had condemned the decision to shut their exhibition as "an act of censorship" after a visit from counter-terrorism police, while the Jewish group Inner West Chavurah wanted to know why it was not invited to stage its own exhibition.

The council voted that all future events for the two groups would be vetted by a subcommittee of councillors and representatives from both organisations.

Cr Jamie Parker censured police for visiting the display. "That has been the most divisive thing about all of this. The police really need to think about the way they interact with the community."