Hanson suspended from Senate for wearing a burqa in the chamber

Pauline Hanson has been suspended from the Senate after she wore a burqa into the chamber on Monday afternoon, the second time in her parliamentary career she has performed the stunt, which prompted a formal rebuke from Labor Senate leader Penny Wong and Coalition Senate leader Anne Ruston.

The One Nation leader’s decision to wear the head covering came minutes after she was denied leave by independent senator Tammy Tyrrell to table a bill to have burqas and full-face coverings banned in Australia, a policy she has campaigned on for decades.

There was uproar in the Senate in the moments after Hanson entered the chamber.

Immediately as Hanson entered the chamber, members of the Greens and the crossbench began to protest.

“She is disrespecting a faith ... This needs to be dealt with immediately before we proceed,” senator Fatima Payman said.

Independent senator Lidia Thorpe rose to her feet and yelled out: “This can’t be happening. Get this racist woman out of here now. Get her out. Get her out … who’s in charge here?” Thorpe then vowed to shut down proceedings until Hanson was removed.

“Racism should not be the choice of the Senate. This is a racist senator,” Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi said. Hanson is currently appealing a Federal Court ruling that she racially vilified Faruqi last year.

The acting chair, Slade Brockman, found initially that Hanson’s dress was allowed, and proceedings were not stopped, but Senate president Sue Lines rushed back to the chamber after news of the stunt broke, to hear Wong and Ruston condemn the actions and ask that Hanson be removed.

Wong had asked Lines to rule that Hanson’s conduct was disorderly, quoting former Liberal senator George Brandis, who as attorney-general rebuked the One Nation leader in 2017, the last time she wore the garment on the Senate floor.

“All of us in this place have a great privilege and we represent in our states people of every faith ... and we should do so decently,” Wong said. “The sort of disrespect that you are engaging in now is not worthy of a member of the Australian Senate.”

Hanson was ordered to remove the item and leave the chamber or face suspension, and the Senate voted overwhelmingly to have her removed. She was suspended for the rest of the day.

Hanson was heard saying to Lines: “You are so vile, you are not doing your job properly.”

Hanson then left the chamber with her One Nation colleagues, having worn the burqa for almost 20 minutes. She remained defiant about her provocation following her suspension.

“They are a hypocritical bloody mob in there that have actually taken a stance without debating it and putting it to the vote,” Hanson told journalists after the Senate was suspended.

“They’ve said to the Australian people, we don’t care about you. It is a national security issue. It is about women’s rights.”

Faruqi also spoke after the suspension, saying she did not feel comfortable in the chamber.

“Muslim women in this country have been persecuted for a long time now, the racist abuse that Muslim women have faced over decades, fuelled by One Nation, but also the dog whistling of other politicians in other major parties has meant that we feel unsafe,” Faruqi said.

Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, who is openly considering defecting to One Nation, defended Hanson’s choice, saying: “People are free to express themselves politically and you are free to interpret it any way you wish.”

Nationals senator Matt Canavan, one of the Coalition’s most conservative MPs, slammed Hanson and argued it was a desperate, attention-seeking stunt.

Canavan said respectful points could be made about migration, but Hanson was acting improperly.

“Don’t vote for them … They only live if you give them attention and look at them,” Canavan said on ABC TV.

“I don’t like this type of politics. This is disrespectful to Muslim Australians. I don’t support ridiculing people.”

Hanson first wore a burqa into the Senate chamber in 2017. Her renewed attempt to ban the burqa was slammed earlier on Monday by Australia’s Islamophobia envoy Aftab Malik, who said the move will worsen harassment, threats of rape, and violence against Muslim women in Australia.

“It is frustrating to see Australian Muslim women’s choice of clothing continually tied to national security concerns. Islamophobia is at record levels in Australia, described as ‘unprecedented’ by the Islamophobia Register Australia. Muslim women, in particular, face the brunt,” Malik wrote in a statement provided to this masthead.

“Senator Pauline Hanson, eight years after her last call to ban the burqa, is again proposing it. This will deepen existing safety risks for Australian Muslim women who choose to wear the headscarf, the hijab, or the full face and body covering, the burqa.”

Hanson’s office did not release a copy of the motion before she attempted to table it in the upper house on Monday afternoon, but a media statement from her office last month said the move was set to echo similar bans in France. Hanson was not given leave to introduce the bill.

Hanson has campaigned against burqas since at least 2002, and in 2014 said she was “offended by the burqa, and opposed to even the niqab”, claiming that “people wearing full face coverings, including women, are known to have hidden bombs underneath them, which they’ve ­– detonated in acts of terror, in various places around the world, such as Chechnya”.

Hanson first wore a burqa into the Senate in 2017, demanding the Coalition government ban the garment, only to be rebuked by then-senator George Brandis and the Labor opposition.

One Nation’s polling is at a record high, receiving a primary vote of 12 per cent in the latest Resolve Political Monitor from this masthead and record popularity in News Corp’s Newspoll and the AFR Redbridge/Accent polls. Hanson is actively aiming to recruit Joyce, who told this masthead One Nation had “a purer form of understandable conservatism”.

Joyce continued to keep his distance from the Nationals’ party room on Monday, restating that he would wait until parliament rises for the year before making any decision about a potential move to One Nation.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.