Politician Found Guilty of Racial Discrimination After Telling Ungrateful Non-Native Lawmaker to Go Home (Which Isn’t a Race)

Fun fact for the day that most of us in America don’t realize: In Australia, the nominal head of state is the monarch of the United Kingdom.

Unlike us tea-tossing Americans, who told the crown where they could stick it a full two centuries before the Sex Pistols made it cool, Aussies are still technically a monarchy. This seems slightly lame for an island settled by a bunch of criminals, but now that we view the British throne as a benign instrument of reminding the Anglosphere of its d cultural history, some respect is due in countries where the Windsors are recognized as technical heads of state.

When Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022, Australian politician Mehreen Faruqi, who was born in Pakistan, ruffled some feathers when she said on social media that she “cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonized people.” Another Australian politician, Pauline Hanson, told her she could “pack your bags and p*** off back to Pakistan.”

Guess who got convicted of racial discrimination?

You’re probably not surprised, even though “Pakistani” isn’t a race. You also won’t be surprised that her conviction was recently upheld.

From the BBC:

Australian populist leader Pauline Hanson racially discriminated against a Muslim senator in a 2022 by telling her to return to Pakistan, a court has said, upholding an earlier ruling.

The One Nation party leader had appealed a 2024 ruling that she had breached the racial discrimination act when she responded to a post by Senator Mehreen Faruqi with an “angry personal attack” that was “anti-Muslim.”

Hanson had argued at the Federal Court that political communication should be protected but Justice Melissa Perry dismissed her appeal on Monday.

“Today’s win is for every single person who has been made to feel that their belonging in this country is conditional,” Sen. Faruqi, a member of the Green Party, said after the ruling.

“This case was always about holding to account racism and holding to account those who perpetrate racism,” she continued. “Hate speech is not free speech.”

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that Hanson has a history of controversy going back to the 1990s, when she was a loud critic of Aboriginal welfare and unchecked immigration from Asia.

She first came to international attention due to her attempts to ban the burka. When those failed, she got the Australian Senate to be suspended by wearing one in protest.

Damned if you don’t, damned if you do.

So Hanson is clearly a bit of a firecracker. She’s also gaining traction with the electorate; according to a recent survey, her One Nation populist-conservative party trails only the Australian Labor Party in polling for the next federal election, 27.5 percent to 25.5 percent. (The more staid conservative parties, the Liberals and the Nationals, are at 22 percent total; they’re currently in a coalition.)

Naturally, this was the time for a judge to rebuke her, saying that “go back to where you came from” was “a racist trope with a long history” which “implicitly” targeted those of the Islamic faith.

“He ordered Hanson to delete the and pay Faruqi’s legal costs,” the BBC reported. “Faruqi, the deputy leader of the Greens party, took Hanson to court after the was posted, arguing it breached the racial discrimination act.”

There are several problems with this, aside from the fact that your ears should prick up every time you hear a politician in a supposedly free society say the magic words “hate speech is not free speech.”

Unless you want a slippery slope where everything is “hate speech,” of course it’s free speech. Ugly, sure. Reprehensible, maybe. But part of the free speech package? Absolutely, unequivocally, and non-negotiably.

Also, it’s worth noting that this is remarkably ignorant as a ruling for an Australian political establishment that loves to paint Hanson as the ignorant party.

Pakistani, of course, is not a race. The nation of Pakistan did not exist until 1947, and it did not magically create people who were of Pakistani extraction. Hanson did not particularly call her out on her ethnic extraction (a Pashtun who originally hails from the current state of Punjab). She simply told her that if she didn’t want to be there, she could go back to a country which ceased recognizing the monarchy in 1956.

It sounds as if she would be a great deal more comfortable there, given her antipathy to the crown. This isn’t a racist thought, merely the facts.

Islam, also, is not a race, as you probably know. Anyone from any race and any ethnicity can indeed become Muslim if they so choose. Naturally, if that choice is made, there are certain cultural aspects of that religion that can be criticized in a free society, including aspects which are non-negotiable tenets of the faith if followed in orthodox fashion.

The same could be said of Christianity, except Christians don’t have the tendency to take people to court and insist that “hate speech is not free speech” if you quote Richard Dawkins on social media, say. (We also don’t pursue violent ends if lawfare isn’t available to us, either. This is not a two-way street, you may have noticed.)

Similarly, taking someone’s non-racial comment and attaching it to “a racist trope with a long history” should not count as legitimate jurisprudence in a free society. But then, this is the history of every statute which criminalizes speech as “hateful.” In the end, it always mutates from a law criminalizing certain behavior to a crime in search of thought criminals.

In Australia, it’s certainly found one in Pauline Hanson.

No one is pretending that she has an uncontroversial history, but when courts are calling her a racist for a comment which didn’t mention race and cannot be attached, even via the specious and tendentious “trope” argument, to anything related to race, one can understand why she feels the necessity to stir the pot.

Hanson said she was “disappointed” in the ruling and would be reviewing it “with a view to commencing an appeal in the High Court of Australia.” Whatever the case, this should significantly alarm Australians to the point of at least listening to Sen. Hanson, lest they too find themselves stumbling on the slippery slope of “racism” and “hate speech.”

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