Australia’s Senate on Wednesday formally censured a senator widely condemned for remarks blaming Muslim immigration for last month’s deadly New Zealand terror attacks.
“IT WAS A HATE SPEECH”
Senators officially censured independent Queensland Senator Fraser Anning for his Islamophobic, racist remarks in a session led by Labor Senator for South Australia Penny Wong and Mathias Cormann, the ruling Coalition’s deputy leader in the Senate.
The censure motion was supported across the aisle, with only one senator in the 76-seat body voting against, and three abstaining. Wong called Anning’s statements “shameful and pathetic.” “There is a difference between freedom of speech and hate speech,” she said. “The former is a feature of our democracy. The latter is an attack on democracy.” “We have to be uncompromising in our rejection of racism, prejudice, discrimination, and hate speech, and we must call it out wherever we see it,” Wong added.
SENATOR’S RACIST TWEETS
At least 50 Muslim worshippers were massacred, with as many injured, in an alleged white supremacist terror attack by an Australian-born man on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on March 15.
In the massacre’s aftermath, Anning had tweeted: “Does anyone still dispute the link between Muslim immigration and violence?” Despite outrage at his tweet, he had also added: “The real cause of the bloodshed on New Zealand streets today is the immigration program which allowed Muslim fanatics to migrate to New Zealand in the first place.”
Some 1.4 million people have signed a petition calling for Anning’s removal from the Senate, a sanction that requires a higher bar than the censure vote.