Before I get to my first guest, I want to talk about something that directly affects her but something she likely won’t be able to comment on.
Pauline Hanson is being taken to court by the Greens' Senator Mehreen Faruqi for hurt feelings.
Well officially, according to Faruqi, she’s taking Hanson to court under section 18c of the racial discrimination act for an ‘insulting and humiliating tweet’.
Faruqi claims Senator Hanson violated the hurt feelings act when she tweeted last year that she should "pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan".
While it's a sentiment many of us share, the SBS reported that Faruqi’s lawyers:
“allege the tweet "did offend, insult, humiliate and intimidate" Senator Faruqi and "other people who share attributes" with her, adding that it "was done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the applicant and some of the people in the group".
I am not sure if those attributes include the repeated distasteful conduct of Faruqi herself who seems to spot racism everywhere except where it’s most noticeable.
She sees racism if you don’t support the religion of Islam…even though religion is not a race. There was no racism when her former fellow green extremist Lidia Thorpe told Hanson to go back to where she came from.
There’s no racism when Green crier-in-chief Senator Hanson-Young talks about old white men or the white patriarchy.
No. For Greens like Faruqi, racism is a pick and choose process.
So apparently is being a victim of hurt feelings.
None of the vile and awful things this useless bunch of cross benchers say about others is apparently offensive.
Instead it’s supposedly only their feelings that matter.
Frankly, this action by Faruqi is everything that is wrong with Section 18c. It should go because it is simply a subjective test about how someone feels when confronted with a point of view they don’t like.
We’ve seen lives damaged or ruined already as a result of the lawfare sparked by hurt feelings.
It’s bad enough when it’s used against students like in the Queensland University case over an Aboriginal only lab but when senators are now using it to silence opponents, we’ve entered a frightening new political realm.,
