Australian senator told she broke race law in Twitter comment

An Australian judge has ruled that anti-immigration party leader Senator Pauline Hanson breached racial discrimination laws by crudely telling Pakistan-born Senator Mehreen Faruqi to return to her homeland.

Ms Faruqi sued Ms Hanson in the Federal Court over a 2022 exchange on the social media platform X, then called Twitter, under a provision of the Racial Discrimination Act that bans public actions and statements that offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate people because of their race, colour or national or ethnic origin.

Following the news that Queen Elizabeth II had died, Ms Faruqi, deputy leader of the Australian Greens party, posted: “I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonized peoples.”

The 70-year-old leader of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party replied that Ms Faruqi had immigrated to take “advantage” of Australia, and told the Lahore-born Muslim to return to Pakistan, using an expletive.

She once wore a burqa in the Senate as part of a campaign to have Islamic face coverings banned.

Ms 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 behaviour.

The post was racist, nativist and anti-Muslim, he said.

“It is a strong form of racism,” he said.

The judge ordered Ms Hanson to delete the offensive post and to pay MS Faruqi’s legal costs. He said he expected those costs would “amount to a fairly substantial sum.”

Ms 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”.

“Today is a good day for people of colour, 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, Ms Hanson said in a statement.

Her lawyers argued that her post was exempt from the law because of constitutionally implied freedom of political communication.

Ms Hanson said she considered the queen’s death a matter of public interest and that Ms Faruqi’s views on the death were also a matter of public interest.

The judge found Ms Hanson’s tweet did not respond to any point made in Faruqi’s tweet.

“Senator Hanson’s tweet was merely an angry ad hominem attack devoid of discernible content (or comment) in response to what Sen. Faruqi had said,” he wrote in his decision.

He described Ms Hanson’s testimony as “generally unreliable,” rejecting her claim that she did not know Ms Faruqi’s religion when she posted.

Ms 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 minor party’s policy.

She conceded she had once said in a media interview she would not sell her house to a Muslim, but would not say whether she had meant what she had said.