Weeks after a federal court found Pauline Hanson guilty of racially vilifying her Senate colleague Mehreen Faruqi in September 2022, the One Nation leader has spoken to Chris Kenny on Sky News, revealing that she had isolated herself for days after the judgement was handed down.
“I basically shut myself away for a couple of days,” she said on Wednesday night. “I just had to rebuild my strength and realise, you know, OK, pick yourself up, dust yourself down. I can’t go anywhere. I have to fight this. It’s just not about Pauline Hanson anymore, it’s about people’s freedom of speech in this nation, that we have a right to have an opinion, and every which way they’re trying to shut it down.”
In September 2022, Hanson tweeted that Senator Faruqi should “piss off back to Pakistan” in response to an earlier post by the Greens Senator reacting to the death of Queen Elizabeth II, in which Faruqi said she “cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples”.
In May 2023, Faruqi launched legal action against Hanson, commencing legal proceedings in the federal court under the Racial Discrimination Act.
Earlier this month, Justice Angus Stewart described Hanson’s tweet as “an angry ad hominem attack”, finding it unlawful under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
“[The tweet was] reasonably likely in all the circumstances” to “offend, insult, humiliate and intimidate the applicant and groups of people, namely people of colour who are migrants to Australia or are Australians of relatively recent migrant heritage and Muslims who are people of colour in Australia,” Justice Stewart said.
His judgement also explained that Hanson had not provided any reasonable justification for publishing “messages that are racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim”.
“[Ms Hanson] reverted most easily to those messages when responding to a Muslim, immigrant woman of colour in anger in the heat of the moment, which is consistent with the views that she has espoused publicly for decades,” he said.
Hanson said the judgement was “unfair” and added, “I’m not going to give up. I’m going to appeal against it, I’m going to fight this.”
On Wednesday, Hanson reflected on the interview she gave immediately after the verdict was made in which she complains that “Australia was “not the country I grew up in” and that “people can’t say what they think anymore”.
“[I was] devastated after the interview with Andrew Bolt,” she told Chris Kenny, but added that she has received “overwhelming” support from some members of the public.
“It’s been astounding,” she said. “The phones in my office never stopped ringing, either at my parliamentary office or whether it was in the Queensland head office. The letters and wishes of support and prayers, it’s been so welcomed.”
One Nation has launched a legal fund to support her appeal, which has currently raised over $656,000.
When Justice Stewart’s decision was handed down earlier this month, Faruqi described the judgement as “draw[ing] a line that hate speech is not free speech”.
“And those who subject people to racial abuse will not get away scot-free,” she said. “[The] judgment is landmark, it is historic, and it is groundbreaking and it will set a new precedent with how racism is viewed in this country.”