An Australian senator was yesterday censured by his colleagues for seeking to blame the victims of last month’s mosque shootings in New Zealand and vilify Muslims.
Australian Senator Fraser Anning was the target of widespread condemnation for blaming the attacks on immigration policies. He later faced more criticism for physically striking a teenager who cracked a raw egg on his head in an incident in Melbourne that went viral.
On the Australian Parliament’s second sitting day since the March 15 attacks, in which 50 people died, government and opposition lawmakers moved the censure motion against Anning for divisive comments “seeking to attribute blame to victims of a horrific crime and to vilify people on the basis of religion, which do not reflect the opinions of the Australian Senate or the Australian people.”
“Senator Anning’s comments were ugly and divisive. They were dangerous and unacceptable from anyone, let alone a member of this place,” Australian Senate Leader Mathias Cormann told the Senate.
Anning dismissed the censure motion as an attack on free speech.
“It is also an exercise in left-wing virtue signaling of the worst kind,” he told the Senate before the vote.
He sits as an independent lawmaker after defecting from the anti-Muslim One Nation Party, whose two senators abstained from the censure vote.
Australian Senator Peter Georgiou, a One Nation member, read a speech on behalf of party leader Pauline Hanson, who was absent.
Hanson said that while Anning’s comments were “untimely and therefore deemed highly insensitive, he still maintains a right to his opinion.”
“If One Nation endorses your action to censure Senator Anning, your freedom of speech as elected members of this chamber will be removed,” she said.
The minor Greens Party later failed to win majority support for a motion for the Senate to suspend Anning.
Australian Senator Mehreen Faruqi, a Pakistan-born Greens member, produced an online petition to the Senate with more than 1.4 million signatures calling for Anning to resign, saying that he should be suspended as well as censured.
“It is terrifying that right-wing extremist groups have a found a mouthpiece in federal parliament,” Faruqi told the Senate.
Hugh Mahon, an Irish-born member of the Australian House of Representatives who criticized British policy toward his homeland, in 1920 became the only Australian legislator to be expelled from the parliament by a vote of colleagues.
Australian Senate President Scott Ryan warned that laws had been tightened in the 1980s so that suspending Anning could be challenged in the courts.
New Zealand Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters on Tuesday called Anning a “jingoistic moron.”
Anning came under criticism over tweets shortly after the massacre, including one that said: “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?”
“The real cause of the bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place,” he said in a later statement.
Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant has been charged with murder in the shootings and is due to appear in a New Zealand court tomorrow.
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