Pauline Hanson has lost her appeal against the Federal Court finding that she racially vilified Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi, with the Full Court on Monday upholding the ruling that her 2022 post breached Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
The Full Court of Justices Melissa Perry, Geoffrey Kennett and Elizabeth Bennett unanimously dismissed the appeal in Sydney on Monday afternoon, in a judgment running to 434 paragraphs, News24 reports. The judges also rejected her argument that Section 18C unconstitutionally burdens political communication. Senator Faruqi was in court for the judgment; Senator Hanson was not, with News24 reporting she was working on constituent matters. The decision was streamed live on News24.
The ruling caps a fight that began with a single post in September 2022 and has since cost Senator Hanson a sum she puts at close to $900,000.
Hanson responds: the fight is heading to the High Court
Senator Hanson responded with a written statement saying she was "disappointed" the court rejected her appeal, and that her legal team will "closely review the decision in coming days with a view to commencing an appeal in the High Court of Australia".
"Public discussion in Australia has become almost totally silenced by laws and rules which prevent ordinary people expressing their personal views in case some small part of our society takes some sort of offence or feels hurt or distressed. This has never been, nor should be, the Australian way," she said.
"We all need to have the courage and the freedom to say what we think on issues that are important to us all."
On the post itself, she said she was "incensed by the incredible disrespect" she felt was shown to the late Queen on the day of her death by Senator Faruqi and others: "I simply wanted to call that out." She thanked the supporters who have backed her through the case.
Video: Pauline Hanson/Facebook. Senator Hanson responds to the Federal Court dismissing her 18C appeal.
What came out of court: costs reserved, and Faruqi wants the lot
The judgment took minutes to hand down, with the court's full reasons to follow in the published decision. Costs of the appeal were reserved. Outside court, Senator Faruqi confirmed she'll be chasing every dollar: "we will be seeking full costs".
Senator Faruqi framed the ruling as bigger than the case, calling it "our fight back against the far right" and declaring that "hate speech is not free speech". That's the same senator who told a court under oath that "mediocre white people should be in the bin" isn't racism, a double standard covered further down this article.
The post that started it: Mehreen Faruqi attacked the Queen on the day she died
On the day Queen Elizabeth II died in September 2022, Senator Faruqi, who migrated to Australia from Pakistan, posted that she "cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples".
Senator Hanson fired back on social media within hours, at 4.05pm the same day.
Senator Faruqi sued over that reply under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. No court has found anything unlawful about Senator Faruqi's post about the Queen. Senator Hanson's reply is the one that ended up before a judge.
Justice Angus Stewart's 2024 ruling: the reply breached Section 18C
Section 18C makes it unlawful to publicly do something that's reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a person because of their race, colour, or national or ethnic origin. It's a civil provision, not a criminal one, so breaching it isn't a crime, but a court can order posts taken down and costs paid.
In a judgment handed down in November 2024, Justice Angus Stewart found Senator Hanson's post crossed that line. He ruled it was reasonably likely to "offend, insult, humiliate and intimidate" Senator Faruqi as well as broader groups, including "people of colour who are migrants to Australia".
The judge rejected Senator Hanson's defence that the post was fair comment made reasonably and in good faith on a matter of public interest. He ordered her to delete the post from her X account and pay Senator Faruqi's legal costs.
Faruqi wanted Hanson gagged, forced into training and made to pin a confession
Deleting the tweet was only the start of what Senator Faruqi asked the court to do. Her claim, set out in the judgment, sought orders restraining Senator Hanson from ever using the phrases "piss off back to Pakistan", "go back where you came from" or "any variation thereof" in public. She also wanted Senator Hanson ordered to pin a tweet to her own account for 3 months stating she'd been found to have breached the Racial Discrimination Act, pay $150,000 to a Western Sydney literacy charity, and undertake anti-racism training at her own expense.
In other words, a sitting senator asked a court to place a permanent speech ban on another sitting senator, compel her to publish a confession, and send her off for re-education.
Justice Stewart refused all of it except the deletion and costs. On the speech ban, he found the injunction went so far it "would even stop her from apologising for having tweeted in those terms". The forced donation and the compulsory training were knocked back too, with the judge noting nobody had even specified what the training would be or who'd run it.
Faruqi called it a landmark win. Hanson called it the thought police at work
Outside court, Senator Faruqi described the decision as a "landmark" victory against racism.
"Today is a good day for people of colour, for Muslims and all of us who have been working so hard to build an anti-racist society. Today is a win of every single person who has been told to go back to where they came from."
Senator Hanson said she was "deeply disappointed" by the ruling and announced she'd fight it, arguing Justice Stewart had applied Section 18C far too broadly.
"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 are out there," she told News24 at the time.
"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."
Sue Chrysanthou's appeal case: Hanson was exposing hypocrisy, not racism
At the appeal hearing in November, Senator Hanson's barrister Sue Chrysanthou SC argued the post wasn't driven by racism but by a need to expose hypocrisy: a senator criticising the country while choosing to immigrate here, buy property and live off a taxpayer funded parliamentary salary.
The post might not have been fit for "an afternoon tea" or a courtroom, Chrysanthou argued, but it was exactly what Australian X users expected from the argy bargy of politics in 2022, and the court couldn't sit in an ivory tower pretending otherwise. She said Justice Stewart failed to take that context into account, and called his finding that the post actually intimidated Australian migrants of colour extreme.
"It's not necessarily a racially motivated reason to say to that person, 'Why don't you just leave? If you don't like it here, leave'," Chrysanthou told the court. She noted the then Greens leader Adam Bandt copped the same "get out of Australia" treatment after he called for a republic on the day the Queen died, and nobody sued anyone over that.
Asked in court if "mediocre white people should be in the bin" was racist, Faruqi said no
The double standard was put to Senator Faruqi directly at the 2024 trial. Chrysanthou read the court a tweet by journalist Osman Faruqi, the senator's son:
"Mediocre white people should be in the bin but instead they own everything and are every-f***ing-where."
Asked whether that constituted racism, Senator Faruqi said it didn't.
"Skin colour is also about who holds power in this country or anywhere else in the world. It is tied to who holds the power and who has the authority to perpetrate racism and oppress people, and in this country, the power of that is held by white people," she told the court.
So on Senator Faruqi's own sworn evidence, "piss off back to Pakistan" is the ultimate racist slur, and "mediocre white people should be in the bin" isn't racism at all. Chrysanthou put it to her plainly: she was "a hypocrite and only against certain forms of racism". Senator Faruqi also conceded her Queen tweet was designed to make an impact, telling the court "I intended to put this issue on the political agenda".
Sharri Markson asked Faruqi to apologise for her own rhetoric. She didn't
Senator Faruqi's sensitivity to offensive words runs one way. After the terrorist attack at Bondi Beach in December, Sky News host Sharri Markson confronted the Greens senator over her rhetoric of the previous two years and asked whether she'd like to apologise for her remarks.
Senator Faruqi didn't apologise. She said she was there to provide support for the Jewish community.
So the senator who took a colleague to court over an offensive tweet declined, on camera, to say sorry for anything she's said herself.
Labor built 18C, and Labor has saved it every time someone tried to fix it
The law Senator Hanson is fighting is Labor's work at every layer. The Racial Discrimination Act was passed by the Whitlam Labor government in 1975 to write a United Nations convention into Australian law. Section 18C didn't exist for the Act's first 20 years: it was bolted on by the Keating Labor government's Racial Hatred Act 1995. Keating's original bill went further and included criminal offences for inciting racial hatred, but the Senate stripped those out, leaving the civil "offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate" test that caught Senator Hanson's post.
Every attempt to rein the section in has died in the Senate at Labor's hands. The Abbott government shelved its 2014 amendments when it couldn't get the numbers. In March 2017 the Turnbull government's changes were voted down 31 to 28, with Labor, the Greens and crossbenchers lining up to keep 18C exactly as it is. One Nation voted to change it.
So the party that wrote the section, and the party whose senator is suing under it, are the same two parties that killed the last attempt to fix it. Nine years later, it's being used against the senator who tried.
The ABC aired a segment on assaulting Gina Rinehart. Hanson faces $900,000 over a tweet
The double standard isn't hard to spot. The taxpayer funded ABC recently aired a segment that Hancock Prospecting says described a violent assault of Gina Rinehart, and it went to air on the public broadcaster without consequence.
Senator Hanson sent one tweet telling a political opponent who attacked the Queen to leave if she's not happy, and she's spent more than three years and close to $900,000 in the Federal Court over it.
Video: Sky News Australia. Andrew Bolt replays the ABC segment describing an assault on Gina Rinehart.
In the segment, a performer asks viewers:
"when the revolution comes, will you hide under your bed, or will you know exactly how" to violently assault Gina Rinehart, before describing mixing up her guts and "making her into one big sausage roll".
Sky News host Andrew Bolt replayed the segment and called it "that obscene and vicious rant, that pornographic vision of violence", noting the ABC must have seen it in advance and "still chose to show it". Of the four people on the ABC program, Bolt observed, only presenter Leigh Sales offered even a word of mild criticism, telling the performer it was "a very easy, kind of nasty gag about Gina Rinehart" that told viewers "we're all in this together, unless you don't share my politics".
A $900,000 bill and a defence fund: what today's loss means
Senator Hanson revealed the litigation could leave her liable for legal costs approaching $900,000, and she launched a legal defence fund to bankroll the appeal.
She's been clear the fight is bigger than one post.
"It's not just about Pauline Hanson. It's about the people themselves having the right to have an opinion, to have a say. And 18C has to go. That's why I have to fight this," she said.
Senator Hanson has campaigned against Section 18C for years, arguing it lets the courts police speech that should be answered in debate, not litigation. The loss leaves the 2024 finding standing, along with the costs order that comes with it, and leaves the section's reach over political exchanges intact. Her only remaining court avenue is special leave to the High Court.
It's also the latest in a long line of collisions between One Nation and the Greens, after Greens senators accused One Nation of foreign interference without proof earlier this year.
Costs of the appeal have been reserved, and this article will be updated when Senator Hanson confirms whether the High Court challenge goes ahead. You can find News24's live coverage here.
