Pauline Hanson, the Burqa, and the Hypocrisy We Pretend Not to See

Pauline Hanson turning up in the Senate wrapped in a burqa was ridiculous. Everyone said so. Everyone clutched their pearls. How dare she. How offensive. How disrespectful. The thing is, the stunt exposed something nobody wanted to talk about. The burqa itself. What it does. Why it exists. And why so many people who claim to care about women suddenly lose their voices when the subject comes up.

What the burqa actually does

Let’s not dance around it. A burqa erases a woman’s face. Her identity. It turns her into a blank figure floating down the street. You can’t read her expression. You can’t see who she is. You get a formless outline and a mesh screen. And somehow we’re supposed to pretend this is empowering, or freely chosen, or just another harmless cultural practice.

Even the people who exploded over Hanson’s stunt know that if you strip away the politics, the burqa is a tool of control. It exists in societies where women are not meant to be seen as individuals. It’s designed to make women invisible. But pointing that out gets you labelled an Islamaphobe, a racist, so most people say nothing.

Hanson didn’t handle it with nuance. She never does. But she did force everyone to look at something they prefer to ignore.

Where the burqa came from

The burqa isn’t some ancient, universal Islamic garment. It isn’t mandated in the Quran. It isn’t in the Hadith as an obligation. The religious texts talk about modesty, not the full-body blackout curtain.

“Wearing the burka and other garments such as the hijab, niqab, and chador is often mistaken as required Islamic convention. Yet the practice of so-called veiling is not one of the five pillars of Islam, and both the Qurʾān (the holy book of Islam) and Hadith (the traditions or sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) are somewhat ambiguous on proper attire.” [source]

The burqa evolved out of specific cultural traditions in parts of Central Asia. It was tied to ideas about honour, seclusion, and keeping women out of public view.

In many Muslim societies, women never wore it at all. Still don’t. The burqa is cultural, not required. Treating it as sacred religious practice is historically wrong and politically convenient.

The Afghanistan contrast

Before the Taliban took over in the 1990s, Kabul looked like any other modern city. Women walked around bare-faced. They wore skirts, jackets, bright scarves. They taught at universities. They worked in offices. They drove cars. There are photos from the seventies and eighties showing Afghan women who could have been students in Sydney or Melbourne.

Then the Taliban arrived. Overnight, the burqa became compulsory. It wasn’t a symbol of faith it was a symbol of dominance. It told women they no longer had public lives.

After the Taliban were pushed out in 2001, the burqa faded in many areas. Not everywhere, but enough to show it wasn’t some eternal custom. It was imposed. And now, after the Taliban regained control, the pattern has repeated. Face erased. Identity removed. Step out of line and the consequences are brutal.

Women’s Rights in Afghanistan shows you what happened there.

So why did Hanson’s stunt matter

Because the outrage was selective. People weren’t angry about the burqa itself. They were angry that she had the nerve to put one on. That she made the chamber uncomfortable. That she brought the whole question out into the light.

The hypocrisy is that we defend the garment as cultural respect while pretending not to see what it does to the women who have no choice about wearing it. We act as if criticism of the burqa is criticism of Muslims. It isn’t. It’s criticism of a tool created to control half the population.

If anything, Hanson’s stunt showed how badly we need an honest conversation. One where we can say, without being shouted down, that a society cannot claim to value women while supporting a garment designed to erase them from view.

You don’t have to like Hanson to admit her burqa moment cracked the polite silence wide open. It wasn’t clever. It wasn’t subtle. But it did something useful. It forced everyone to look at the thing itself instead of hiding behind etiquette.

I was ashamed of the women in the senate. And I’m in favour of banning the burqa. It is an afront to women’s right.