Controversial comments calling for a halt to Muslim migration to Australia are just the "tip of the iceberg" and will become more common unless they are denounced by the government, according to leading academics.
On the Nine Network's Today show on Monday morning, Sonia Kruger - who hosts reality show The Voice and mid-morning program Today Extra - said she would like to see the immigration of Muslims to Australia "stopped now".
"Personally I think [columnist] Andrew Bolt has a point here that there is a correlation between the number of Muslims in a country and the number of terrorist attacks," Ms Kruger said. 
"I would like to see it [the immigration of Muslims] stopped now for Australia because I would like to feel safe as all of our citizens do when they go out to celebrate Australia Day and I'd like to see freedom of speech."
The comments were condemned on social media, causing Ms Kruger to post on Twitter: "[A]s a mother I believe it's vital in a democratic society to be able to discuss these issues without automatically being labelled racist".
Dr Andrew Jakubowicz, a professor of sociology at the University of Technology Sydney, said such comments have been made for several years by politicians including Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump, but they are still enormously harmful for members of the Muslim community.
"The fact that it [banning Muslims from migrating] will be almost impossible to do is neither here or there apparently," he said. "The fact that it actually carries an enormous pain load for the 99 per cent of Australian Muslims who have no truck at all with jihadist extremism seems to be of no interest at all to the people who promote these sort of perspectives.
"There's a certain bizarre irony in these sort of calls, because of course the groups that benefit most from these sorts of calls are the extremist organisations that are preying on the Muslim community. They're the groups that want people like Kruger, and [Andrew] Bolt and [Pauline] Hanson just to keep on going the way they are. The more outrageous the anti-Muslim rhetoric becomes, the happier people like ISIS become."
Dr Jakubowicz, who has previously done studies which examined the attitudes of young Muslims in western Sydney, said public debate on Islam had been "on for young and old" since Attorney-General George Brandis' asserted that people have "a right to be a bigots", and "bigoted" views would be expressed repeatedly.
"My view is that we're going to see more of this. We're going to see this particular theme opening up again and again and again," Dr Jakubowicz said.
"It's going to be a very uncomfortable time to be an honest Australian Muslim, because we're not seeing today in all this rubbish that's being produced around Sonia, we're not seeing any Federal Government ministers standing up and saying 'this is absolutely ridiculous'.
"In a sense, this has just been let run, and a fairly vulnerable group of people basically been abandoned to this sort of hysteria. It's not a good look and I think we're in line for some difficult times ahead."
Dr Vincent O'Donnell, an honorary research associate in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, said morning television is increasingly setting the day's conversational agenda along with newspapers and that carried with it the responsibility of balancing pessimism and optimism in a time when media may give the "false apprehension that the world is worse now than ever".
"Things like social media have encouraged people to be more upfront with their opinions, partly because they can do so anonymously or pseudonymously, but that has in turn signalled on a wide front the fact that we're a community with a much greater diversity of opinion," Dr O'Donnell said.
"There's some pretty angry people out there and I think Sonia Kruger is just the tip of the iceberg in that respect."
with Michaela Whitbourn