MELBOURNE: An Australian senator who is campaigning for a national burqa ban was barred Tuesday from parliament for the rest of the year for wearing the Muslim garment in the chamber.
Pauline Hanson, the 71-year-old leader of the anti-Muslim, anti-immigration One Nation minor party, was accused of performing a disrespectful stunt on Monday when she walked into the Senate shrouded in the head-to-ankle garment to protest fellow senators’ refusal to consider her bill that would ban the burqa and other full-face coverings in public places.
Senators suspended her for the rest of the day on Monday. In the absence of an apology, they passed a censure motion Tuesday that carried one of the harshest penalties against a senator in recent decades. She was barred from seven consecutive Senate sitting days.
The Senate arises for the year on Thursday and Hanson’s suspension will continue when parliament resumes in February next year.
Hanson later told reporters she would be judged by voters at the next election in 2028, not by her Senate colleagues.
Hanson, who gave a speech at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida this month, created outrage in 2017 when she wore a burqa in the Senate in a similar protest. She wasn’t punished on that occasion.
The government leader in the Senate, Malaysian-born Penny Wong, who is not Muslim, moved the censure motion on Tuesday.
Wong said by wearing the burqa, Hanson had “mocked and vilified an entire faith” that was observed by almost 1 million Australians among a population of 28 million.
Pakistan-born Mehreen Faruqi said she and Afghanistan-born Fatima Payman were the only Muslims in the Senate. But when Hanson first wore the burqa in 2017, there were none.
