By Christine Chen
SYDNEY, July 27 (Reuters) – An Australian court on Monday rejected an appeal from right-wing leader Pauline Hanson to overturn a ruling that she racially discriminated against a Muslim senator by telling her to “piss off back to Pakistan”.
The three-judge panel of the Full Federal Court of Australia unanimously upheld a 2024 ruling that the comment, addressed to Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi on social media, 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 in a statement she was disappointed in the outcome, and that public discussion in Australia had become “almost totally silenced by laws and rules which prevent ordinary people expressing their personal views”.
“My legal team and I will now closely review the decision in the coming days, with a view to commencing an appeal in the High Court of Australia,” she added. The High Court of Australia is the country’s final court of appeal.
‘RACIST SLOGAN’
Hanson, who leads the hard-right One Nation party, made the remarks in September 2022 after Faruqi posted on Twitter, now known as X, following the death of Queen Elizabeth II.
Faruqi wrote that she could not “mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples.”
Hanson replied: “When you immigrated to Australia you took every advantage of this country… It’s clear you’re not happy, so pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan.”
Faruqi, who moved to Australia from Pakistan in 1992 and is the first Muslim woman to be a member of any Australian parliament, sued Hanson over the remark.
A judge in 2024 found it breached Australia’s laws against racial discrimination as it was reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate and intimidate Faruqi, as well as Muslim Australians and people of colour who had migrated to the country.
Hanson appealed the decision, arguing she did not breach the law and the law was in any case constitutionally invalid.
But the Full Federal Court agreed with the earlier decision, dismissing all grounds of appeal in a lengthy judgment.
The court said it agreed with the previous 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 fringe but Hanson’s hard line on immigration has drawn more support in recent polls.
(Reporting by Christine Chen in Sydney; Editing by Kate Mayberry)
Comments