//According to the principal who was questioned later, it was a month of mourning for some students who, in that month, could not attend parties, listen to music, or "paint their nails". Avoiding singing the anthem of your country was not mentioned, but there you go!//

I think most people would say that singing the anthem - presumably to musical accompaniment - counts as listening to music. Personally, I would say it's a bit of a stretch to call our anthem 'music' - especially the way some performers (usually at football matches) mutilate it. Which is why this should be our anthem instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xiEycVMKoJo

Genius.

Although we really ought to change the lines 'For those who've come across the seas/We've boundless plains to share' to something more appropriate: 'For those who've come across the seas/We've indefinite detention to share'.

Why Cannot Kids be treated Like Kids? ttbn...

Because parents always seem to insist on treating their kids as their property.

But in this instance I'm more encouraged that the kids are in a state school and not cloistered in a private religious school.

I don't know why the school didn't opt for reciting the national anthem which would have been inclusive of the tone-deaf and only discriminated against the stutterers.

Thanks for the laugh with, "Seventh Day Adventists were exempted, and they stood against the wall looking hunted and miserable."

Firearm ownership will do that sort of thing!

Admission: like some other Australians (more than a few, I suspect) I do not know the words to the current National Anthem. I do not sing - ever; it's too embarrassing as I sound like a chook being throttled. I can just about remember God Save The Queen, but I don't remember ever singing it. I can hum, I can move my lips to appear to be singing. I'm sure others do something when of the kind when necessary. But, I do stand and show the respect I believe my country and culture is due, no matter how wacky I think the song is, or how strong my horror of singing. If you go to a foreign country where you don't even know the language, you stand and show your respect for the people and their country.

But, in Leftstralia, kids with brown skins, supposedly Australian, are excused, or denied, the chance to show respect and loyalty to their own country.

I don't know what I dislike most: Islam or the Australian activist left. I don't dislike Muslim
kids, or any other kids; kids are going to be running this country one day, and they are not being shown how to do it. Embarrassing kids, as this school certainly did, and will continue to do, is really the worst offence of the lot; and the offensive behaviour here is all down, not to Muslims or Islam, but to a stupid Australian school principal

Wm Trevor,

You weren't mean to get a laugh. If you laugh at the humiliation of children, I hope that you don't have any kids of your own. Your gun comment is absurd.

As for for private schools, my wife used to teach at a Catholic college in a low socio economic area, which abounded with Muslims. And, yes, many of those Muslim kids were sent to the Catholic school by their parents who, like the non-Muslim parents of other kids, preferred to find the fees to get their kids a decent education rather them send them to the blackboard jungles of the free, state schools in the area.

Gone are the days of nuns teaching. The best teachers are sought, irrespective of whether they are Catholics, Protestants., Taoists, Bhuddist or athiests or Muslims.

My wife, a non-Catholic, and all the other teachers and students, were merely expected to attend 'morning prayers' for a few minutes, at which time they could prayer, go blank, worry about whether or not they'd turned off the iron and so on. Catholism, relgion was NOT FORCED ON ANYONE.

And, yes, the Muslim students did eveything the others did. There were no complaints, no incidents, and no PC BS

I recall: Attending Catholic School in the 1960's, going to 'Confession' once a month on Friday mornings aged about 12. Reeling off the usual spiel to the old Irish priest. "Bless me father for I have sinned..."
Giving him my trumped up innocuous list of venial's, not that he was listening or interested. Then came the "juicy" part when the old B would say "any impure thoughts, or acts?" Hummm, after 'Confession' you always asked the kid next to you "did the old B ask you if you were jerking yourself?" "sure did" would come the reply, did you say "yeah", "nah", "me too". The Catholic Church passes that kind of behavior off as just being "part of the times" a poor excuse indeed.
Oh! What a wonderful church the Catholic Church was, and still is!

Only recently, an untrained Catholic Brother attached to a Catholic HS in Sydney was quietly removed following parental complaints that he was having inappropriate and unauthorized, private discussions, one on one, about sex with year 7 and 8 boys. that was in 2014, not 1960.