"Unfair": Pauline Hanson's tearful pledge after court ruling
Pauline Hanson has made an emotional pledge after the court ruled she made racist remarks towards a fellow senator.
Justice Angus Stewart found that the One Nation leader engaged in "seriously offensive" and intimidating behaviour when told Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi to "piss off back to Pakistan" in a tweet, with the judge saying the message constitutes "strong racism".
After the ruling, Hanson spoke to Sky News in a teary interview in which she called the Federal Court ruling “unfair and unjust”, lamenting that Australia was “not the country I grew up in”.
“I just feel that the country’s changed so much in such a way that people can’t say what they think anymore. The thought police is out there, everyone’s shut down for having an opinion,” she said between sobs.
“It’s not the country I grew up in."
“People may criticise my comment, but I’ve never changed since the first day of politics nearly 30 years ago."
“But I think the decision made I think was unfair, unjust and a bit hard, but I’m not going to give up, I’m going to appeal against it, I’m going to fight this.”
Handing down his the decision on Friday, Justice Angus Stewart labelled the post as “an angry ad hominem attack”.
He ruled the post 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 found that Senator Hanson’s post was motivated by “the race, colour or national or ethnic origin” of Senator Faruqi, and her response was not made in good faith as a fair comment on a matter of public interest.
“Senator Hanson’s tweet was merely an angry ad hominem attack devoid of discernible content (or comment) in response to what Senator Faruqi had said,” Justice Stewart said.
Image credits: Sky News