Australian Politician DNS Redirect, 15 January 2021

Pauline Hanson’s website redirected to refugee council site

Ms Hanson’s mistake of allowing her DNS registration to lapse has complicated fixing the link

Source: Pauline Hanson’s website redirected to refugee council site | SBS News
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Visitors to the website paulinehanson.com.au are being redirected to the Refugee Council of Australia website, a not-for-profit organisation advocating for the rights of refugees.

The Refugee Council of Australia says they have no involvement in the purchase of the domain paulinehanson.com.au, which now redirects to their website.

“We had no knowledge of, or involvement with, this change to that web domain,” a spokesperson for the Council said in a statement.

Paulinehanson.com.au was never the politician’s official website. Her official website, senatorhanson.com.au is still operational.

The domain name appears to have been updated on the 13th of January, with meme-page Brown Cardigan first pointing out the redirection.

Malcolm Burrows, who specialises in IT and intellectual property law at Dundas Lawyers, explains that Cybersquatting is the practice of registering or using a domain name in bad faith, usually with the aim of profiting from someone else’s trademark.

“However, whether or not merely redirecting a domain name to an otherwise unrelated caused-based website is considered use of the words as a trade mark is uncertain, and this may complicate Ms Hanson’s ability to correct the mistake of allowing her registration to lapse.