Fear of the Invisible Minaret.

There is a peculiar geometry to contemporary Australian fear. It is, on the whole, inversely proportional to proximity. The further you live from a mosque, it turns out, the more urgently you feel that Islam is dismantling the nation, one halal certified meat pie at a time. Up here on the Blackall Range, where the Muslim population is negligible enough to be invisible in the census, the topic nevertheless surfaces in fence-line conversations, at the bowls club, and with some regularity on social media: they're taking over, sharia law is coming, what happened in Gaza was deserved, the Iran conflict was overdue. These are strong views, held with confidence, about a community most speakers have never meaningfully encountered.

One Nation's recent South Australian result, 22 percent statewide, 39 percent in some rural seats, confirms the pattern at a political scale. The party's strongest results came in areas where Muslim populations are essentially non-existent. This is not a coincidence. It is the signature of what social scientists call moral panic: a perceived threat that is national in rhetoric and local in consequence, sustained not by direct experience but by a curated flow of alarming images and confident interpretation from politicians and media figures who profit from the alarm.

The psychologist Gordon Allport spent much of the 1950s trying to understand the conditions under which prejudice diminishes. His contact hypothesis, developed in the wake of the second world war and substantially confirmed by decades of subsequent research, holds that meaningful contact between groups, under conditions of rough equality, tends to reduce the dehumanising generalisations that drive intergroup hostility. Not always, and the conditions matter. But the basic finding is robust: that familiarity is a corrective and stereotypes survive best in a vacuum.

Which is precisely the situation on the Sunshine Coast hinterland. There is no vacuum of anger or grievance, those are real, and they are attached to real things: the cost of living, the state of rural infrastructure, the sense that decisions made in Brisbane and Canberra are made by people who have not been here and do not intend to come. But there is a vacuum of the corrective experience. Nobody's stereotype of the dangerous, unassimilable Muslim has been tested against the reality of a Muslim neighbour who is worried about his rates notice and whether the school bus still runs on Fridays. The composite villain assembled by talkback radio and the social media algorithm has the field entirely to itself.

Familiarity is a corrective. Stereotypes survive best in a vacuum, and the Sunshine Coast hinterland provides an almost perfect one. This matters because it explains something that otherwise looks paradoxical: why the rhetoric is often most intense precisely where the contact is lowest. It is not that high-Muslim-population areas are calm and rural areas are agitated by genuine local friction. It is the opposite. The friction in diverse urban areas is real, ordinary, and largely self-correcting. The fear in homogeneous rural areas is abstract, synthetic, and has no local reality to push back against it.

None of this means the underlying grievances are manufactured. The Sunshine Coast hinterland, like most of regional Queensland, is dealing with genuine pressures: housing costs that have accelerated faster than incomes, services that are thinning, energy bills that have made some farming operations marginal, and a generalised sense that the institutions that are supposed to represent ordinary people have largely stopped trying. Those are legitimate complaints, and they deserve a serious political response.

What is manufactured, or more precisely, what is strategically supplied, is the explanation. The connection between those real economic pressures and the cultural threat posed by Muslim immigration is not something most people arrived at independently. It was provided. Pauline Hanson has been providing it, in various forms, since 1996. The argument that Islam is not a religion but a political ideology seeking cultural domination, a claim that originates in American far-right literature and has been circulating in Australian political discourse ever since, lands easily in communities that have no local experience to contradict it and plenty of economic frustration to attach it to.

The scapegoat mechanism does not require the scapegoat to be present. It requires only that the explanation be emotionally coherent and politically available. On the Blackall Range, as in rural South Australia, it is both.

This publication does not take a particularly progressive line on these questions. There are legitimate debates about the pace of immigration, about integration policy, about the proper relationship between religious practice and civil law. Reasonable people hold different views, and those debates are worth having seriously. A small-c conservative instinct, that social cohesion matters, that institutions should be robust, that change should be legible and managed, is not inherently hostile to Muslim Australians, and most of the time it isn't.

What is harder to defend, from any coherent political position, is fear as a substitute for thought. The conversations happening on the Range about sharia law and Gaza and the Iran conflict are not, for the most part, grounded in knowledge of those situations. They are grounded in a feeling, of threat, of displacement, of elites who have stopped listening, that has been successfully redirected onto a convenient outgroup. That is worth noticing, and worth saying out loud, regardless of where you sit on the political spectrum.

The geese are honking. The question worth asking is what, exactly, they think they can see.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.