Meat – 10/10: tender and juicy and loads of it. Signage? Sorry, just 5/10 for the hand-written note banner 'Halal Snack Pack and drink $13' no other claims of halal certification. Around midnight I found a brightly lit and nearly empty kebab shop. On the coldest night in living memory I went searching for the HSP in Sydney Road. Melbourne shops have been a bit slow to get that right, with posters marking them down for failing to use 'brother' (or sister if you're a girl). The greeting is important – an enthusiastic, Muslim-style 'Brother, what can I get you?' scores 10/10. Vegetables are not an option with the HSP: the group has declared the usual kebab-shop salads 'haram' – forbidden, as if by Islamic law – on a snack pack while if you insist on tomato sauce you risk being declared a 'haram dingo'. One website says they were invented by a group of drunk Adelaide university students who couldn't decide whether they wanted chips or yiros and ended up with both piled on one plate. The origins of the HSP are a bit of a mystery, though one of the founders of the Facebook group, Luke Eagles, says they have been around for decades in Sydney kebab shops. The origins of the Halal Snack Pack are shrouded in mystery. Muslim and non-muslim kids alike post reviews and photos of snack packs to the Facebook page, serving up some grass-roots resistance to bigotry in Arabic-accented English. After the Brussels attacks in March, one Melbourne poster offered: 'Here we are Muslims and non-Muslims alike enjoying our HSP's, reading reviews and worrying about our assignment due dates when a bunch of dickheads go and kill innocent people around the world in the name of their barbaric ideologies …' That post got a couple of thousand likes.Īnyone anxious about the nation's supply of Vegemite and Nescafe being polluted by halal certification should get a load of the cultural boundaries that are blurred by this meaty snack. The 'snack packs' – a styrofoam box of chips topped by cheese, kebab meat and a 'holy trinity' of garlic, chilli and barbecue sauces, particular popular among high-schoolers – have become an inter-communal feast of brotherly (and sisterly) love. Meantime the Halal Snack Pack Appreciation Society, launched light-heartedly last December, now has more than 140,000 members – becoming in the process an accidental rallying point for opposition to anti-Muslim bigotry.

The senator-elect then claimed, dubiously, that 98 per cent of Australians are opposed to halal certification.

'It's not happening, not interested in halal, thank you,' whined Pauline Hanson when ALP senator Sam Dastyari invited her out for a halal snack pack during Saturday night's coverage of the federal election.

Unpacking octgn image packs