So… in case you missed it, yesterday Pauline Hanson told the Senate that she is fed up with the reverse racism that is directed at her and being told to be tolerant of people who don’t want to assimilate to her view of Australian life.
On Thursday, while supporting a private bill that seeks to reduce the race-hate laws, the One Nation leader said that she’s sick of being the subject of slurs like ‘white trash’.
“There is a lot of this going on in this country,” Senator Hanson said.
“We can’t have an opinion, we can’t say anything anymore.”
Despite her past claims that Australia is being swamped by Muslims and Asians, and a suggestion that the majority of South African migrants bring AIDS to Australia, Hanson says that her detractors have nothing to lean on because she’s never uttered a racist word.
After Hanson’s address Labor senator Pat Dodson said “it is interesting that bigotry is back in favour”, giving a speech from personal experience.
Mr Dodson also took aim at comments by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton earlier in the week, that past Lebanese immigration might have been a mistake. Mr Dodson – who was born before the 1967 referendum when Indigenous Australians weren’t counted in the census – argued that the ‘stupidity’ of Dutton’s language had ‘excited some lunatic’ to make death threats to Muslim Labor MP Anne Aly.
“This is what words do – when you don’t understand and comprehend the difference between debate and prejudice,” said Mr Dodson.
