Pauline Hanson and Mehreen Faruqi are currently battling it out in court over one of the former’s less-than-impressive tweets, and Hanson’s lawyers have used a defence that essentially implies she could have said way worse given her reputation.
In case you weren’t aware, Faruqi is suing Hanson under racial discrimination laws after Hanson tweeted “It’s clear you’re not happy, so pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan,” after Faruqi called the late Queen Elizabeth “the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised people” moments after her death.
Faruqi is officially seeking the post to be deleted, alongside Hanson attending anti-racism training out of her own pocket and donating $150,000 to a charity of Faruqi’s choice.
In court on Thursday, acting lead barrister for Hanson, Kieran Smark, SC, told Judge Angus Stewart the defendant used a “rhetorical device” in her tweet, and implied she could have been worse.
Here is what Smark said shortly after Judge Stewart was shown clips of Hanson’s publicly racist vitriol in the past.
“If your honour forms the view… that she’s not a shrinking violet on that topic — that is, if she’s got something to say about Islam she’ll say it — then its absence from the tweet is notable,” he said.
“It’s not nice. It’s not a nice tweet. It wasn’t a polite tweet. It wasn’t meant to be a polite tweet.
“Senator Hanson was angry and she thought she had reason to be angry and she wanted readers, evidently… to be aware of her anger and the reasons why.”
So essentially, if you are under the impression Hanson is racist based on things she’s said in the past, you’d have plenty of reason to think so, but the absence of such extreme hatred from the tweet in question should exempt her from racism charges, because it’s not as bad as what she could have said. Interesting.
Pauline Hanson’s team argued that Hanson acted “in good faith“, and was simply calling out a hypocrisy. Judge Stewart had this to say in response:
“Senator Hanson said that she was calling out hypocrisy, but I’m struggling to understand why that’s hypocrisy,” he said.
“Senator Hanson herself is outspokenly critical of government policy and aspects of Australian society. That doesn’t make her a hypocrite. That doesn’t make her un-Australian.
“Why is it hypocritical of someone else to be critical of aspects of Australia or its history, unless it’s because they’re from somewhere else and they’re not actually welcome here?”
You could say Hanson was, legally speaking, dragged by her roots. I wouldn’t say such a thing, for legal reasons, but you sure could.
