Queensland senator Pauline Hanson has been referred to the Human Rights Commission after she ended a broad-sided defence of racist comments directed at another senator, who she told to “piss off back to Pakistan”, with an offer to take them “to the airport”.
Hanson launched into the tirade after the Greens tabled a motion calling on the Senate to censure the One Nation leader for racist, “anti-migrant” comments directed at senator Mehreen Faruqi in the wake of Queen Elizabeth II’s death.
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Earlier this month, Faruqi offered her condolences to those “who knew the Queen”, but said she couldn’t mourn “the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples”.
In a reply on Twitter, Hanson claimed Faruqi had taken “every advantage of this country” when she “immigrated to Australia”, before telling her to pack her bags and “piss off back to Pakistan”. The tweet was signed off “-PH”, signalling that Hanson had personally written and posted the remarks from her official account.
Faruqi said the censure was the “bare minimum” that could be done. She said the tweet opened the door to an onslaught of harassment.
“We’ve got to name and shame racism and the perpetrators of racism,” Faruqi told the Senate on Tuesday.
“It is a symbolic but important step that everyone in this place can take to make clear that we condemn racism in all its forms, shapes and sizes.”
The censure motion was later amended by Labor and the Coalition in the Senate to instead call for respectful debate, removing Hanson’s name and her slurs. Faruqi said the amendment let Hanson off “scot-free”, and will only give her the chance to do it again.
Speaking on the motion, Penny Wong, Labor’s leader in the Senate, said she condemned Hanson’s comments and didn’t want them repeated, but warned against using censure motions to respond to attacks made on social media.
“I think they’re appalling, and they’re comments that have been levelled at me countless times since I arrived in this country, and I remember getting them as a kid in the schoolyard,” Wong said.
“Can I say to senator Faruqi, we on this side do understand your grievance at the comment and we understand why you are calling out such behaviour, and I pick up something that senator Faruqi said in her contribution about how triggering this is.”
In a speech of her own, Hanson refused to retract the racist comments, before levelling a minutes-long diatribe at the Greens that included a definition of racism Hanson insisted she didn’t fit, before accusing the party of hypocrisy, citing allegations against Faruqi’s party colleague, Greens senator Lidia Thorpe.
“Criticism is not racism,” said Hanson, for the umpteenth time in her political career. As she wrapped up her speech, a Senate colleague could be heard branding her an “absolute scumbag” from across the chamber.
The One Nation leader has a chequered track record on racism, stretching all the way back to her maiden speech to parliament back in 1996, where she ranted about the “reverse racism” that offers Indigenous people of Australia “privileges…over other Australians”.
In that same speech, she called for the abolition of multiculturalism and said Australia was in danger of being “swamped by Asians”, who she accused of forming “ghettos” and refusing to “assimilate”.
Over the decades since, Hanson has been immovable. During an interview with a Christian radio station in 2016, Hanson claimed Islam was trying to commandeer government, before calling the religion “a big problem”.
In 2017, she wore a burqa into question time, sat in it for 20 minutes, before tearing it off during a speech in which she called on then-attorney-general, George Brandis, to “actually ban the burqa in Australia?”
A couple of years later, she took to Nine’s A Current Affair to dispute calls for an end to climbing Uluru. In the 2019 segment, one First Nations person said climbing Uluru was disrespectful. The senator replied: “I’m Indigenous, I was born here, I’m native to the land.”
Through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2020, she was barred from appearing on the Nine Network’s Today program after she blamed a covid-induced public housing lockdown in Melbourne on “non-English speaking” migrants.
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