Religion, Crime and the Evidence

1. What One Nation has claimed about Muslims and crime

In her first speech to the Senate on 14 September 2016, Senator Pauline Hanson said:

"Now we are in danger of being swamped by Muslims, who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own."

Senator Pauline Hanson, First Speech, Senate Hansard, 14 September 2016[1]

In the same speech she made four specific empirical assertions:

• Muslims are "imprisoned at almost three times the average rate"
• Muslim unemployment and welfare dependency run at "two to three times greater than the national average"
• "Muslims are prominent in organised crime, with associated violence and drug dealing"
• "Anti-social behaviour is rampant, fuelled by hyper-masculine and misogynist culture"

Source: Senate Hansard, First Speech, 14 September 2016

These are not opinions. They are factual claims about measurable quantities, and they can be checked. That is what this paper does. We are concerned here only with the crime-related assertions. We take them seriously enough to test them properly, which means reporting what we found even where it is inconvenient.

2. Australia records the age, sex and Indigenous status of offenders but never their religion

The first question is not whether the claim is true but whether anyone has ever measured it. The answer is no.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics runs the national offender collection, Recorded Crime – Offenders. Its most recent release covers 2024–25 and counts 344,620 people proceeded against by police, an offender rate of 1,419.8 per 100,000 people aged 10 and over.[2] The published methodology sets out precisely which characteristics are recorded: age, sex, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander status, alongside principal offence, method of proceeding, and location.[3] Religion is not collected. Neither is ethnicity, beyond Indigenous identification, nor country of birth.

Sources: ABS Recorded Crime – Offenders, 2024–25 · ABS Recorded Crime – Offenders methodology

Nor do the prisons record it. We obtained and searched the full text of the NSW Inmate Census 2024, published by Corrective Services NSW in May 2025, which enumerates all 12,946 people in full-time custody in New South Wales at midnight on 30 June 2024.[4] It reports sex, age, birthplace, Aboriginal status, legal status and management category. It contains no religion field. Because the most widely cited figure for Muslim over-representation is attributed to the 2013 edition of that census, we retrieved and searched that document as well.[5] It contains no religion table either. The only occurrence of the word "religious" in either publication is inside an offence code, for inciting hatred on racial or religious grounds.

Sources: NSW Inmate Census 2024 (PDF) · NSW Inmate Census 2013 (PDF)

3. The 9.3% Muslim prisoner figure traces back to a study that never showed its source

One figure does circulate: that 9.3% of the NSW prison population is Muslim. Honesty requires us to deal with it rather than ignore it, so we followed it back to its origin. It does not have one.

1. The figure in circulation "9.3% of the NSW prison population is Muslim."
2. Appears in A peer-reviewed article in the Australian Journal of Islamic Studies, 2017.[6]
3. Which attributes it to A 2015 research report published by the University of South Australia.[7]
4. Which attributes it to A NSW Corrective Services inmate census for 2013.
5. Dead end We retrieved that census. It contains no religion table at all.[5]

This is the sentence in which the figure appears:

Why the 2013 NSW prison census cannot support the 9.3% figure

The 2013 NSW Inmate Census records sex, age, birthplace, Aboriginal status, offence and sentence details. It does not ask, record or publish religion. We searched its full text, and the word "religious" appears exactly once, inside an offence code for inciting religious hatred. A figure describing the religion of prisoners cannot be drawn from a document that never recorded religion.

Whoever first produced the 9.3% therefore either worked from an internal extract that was never published, or attributed it to the wrong document. We cannot tell which, and neither can anyone else. That is the whole problem: the number cannot be checked by any reader. The same chain reports a Corrections Victoria figure of 8% for April 2015, which has the same difficulty.

Source: NSW Inmate Census 2013 (PDF) · Full index of NSW Inmate Census editions

4. Overseas-born people are half as common in prison as they are in the population

Before presenting this evidence we must be exact about what it can and cannot establish, because this is the point at which arguments of this kind usually overreach.

Australian justice agencies do publish birthplace. The NSW Inmate Census reports a three-way split between Australia, overseas and unknown, and separately breaks the overseas-born down by world region and lists the most common individual countries.[4] Victoria publishes alleged offender counts by country of birth.[9] None of it identifies religion, and the gap is wider than it first appears:

Sources: NSW Inmate Census 2024 (PDF) · Crime Statistics Agency Victoria, country of birth in recorded crime statistics

• Figure 1 below compares only "born in Australia" against "born overseas." A split of that kind plainly cannot distinguish a Muslim from anyone else. It is a statement about migrants.
• The finer breakdowns cannot do it either, because a country is not a religion. Only 45.1% of Australians born in Lebanon are Muslim.[19] Australians of Iraqi ancestry are 39.4% Catholic and 25.4% Muslim, because Australia's Iraqi intake came largely as refugees from persecuted Christian minorities, among them Assyrians, Chaldeans and Mandaeans.[20] A Middle Eastern birthplace in Australia is, on the numbers, at least as likely to indicate a Christian as a Muslim.
• And a large part of the Muslim community is not migrant at all. At the 2006 Census, the most recent birthplace breakdown of Australian Muslims we could locate, 58% were born overseas, meaning roughly four in ten were born here.[21] Given the community's median age of 27, that share has almost certainly grown. Australian-born Muslims are invisible to any birthplace analysis whatsoever.

Sources: 2021 Census, religion of Australia’s Lebanon-born population · 2021 Census, religion of Australians of Iraqi ancestry · Cultural Atlas (SBS), Iraqis in Australia · 2006 Census, birthplace of Australian Muslims

We therefore make no attempt to estimate a Muslim offending rate from birthplace data, and readers should treat with suspicion anyone who does, in either direction. What follows is evidence about migrants, not about Muslims. We present it because Senator Hanson's argument explicitly ties Muslims to immigration, and because it is the only relevant published evidence that exists.

The NSW Inmate Census 2024 records that 75.7% of prisoners were born in Australia, 15.4% were born overseas, and 8.9% have an unknown birthplace.[4] The 2021 Census records that 29.3% of the NSW population was born overseas, against 27.7% nationally.[8]

Sources: NSW Inmate Census 2024 (PDF) · ABS Snapshot of New South Wales, 2021 Census

The gap is wide enough to survive the missing data. Overseas-born residents are roughly twice as prevalent in the NSW population as in its prisons. The over-represented group in New South Wales prisons is the Australian-born.

Victorian offender data shows the same pattern with one honest exception

Victoria is the one Australian jurisdiction that publishes alleged offender counts by country of birth, drawn from a field Victoria Police may record.[9] Analysis of that data against Census denominators for April 2015 to March 2018 found that Australian-born residents were 64.90% of the population and 72.57% of alleged offenders, a representation ratio of 1.1.[10] Again, the Australian-born are over-represented.

Sources: Crime Statistics Agency Victoria, country of birth in recorded crime statistics · Victorian crime statistics analysis (CSA Victoria and ABS 2016 Census)

Two birthplace groups in that analysis exceeded the Australian-born ratio: New Zealand-born residents at 1.4, and Sudan and South Sudan-born residents at 7.0. We report this because omitting it would be exactly the selective quotation this paper criticises. Why those three groups and no others were examined, and what bears on reading the Sudan figure, are set out with Figure 2 below. The Crime Statistics Agency has itself issued a correction notice about media misuse of its country-of-birth data.[11]

Source: Crime Statistics Agency Victoria, correction notice on misreported country-of-birth data

The broader Australian research literature points the same way. The Australian Institute of Criminology's review of migration and crime concluded that migrants have lower rates of offending than the Australian-born population, with first-generation Australians in between, while noting higher involvement among migrants from a handful of specific origins including New Zealand, Lebanon, Vietnam and Turkey.[12] That literature is dated and should be treated as indicative rather than current.

Source: AIC, Migration, Ethnicity and Crime in Australian Society (PDF)

5. Sexual offending is overwhelmingly one man acting alone against someone the victim already knows

The allegation that Muslim men are responsible for a disproportionate share of rape and sexual assault in Australia can be addressed without any religion data at all, because the published offender profile is incompatible with the picture the claim depends on.

The Australian Sexual Offence Statistics collection for 2022–23 found that 97% of sexual offences involved a single alleged offender, and that 65% of offenders were known to the victim.[13]

Source: AIHW, Sexual violence (ASOS 2022–23; ABS Personal Safety Survey 2021–22)

The ABS Personal Safety Survey for 2021–22 shows the same pattern across the population. Among women aged 18 and over, 20%, or about 2.0 million women, had experienced sexual violence by a man who was known to them, against 6.1%, or about 605,000, by a stranger.[13] Sexual violence by someone the victim knows is more than three times as common as sexual violence by a stranger.

Source: AIHW, Sexual violence (ASOS 2022–23; ABS Personal Safety Survey 2021–22)

Sexual violence in Australia is overwhelmingly committed by one man, acting alone, against a woman who already knows him, frequently in her own home. The archetype invoked in political rhetoric, a group of culturally foreign strangers, describes a small minority of a crime whose dominant form is domestic. Presenting sexual violence as an immigration or religion problem misdirects attention away from where the overwhelming majority of it actually occurs.

6. The claim that prison figures prove Muslim criminality fails because they measure punishment served, not crime committed

Suppose a reliable Muslim prison proportion were produced and showed over-representation. It still would not establish what the claim asserts. Between an offence and a prison cell sits a long series of decisions: where police patrol, who is stopped, who is arrested rather than cautioned, who is charged, who is refused bail, who can afford competent representation, what sentence is imposed and who is granted parole. Disparity entering at any one of them is carried through to the end. A prison roll measures the output of that whole sequence, not the behaviour of a population.

The statistic most often quoted in this debate comes from the United Kingdom, the only comparable country that records the religion of the people in its prisons. In September 2023, Muslims were 18% of the England and Wales prison population, against about 6.5% of the general population.[14]

Source: HMPPS Offender Equalities Report 2023/24, UK Ministry of Justice

That figure is accurately recorded and accurately published. It is also, as it is almost always used, misread, and the misreading is built into the phrase itself. A "prison population" is not a count of people who offended. It is a snapshot of who is occupying a cell on one particular night, and that quantity is the product of two entirely separate things: how many people were sent to prison, and how long each one was sentenced to stay. Consider two groups who commit identical crimes at identical rates and differ only in the sentences they receive:

Group B is twice as prevalent in the prison population as Group A while offending at exactly the same rate. Sentence length alone produced the entire disparity. The prison share cannot distinguish that case from one in which Group B genuinely offends twice as often, because both produce an identical number.

There is a second problem underneath the first. Religion is recorded only at the end of the process. English prisons ask it on reception, for chaplaincy and dietary purposes; the police, the courts and the Crown Prosecution Service do not record it at any earlier stage. Religion is therefore captured at the end of the sequence and at none of the decisions along it. So not only does the standing count measure the wrong thing, there is no data anywhere against which to correct it, and no way to test whether the 18% reflects more offending, heavier policing and charging, or longer sentences.

The Lammy Review, an independent review commissioned by the UK Government, examined this exact question. It concluded that because religion is not recorded before prison, there is no way to tell which of three quite different explanations produces the disparity:[15]

• Police and prosecutors bringing charges against Muslims more often than others
• Courts handing down heavier sentences once people reach them
• Muslims committing further offences at a higher rate

Source: The Lammy Review, UK Government, 2017

The first two are failures of the system. Only the third is about the behaviour of the people in it, and nothing in the data distinguishes them. The review did, separately, find disproportionality in the justice system's own decision-making. The most-quoted statistic in this debate is therefore a measurement of the system's output, taken while the system itself goes unmeasured, and the official body that examined it declined to attribute the disparity to offending.

Source: The Lammy Review, UK Government, 2017

7. Five findings on the claims made about Muslims and crime

This review reached five findings.

1. No Australian agency records the religion of offenders or prisoners. We searched the ABS national offender collection and both the 2013 and 2024 editions of the NSW Inmate Census. None contains a religion variable. The claim that Muslims are imprisoned at almost three times the average rate has no published Australian source. Sources: ABS Recorded Crime – Offenders methodology · NSW Inmate Census 2024 (PDF) · NSW Inmate Census 2013 (PDF)
2. The most-quoted supporting figure cannot be verified. The 9.3% traces back through two publications to a 2013 NSW prison census that contains no religion table, so it cannot be checked against any public document. Sources: Australian Journal of Islamic Studies (2017) · Hasan, University of South Australia (2015)
3. On the marker Australia does publish, the evidence runs the other way. Overseas-born people are 29.3% of the NSW population but 15.4% of its prisoners. In Victoria, the Australian-born are over-represented among alleged offenders. Sources: NSW Inmate Census 2024 (PDF) · ABS Snapshot of New South Wales, 2021 · Victorian crime statistics analysis
4. The claim about sexual violence is contradicted by the national data. Sexual offending in Australia is overwhelmingly solitary, domestic and committed by someone the victim already knows: 97% of offences involve a single alleged offender, and 65% involve a person known to the victim. Source: AIHW, Sexual violence (ASOS 2022–23; ABS Personal Safety Survey 2021–22)
5. The burden of proof has not been met. Senator Hanson has produced no source for the assertion that Muslims are "prominent in organised crime." Fifteen of the claims in the speech containing it were assessed as false by independent fact-checkers at the time.[16] Sources: Senate Hansard, First Speech, 14 September 2016 · SBS fact check

We do not argue that Muslim Australians commit no crime, and we would not defend any who do. We argue something narrower and firmer: that a serious allegation has been levelled at 813,392 Australians[17] without evidence, and that the evidence available does not support it. Public policy should not be built on a number nobody has.

Source: ABS, Religious affiliation in Australia, 2021 Census

8. Limitations of this review

• Country of birth is a weak proxy for religion. It excludes Australian-born Muslims, who are a large part of the community, and includes substantial non-Muslim populations from the same countries. As set out in section 4, our birthplace findings are evidence about migrants, not about Muslims.
• The NSW prison birthplace figures carry 8.9% unknown. We have stated the effect of that uncertainty explicitly rather than discarding it.
• The Victorian analysis covers April 2015 to March 2018 and reports only three birthplace groups. It is not a complete ranking.
• The Australian Institute of Criminology review cited is dated and is used only as an indication of the direction of the literature.
• We could not verify the 9.3% NSW prison figure against any published document, and our analysis does not depend on it in either direction.
• We do not assert that no over-representation exists. We assert that it has not been publicly measured in Australia, and that where measurement exists elsewhere the responsible official review declined to attribute it to offending.

The Ulama Board of Western Australia supports the collection and publication of religion data across the Australian criminal justice system, on the same basis it is collected in the United Kingdom. If a disparity exists, the community is better served by knowing its size and its causes than by leaving the field to assertion.