Australian judge rules senator broke race law by telling rival legislator to return to Pakistan

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — An Australian judge ruled Friday that anti-immigration party leader Sen. Pauline Hanson breached a racial anti-discrimination law by crudely telling Pakistan-born Sen. Mehreen Faruqi to return to her homeland.

Faruqi sued Hanson in 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, color or national or ethnic origin.

After the death of Queen Elizabeth II, 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.”

Hanson, the leader of the 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.

Hanson has been known for her views on race since her first speech to Parliament in 1996, in which she said Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians” because of its 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 trained 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,” he said.

Stewart ordered Hanson to delete the offensive post and pay Faruqi’s legal costs, saying they 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.”

"Today’s ruling tells us that telling someone to go back to where they came from is a strong form of racism,” Faruqi told reporters.

“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.

The Australian Muslim Advocacy Network, a human and civil rights organization representing the 3.2% of Australians who identified as Muslim in the latest census, said the ruling “serves as a strong warning to those who perpetrate racism in politics and the media.”

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 was found to have 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 tweet did not respond to any point made in Faruqi’s tweet.

“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 her response.

Hanson told the court she had called for a ban on Muslim immigration in the past, but 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.

Australia is an increasingly multicultural society. Australians born overseas or who have at least one overseas-born parent became a majority in the latest census in 2021.