Pauline Hanson’s legal team played footage in court showing the One Nation leader telling a white senator to go back to their birth country, as Hanson defends a racial discrimination suit brought against her by Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi over a tweet telling her to “piss off back to Pakistan”.
Faruqi is suing Hanson under racial discrimination laws in response to the comment on Twitter, now X, which was posted on September 9, 2022. The Federal Court trial before Justice Angus Stewart started in Sydney on Monday and is expected to conclude on Thursday.
Mehreen Faruqi and Pauline Hanson outside the Federal Court in Sydney on Monday.Credit: Nick Moir
Faruqi, an Australian citizen who migrated from Pakistan in 1992 and is deputy leader of the Greens, is seeking court orders requiring Hanson to delete the post, attend anti-racism training at her own cost, and make a $150,000 donation to a charity chosen by Faruqi.
Faruqi’s barrister, Saul Holt, KC, said during closing submissions on Wednesday that the One Nation senator had tweeted “a version of a well-known, anti-migrant, racist phrase, ‘go back to where you came from’.”
The words were “plainly targeted at ... a brown, Muslim, migrant senator,” Holt said. “They were said by Pauline Hanson … a high-profile purveyor of hateful speech against people who have those characteristics like senator Faruqi.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Hanson’s legal team asked the court to play a clip from Seven’s Sunrise program in September 2018, during which Hanson told then-senator Derryn Hinch, an Australian citizen who was born in New Zealand, to “pack your bags and get on the next plane out of the country” and “go back to New Zealand”.
She said Hinch could “come back when you’ve got some manners”.
Senator Pauline Hanson is congratulated by Senator Derryn Hinch after delivering her first speech in the Senate, 2016.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Hanson’s junior barrister Timothy Smartt told the court it was tendered because it was relevant to a question asked of Hanson on Tuesday, namely, “if she’d ever told a white migrant to go back to where they came from”.
“She said, ‘I have.’ I think she was challenged on that,” Smartt said.
Kieran Smark, SC, the lead barrister acting for Hanson, delivered closing submissions later on Wednesday and advanced the argument that the senator’s comment was political speech.
“Politics involves the deployment of rhetoric, powerful language, emotion, all with a view to persuading the audience towards a particular view,” he said.
The court has heard Hanson’s comment on X was a response to a post by the Greens senator, who had noted the death of Queen Elizabeth II and said she could not “mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples”.
Hanson posted that Faruqi’s “attitude appalls and disgusts me”. “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,” she said in the comment.
Faruqi alleges Hanson’s post amounted to unlawful offensive behaviour under the Racial Discrimination Act because the comment was reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate, and it was done because of her race, colour or national or ethnic origin.
Holt submitted that Faruqi was entitled to enter into robust debate without being subjected to racist speech. He said the Greens senator faced a wave of abuse after Hanson’s tweet.
“That’s just what Twitter is. You throw the grenade and it blows up,” he said.
But Hanson’s legal team argue the comment fell within an exemption because she acted reasonably and in good faith in making a fair comment on a matter of public interest, and it was an “expression of a genuine belief” held by her. They have also said Faruqi faced criticism for her own tweet, rather than as a consequence of Hanson’s post.
Hanson’s legal team has also argued the Racial Discrimination Act provisions fall foul of the implied freedom of political communication in the Commonwealth Constitution, and are therefore “invalid in full” or in part.
That argument has prompted the Commonwealth attorney-general, represented in the hearing by Craig Lenehan, SC, to intervene in the case to defend the constitutional validity of the sections.