Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he proposed officials on Friday to "re-think the decision' that would require women wearing face and head coverings, including burqas, to be seated separately from the public at Parliament House, following an immediate public backlash against the measures, Reuters reported.
Parliament's presiding officers - Speaker Bronwyn Bishop of the House of Representatives and president of the Senate, Stephen Parry, announced the security measures on Thursday, under which women who chose to cover themselves or their faces, such as with the niqab, would be forced to view chambers of parliament from a glass-enclosed public gallery.
Just hours later, critics and parliament members slammed the interim ruling, accusing the government of inflaming tensions with the Muslim community following a series of security-related raids, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
"I asked the Speaker to rethink the decision," Abbott said at a press conference to announce cabinet approval for Iraqi military action. "My understanding was it was an interim decision, that it would be looked at again the light of security advice that will come in coming days and I am sure the matter will be fully resolved before the parliament comes back in a fortnight."
However, the Speaker's office claimed that no such request to overturn the ban on facial coverings had been made by Abbott. "No request has been received by the PM or his office," a spokesman for the Speaker told The Guardian at midday.
Last week, Abbott said he found the burqa "confronting" and wished people would choose not to wear it. But nonetheless, he supported the rights of all Australians to wear whatever they wished to outside of secure buildings.
The comments drew widespread condemnation from politicians across the divide, human rights commissioners and the Muslim community, including independent MP Andrew Wilkie, who called it a "religious apartheid".
Denouncing the ban, Communications minister Malcolm Turnbull said he had only witnessed one woman wearing a full facial covering in the public gallery in his 10 years in parliament, further warning that "demonizing and alienating" the Muslim community was "doing the terrorist's work".
"We don't want to have debates like this being turned into some sort of coded attack on the Muslim community," Turnbull told the Today Show.
"They want us to attack Muslims, they want us to alienate and frighten and demonize the Muslim community so that they don't feel they are part of Australia, so that they feel that their only home is with an extremist group.
"There is no point us doing the terrorists work, we have to pull together."
But others like Senator Cory Bernardi, a member of Abbott's Liberal Party, supported the ban, stating that security reasons had been his top priority in barring women from wearing head-to-toe burqa robes, according to Reuters.
Meanwhile, Senator Jacqui Lambie, a member of mining magnate Clive Palmer's Palmer United Party, has sought a ban on burqas in public places and demanded that all people practicing Islamic sharia law be expelled from the country.
