Australian court rejects racial discrimination appeal by Pauline Hanson
An Australian court has unanimously rejected an appeal by right-wing leader Pauline Hanson to overturn a ruling that she racially discriminated against a Muslim senator
An Australian court has unanimously rejected an appeal by right-wing leader Pauline Hanson to overturn a ruling that she racially discriminated against a Muslim senator. In 2024, Hanson was found to have violated racial discrimination laws after she told Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi to “pack your bags and p*** off back to Pakistan”. The leader of the anti-migrant One Nation party had made the comment in a social media post two years earlier, on the day Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II died, while responding to Faruqi’s remarks that she could not “mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples”.
In their ruling on Monday, the three-judge panel of the Full Federal Court of Australia said that “none of the grounds” of appeal had been established, adding that Hanson’s comment was unlawful and unprotected by free speech defences. “Today, justice has prevailed,” Faruqi told reporters outside court in Sydney. “Today’s win is for every single person out there who has been told to go back to where you came from.” Hanson said she and her legal team would review the decision and intended to lodge an appeal with Australia’s final court of appeal, the High Court. “Public discussion in Australia has become almost totally silenced by laws and rules which prevent ordinary people expressing their personal views in case some small part of our society takes some sort of offence or feels hurt or ‘distressed’.
This has never been, nor ever should be, the Australian way,” Hanson posted on X. The Full Federal Court said it agreed with the 2024 judgement, which “correctly characterised” Hanson’s post as containing an anti-Muslim and Islamophobic message and “being a variant of the historically racist, nativist and anti-immigrant slogan ‘go back to where you came from’.” The law was also constitutionally valid and Hanson did not establish a defence allowing for fair comment on a matter of public interest, it said. “We have 434 paragraphs of dismissing Pauline Hanson’s appeal, of confirming that indeed Pauline Hanson behaved in racism, Islamophobia, and hate,” Faruqi said.
“Hate speech is not free speech, and the Federal Court has reaffirmed that today.” Founded in 1997, One Nation was long seen as a fringe party but Hanson’s hard line on immigration has attracted more support in recent polls. Hanson has advocated for an end to multiculturalism in Australia, saying the country should exist as a “monocultural” society.
The BriefWire