‘We are not going back’: Senator Mehreen Faruqi launches fiery broadside against One Nation over migration
CANBERRA — Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi has delivered a blistering rebuke to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party during a fiery Senate debate, accusing the right-wing minor party of attempting to resurrect the remnants of the White Australia Policy through divisive immigration rhetoric.
Speaking during a Matters of Public Importance (MPI) debate on migration in the Senate chamber, the New South Wales Greens Senator did not hold back, stating she had initially questioned whether the discussion was even worth her time before deciding she had “had it up to here” with One Nation’s agenda.
Senator Faruqi, who migrated to Australia from Pakistan in 1992 and is the first Muslim woman to sit in the Australian Federal Parliament, argued that One Nation’s policy focus on changing the intake of the nation’s migration programme was a thinly veiled attempt to weaponise race and identity.
“This MPI is just another way for them to define who should be in Australia, who is deemed as ‘one of us’ and who is deemed as the ‘other’ because of what they look like or where they come from,” Senator Faruqi told the chamber.
“Let me make one thing crystal clear: when One Nation talk about changing the composition of our migration program, we know what you mean. It’s not simply a technical or abstract debate about temporary versus permanent migration… For One Nation, the party of the Muslim ban and decades of overt racism, it is about something else entirely.”
Invoking the ghost of Fraser Anning
In her address, Senator Faruqi directly linked One Nation’s current political stance to the controversial 2018 maiden speech of former Queensland Senator Fraser Anning. Anning, who was elected on a One Nation ticket before splitting from the party, sparked widespread national condemnation when he called for a “final solution” to Australia’s immigration system and a return to a migration programme that favoured “historic European Christian composition”.
“That senator, thankfully, has gone, but unfortunately, One Nation is still here,” Senator Faruqi said.
Turning her attention directly toward the One Nation benches, she delivered a deeply personal reprimand, noting that the party’s idealised version of Australia would have barred her from entering the country entirely.
“If you had your way, I would have never been allowed in this country that I call home, let alone sit in this parliament, in the Senate chamber. Shame on you,” she said.
“For all your talk about supporting good migrants who speak perfect English and assimilate completely, you would rather we just go back to the White Australia Policy. Well, we are not going back to White Australia.”
Major parties ‘cop blame’ for normalising xenophobia
While One Nation bore the brunt of the Greens Senator’s fury, the major political parties did not escape unscathed. Senator Faruqi turned her sights on both the Liberal-National Coalition and the Australian Labor Party, accusing them of complicity in fostering a hostile environment for multicultural communities.
She accused successive Liberal governments of “fanning the flames of hatred” by politically targeting specific migrant communities—including Sudanese and Lebanese Muslim Australians—as well as asylum seekers and refugees.
Labor was similarly accused of “dirtying its hands” through the tactical use of “Australian-first” rhetoric, which Faruqi labelled as deliberate political dog-whistling.
“This posturing and rhetoric normalises and gives oxygen to One Nation’s racism and xenophobia. It hurts and damages us,” Senator Faruqi warned.
Concluding her speech with a staunch defence of multicultural Australia, the Senator rejected the notion that minority communities should be used as political leverage in parliamentary debates.
“We are not here as fodder for your inherent biases and white supremacy that you want to exert,” she said. “We are proud, upstanding citizens of this country and we work hard to make Australia a better place.”