An Australian judge yesterday ruled that Australian Senator Pauline Hanson breached racial discrimination laws by telling Pakistan-born Australian Senator Mehreen Faruqi to return to her homeland.
Faruqi sued Hanson in the Australian Federal Court over a 2022 exchange on X, then called Twitter, under a provision of the Australian Racial Discrimination Act that bans public actions and statements that offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate people because of their race, color or national or ethnic origin.
Following the news that Queen Elizabeth II had died, Faruqi, deputy leader of the Australian Greens party, wrote on X: “I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonized peoples.”
Photo: AP
The 70-year-old leader of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party replied that Faruqi had immigrated to take “advantage” of Australia, and told the Lahore-born Muslim to return to Pakistan, using an expletive.
In her first speech to the Australian Parliament in 1996, Hanson warned that the nation was “in danger of being swamped by Asians” because of the nation’s non-discriminatory immigration policy.
She once wore a burqa in the Senate as part of a campaign to have Islamic face coverings banned.
Faruqi, a 61-year-old qualified engineer, moved to Australia with her husband in 1992 as skilled economic migrants.
Justice Angus Stewart found that Hanson had engaged in “seriously offensive” and intimidating behavior.
The post was racist, nativist and anti-Muslim, Stewart said. “It is a strong form of racism.”
Stewart ordered Hanson to delete the offensive post and to pay Faruqi’s legal costs.
Stewart expected that those costs would “amount to a fairly substantial sum.”
Faruqi welcomed the ruling as a vindication for “every single person who has been told to go back to where they came from.”
“And believe me, there are too many of us who have been subjected to this ultimate racist slur, far too many times in this country,” she said. “Today’s ruling tells us that telling someone to go back to where they came from is a strong form of racism.”
“Today is a good day for people of color, for Muslims and all of us who have been working so hard to build an anti-racist society,” she said.
Hanson said she was “deeply disappointed” by the ruling and would appeal.
The verdict demonstrated an “inappropriately broad application” of the section of the Racial Discrimination Act that she had breached, particularly in how that section impinged upon freedom of political expression, Hanson said in a statement.
Hanson’s lawyers argued that that her post was exempt from the law because of constitutionally implied freedom of political communication.
Hanson said she considered the queen’s death a matter of public interest and that Faruqi’s views on the death were also a matter of public interest.
Stewart found that Hanson’s post did not respond to any point made in Faruqi’s comments.
“Sen. Hanson’s tweet was merely an angry ad hominem attack devoid of discernible content (or comment) in response to what Sen. Faruqi had said,” Stewart wrote in his decision.
Stewart described Hanson’s testimony as “generally unreliable,” rejecting her claim that she did not know Faruqi’s religion when she posted.
Hanson told the court she had called for a ban on Muslim immigration in the past, but she described that as her personal opinion rather than her party’s policy.
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