Southern has said on Twitter that it is “not racism to oppose lying to desperate people in order to steal their money”. In 2017, Southern was among a group of far-right activists attempting to obstruct humanitarian vessels running refugee rescue operations in the Mediterranean. And she told the Daily Mail that Sydney “certainly has a problem with mass Chinese immigration” and that Australia should put European migrants first.
On the same speaking tour, Southern arrived in Brisbane in July 2018 wearing an “It’s okay to be white” shirt. Southern was confronted by a journalist over her claims that the area had become a “monoculture”.
Southern previously attracted headlines when police asked her to move from outside a mosque in Lakemba in western Sydney in 2018. “It’s basically a conspiracy with roots in white nationalism and Islamophobia, saying that white European people in the western world are being replaced by non-Europeans at a mass scale,” Faruqi said, adding that the idea had “become popular in far-right circles”.īradley also argued that the tweet “constituted a fair report and/or a fair summary of the parliamentary proceedings” and Faruqi was also “able to avail herself of an alternative complete defence of contextual truth” under NSW defamation laws. Lauren Southern is on the comeback trail, and Australian conservatives are all too happy to help | Jason Wilsonįaruqi’s questions to News Corp executives at the Senate hearing last month focused on “the far-right conspiracy theory The Great Replacement”. She moved to Australia last year and describes herself on Twitter as a Sky News contributor – but has also said she is not employed by the broadcaster. Southern, a Canadian film-maker and YouTube personality frequently described as a “rightwing provocateur”, has previously rejected claims of being a “white nationalist”, while speaking out against the “cult” of multiculturalism and criticising Muslim immigration into western countries.
Mitry Lawyers, which is representing Southern, told Guardian Australia on Thursday: “The commentary contained in that correspondence, to the extent it related to our client specifically (as opposed to general statements) is rejected.” At issue are not the questions posed by Faruqi to News Corp executives about Southern’s alleged promotion of the “great replacement” theory – an exchange that is covered by parliamentary privilege – but the wording the senator used in a tweet when she retweeted video of the exchange.įaruqi’s legal representatives said in a letter on Monday that the New South Wales senator took her public duties “very seriously” and would continue to speak out against what she saw as any “racist rhetoric and race-baiting commentary and behaviour engaged in by Ms Southern and others”.
0 kommentar(er)
