By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
GREENS Senator Mehreen Faruqi, in response to the death of Queen Elizabeth in 2022, took the opportunity to take a shot at the British Empire and colonialism.
Her post stated: “Condolences to those who knew the Queen. I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples. We are reminded of the urgency of Treaty with First Nations, justice & reparations for British colonies & becoming a republic.”
Senator Pauline Hanson took offence at the post and suggested in a responding post that her fellow senator “pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan”, based on her apparent disdain for Australia and its historical connection to the monarchy and the British Empire.
This response, according to Senator Faruqi, was “racial vilification”. No it wasn’t, it was simply an impassioned response to what Senator Hanson perceived as disloyalty by a Pakistani immigrant who came to Australia in 1992.
Under Australia’s “implied freedom of political communication” Senator Fraqi had every right to criticise Britain’s colonial history. And Senator Hanson had every right to respond too – but not according to our warped and unjust law, namely the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 and its notorious Section 18c.
Faruqi, Australia’s first Muslim senator, sued Hanson under Section 18C and in November 2024, the Federal Court ruled that Hanson’s post was “an unlawful, humiliating ad hominem attack” rather than protected fair comment. The Full (of progressive judges) Federal Court dismissed Hanson’s appeal in July 2026.
Federal Court Justice Angus Stewart ruled that Senator Hanson’s reply was “a seriously humiliating, anti-Muslim, and racist personal attack.” As most fair-minded Aussies would say; ‘Bollocks!”
The worst we could say about Senator Hanson’s response was that it was impolite. Bit it was also a fair, impassioned response to a provocative statement by a radical leftist politician.
Senator Hanson has been granted special leave to appeal to the High Court over a racial discrimination law she quite rightly says prevents Australians from speaking their minds for fear they will be labelled racist and face legal action.
Section 18c is not about providing justice, it is about providing a tool that leftist activists can use to wage lawfare against their perceived enemies and to silence others who may want to speak out.
Anti-discrimination Acts came out of UN treaties and were designed to protect participants in a future grievance industry that would harass and prosecute people expressing “anti-progressive” and conservative viewpoints that contradicted the now entrenched ideology of the New Left and cultural Marxism that was marching through the institutions of the West.
Another stack of laws enforcing New Left ideology was the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 introduced by radical feminist Labor Senator Susan Ryan, that legally defended women against being denied jobs, accommodation, or services based on their gender, and made sexual harassment illegal for the first time.
Under this law, woe betide the employer who preferred male employees, even for good reasons. After all, in every “good communist society” women, rather than being family makers and child nurturers, were “better employed” wearing overalls and contributing to the glorious advance of the state’s latest five-year plan.
Race and sex discrimination laws made way for “racial and religious vilification” laws that were adopted by all states and territories in varying forms and would provide a legal bludgeon against people who dared criticise the new “multicultural society” and the various imported non-Christian religions that came with it.
These laws also incorporated the politically-loaded, Orwellian term “hate speech”, a handy and emotive term to use against people daring to express their anger against any particular group of people.
Further legal battering rams against conservatism came in the form of updates to the Sex Discrimination Act covering:
- Sexual Orientation: Protecting individuals regardless of whether their attraction is towards persons of the same or a different sex.
- Gender Identity: Protecting trans and gender-diverse individuals based on their internal experience or gender-related appearance and characteristics, irrespective of medical interventions or designated sex at birth.
- Intersex Status: Protecting individuals with variations in sex characteristics.
- Marital or Relationship Status: Formally extending protections to cover same-sex de facto couples
This Act effectively gives “protected status” to all manner of pink, blue and green-haired individuals who hate society and its generally accepted gender roles and talk themselves into various states of gender disphoria, even to the point of mutilation of sexual organs.
This “anti-discrimination” ideology has been extended into the Fair Work Act 2009 (Cth) that outlaws discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and intersex status specifically within the workplace.
Senator Hanson’s High Court case will be a landmark either way, win or lose.
