SYDNEY — An Australian federal appeals court has rejected a bid by hard-right political leader Pauline Hanson to overturn a ruling that she racially discriminated against a Muslim senator with a social media post telling her to leave the country.
The Full Federal Court of Australia’s three-judge panel voted unanimously on Monday to uphold a 2024 decision finding that Hanson’s comment directed at Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi was unlawful and could not be shielded by free speech arguments.
Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, Faruqi celebrated the outcome. “Today, justice has prevailed,” she said. “Today’s win is for every single person out there who has been told to go back to where you came from.”
Hanson, who heads the hard-right One Nation party, issued a statement saying she was disappointed with the court’s decision. She also signaled she may not be done fighting the ruling.
“My legal team and I will now closely review the decision in the coming days, with a view to commencing an appeal in the High Court of Australia,” Hanson said. The High Court serves as the nation’s final court of appeal.
The dispute traces back to September 2022, when Faruqi posted on Twitter — now called X — following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. In her post, Faruqi wrote that she could not “mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples.”
Hanson fired back with a post that read: “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.”
A judge in 2024 determined that the post violated Australia’s racial discrimination laws, concluding it was reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate, and intimidate Faruqi, as well as Muslim Australians and immigrants of color more broadly.
Hanson challenged that ruling, contending both that she had not broken the law and that the law itself was constitutionally invalid.
Faruqi noted the scope of the appeals court’s rejection. “We have 434 paragraphs of dismissing Pauline Hanson’s appeal, of confirming that indeed Pauline Hanson behaved in racism, Islamophobia, and hate,” she said.
One Nation was founded in 1997 and was long considered a fringe political movement, but Hanson’s hardline positions on immigration have gained growing support in recent polling.
