When Senator Mehreen Faruqi triumphantly stepped out of the Federal Court, having won her case of racial discrimination against Senator Pauline Hanson, I am sure she thought she has won a victory for all immigrants of colour in Australia – in short, people like me.

Like Senator Faruqi, I am a migrant to Australia, albeit a Hindu from India – Pakistan’s closest neighbour and arch-nemesis. Like her, I too left India for the West in search of better opportunities and greater freedom. My journey first took me to continental Europe and the UK, and then via marriage to Australia in 2011.

But unlike Senator Faruqi, I see her win as a net loss for all Australians, migrants or otherwise.

It is not as if I don’t understand the unfairness of comments such as ‘go back to your country’ cause. I have faced them myself. Indeed, it is an easy grenade for an Anglo-Australian to throw at immigrants who may complain about the ‘state of affairs’ in Australia.

However, by staking her claim of racial discrimination on the Tweet that she did, Senator Faruqi has actually shown herself incapable of the very same graciousness, respect, and sensitivity that migrants would like to be treated with by Anglo-Australians.

Senator Faruqi used nice words to describe Australia in her (far more honest) inaugural speech when she was first elected to the NSW Parliament in 2013. As she shared, she has benefited enormously from her migration from a patriarchal, oppressive, undemocratic, and unequal Pakistan to modern Australia.

To quote her, Australia is ‘an inclusive, democratic, pluralist society which seeks to provide opportunity for all who live here; a society in which our achievements may only be limited by the scale of our determination, and the scope of our imagination’.

However, if Australia is such a society – it didn’t come out of nowhere. It has come about because Anglo-Australians built the foundations of this modern democratic, pluralistic, and inclusive Australia to which Senator Faruqi migrated to and found incredible success in.

Unfortunately, despite benefiting from the pluralism and inclusiveness of Anglo-Australians, she fundamentally fails to understand what it takes to be so.

Australia succeeds as an inclusive, pluralistic society when we choose to respect the feelings and backgrounds of our compatriots.

But it fails when we choose to make gratuitous attacks on other people’s backgrounds, histories, and feelings, and take pleasure in their hurt.

That is what Senator Faruqi chose to do with her Tweet.

Regardless of our feelings about the British Empire, we would all agree that Queen Elizabeth herself was a woman of exemplary character, whose reign was largely marked by the peaceful disintegration of the Empire not its expansion.

Of course, Senator Faruqi would claim her Tweet was on behalf of Aboriginal Australians, and it was aimed less at the late Queen herself, and more than the erstwhile Empire she represented.

There are two reasons why this does not fly muster.

One of the most under-appreciated things about the Voice debate was that both the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ cases were prosecuted by highly educated and articulate Aboriginal Australians.

Aboriginal Australians already have a diverse array of leaders to fight their corner – they don’t need Senator Faruqi to speak for them.

Nor does it absolve her of the need to acknowledge how handsomely she has benefited from the Empire.

The Pakistan she migrated from had largely been ruled by Mughal and Sikh emperors (before the British arrived), and none of their ‘absolute’ monarchs of note were women. There was no universal suffrage, no democracy, no universal private ownership of property, and no councils or parliaments you could be elected to. You lived and died by your Monarch’s whim!

While this does not discount the economic vandalism of the East India Company and the British Empire after that – the very fact that Pakistan has struggled to deliver a democratic, pluralistic, free, open society shows that it takes more than ‘autonomy’ to build the kind of society where families like the Faruqis can thrive.

It also takes culture – a culture that sees beyond tribal interests.

It takes modesty, graciousness, a willingness to forgive and forget, and to know when to press in with your demands and grievances and when to just let people be.

Senator Faruqi showed none of those qualities in her Tweet.

Instead, she knowingly set out to provoke and hurt the Anglo-Australians who (rightly or wrongly) mourned the death of their largely benign monarch – and Senator Hanson took the bait.

Ms Faruqi thinks she has empowered minorities by her win.

The truth is she has just drawn Australian society a little closer to the Pakistani society she escaped from – a society where pugilistic and tribal ill-will trumps universal humanity.

We are all poorer for that.

Chetna Mahadik is a writer in Melbourne.