Australian Senator Pauline Hanson suspended from Parliament

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MEBOURNE, Australia – An Australian senator pushing for a national ban on the burqa was suspended from parliament until the end of the year on Tuesday for wearing Muslim garb in the chamber.

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Pauline Hanson, the 71-year-old leader of the anti-Muslim and anti-immigration One Nation party, was accused of performing a disrespectful stunt on Monday when she entered the Senate, shrouded from head to ankles to protest her fellow senators' refusal to consider her bill to ban the wearing of burqas and other face coverings in public.

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Senators suspended her for the remainder of the day Monday. With no apology forthcoming, they passed a no-confidence vote Tuesday that included one of the harshest penalties against a senator in decades. She was banned from participating in Senate meetings for seven consecutive days.

The Senate will meet for the year on Thursday and Hanson's suspension will continue when Parliament resumes in February next year.

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Hanson later told reporters that she would be judged by voters, not her Senate colleagues, in the next election in 2028.

“They didn't want to ban the burqa, but they denied me the right to wear it on the floor of parliament. There is no dress code on the floor of parliament, but I'm not allowed to wear it. So for me it was hypocrisy.” She said.

Hanson, who spoke at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida this month, sparked outrage in 2017 when she wore a burqa to the Senate in a similar protest. She was not punished that time.

The government's Senate leader, Malaysian-born Penny Wong, who is not Muslim, tabled a motion of no confidence on Tuesday.

Wong said that by wearing the burqa, Hanson was “ridiculing and denigrating the entire faith” practiced by nearly 1 million Australians among a population of 28 million.

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“Senator Hanson's hateful and superficial spectacle is tearing apart our social fabric and I believe it is making Australia weaker, as well as having brutal consequences for many of our most vulnerable, including in our schoolyards,” Wong told the Senate.

Pakistani-born Mehreen Farooqi said she and Afghanistan-born Fatima Payman were the only Muslims in the Senate. But when Hanson first donned the burqa in 2017, it wasn't there.

“Let this be the beginning of actually addressing the structural and systemic racism that permeates this country,” Farooqi said of the censure vote.

Payman, who wears a hijab, did not speak in the Senate on Tuesday. But on Monday she told Hanson that her wearing the burqa was “disgraceful” and “disgraceful”.

Last year, a judge ruled that Hanson had broken racial discrimination laws by crudely ordering Farooqi in a social media post to return to her home country.

Hanson is appealing the decision.

Rateb Jneid, president of advocacy group the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils, said in a statement that Hanson's wearing of the burqa was “part of a pattern of behavior that has repeatedly vilified Muslims, migrants and minorities.”

Hanson has been known for her views on race since her first speech to Parliament in 1996, in which she said Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians” due to its non-discriminatory immigration policies.

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