[A young daughter of Vietnamese refugees was set to run for
Parliament. Then she was passed over for a white insider, and a debate over
cultural diversity flared into the open.]
By Yan Zhuang
Tu Le, a young Australian lawyer
who is the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, was set to become the opposition
Labor Party’s candidate for Parliament in one of Sydney’s most diverse
districts. She grew up nearby, works as an advocate for exploited migrant
workers and had the backing of the incumbent.
Then Ms. Le was passed over. The
leaders of the center-left party, which casts itself as a bastion of diversity,
instead chose a white American-born senator, Kristina Keneally, from Sydney’s
wealthy northeast to run for the safe Labor seat in the city’s impoverished
southwest.
But Ms. Le, unlike many before her,
did not go quietly. She and other young members of the political left have
pushed into the open a debate over the near absence of cultural diversity in
Australia’s halls of power, which has persisted even as the country has been
transformed by non-European migration.
While about a quarter of the
population is nonwhite, members of minority groups make up only about 6 percent
of the federal Parliament, according
to a 2018 study. That figure has barely budged since, leaving Australia far
behind comparable democracies like Britain, Canada and the United States.
In Australia, migrant communities
are often seen but not heard: courted for photo opportunities and as
fund-raising bases or voting blocs, but largely shut out of electoral power,
elected officials and party members said. Now, more are demanding change after
global reckonings on race like the Black Lives Matter movement and a pandemic
that has crystallized Australia’s class and racial inequalities.
“The Australia that I live in and
the one that I work in, Parliament, are two completely different worlds,” said
Mehreen Faruqi, a Greens party senator who in 2013 became Australia’s first
female Muslim member of Parliament. “And we now know why they are two
completely different worlds. It’s because people are not willing to step aside
and actually make room for this representation.”
The backlash has reached the
highest levels of the Labor Party, which is hoping to unseat Prime Minister
Scott Morrison in a federal election that must be held by May.
The Labor leader, Anthony Albanese,
faced criticism when he held up the white senator, Ms. Keneally, 52, as a
migrant “success story” because she had been born in the United
States. Some party members called the comment tone deaf, a charge they also
leveled at former Prime Minister Paul Keating after he said local candidates “would take years to scramble”
to Ms. Keneally’s “level of executive ability, if they can ever get there at
all.”
Ms. Keneally, one of the Labor
Party’s most senior members, told a radio interviewer that she had “made a
deliberate decision” to seek the southwestern Sydney seat. She did so, she
said, because it represents an overlooked community that had “never had a local
member who sits at the highest level of government, at a senior level at the cabinet
table, and I think they deserve that.”
She plans to move to the district,
she said. In the Australian political system, candidates for parliamentary
seats are decided either by party leaders or through an internal vote of party
members from that district. Candidates do not have to live in the district they
seek to represent.
When contacted for comment, Ms.
Keneally’s office referred The New York Times to previous media interviews.
Chris Hayes, the veteran lawmaker
who is vacating the southwestern Sydney seat, said he had endorsed Ms. Le
because of her deep connections with the community.
“It would be sensational to be able
to not only say that we in Labor are the party of multiculturalism, but to
actually show it in our faces,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
in March
Ms. Le, 30, said she believed the
party leadership sidelined her because it saw her as a “tick-the-box exercise”
instead of a viable contender.
As an outsider, “the system was
stacked against me,” she said. “I haven’t ‘paid my dues,’ I haven’t ‘served my
time’ or been in with the faceless men or factional bosses for years.”
What she finds especially
disappointing about Labor’s decision, she said, is the message it sends: that
the party takes for granted the working-class and migrant communities it relies
on for votes.
Australia has not experienced the
same sorts of fights over political representation that have resulted in
growing electoral clout for minority groups in other countries, said Tim
Soutphommasane, a former national racial discrimination commissioner, in part
because it introduced a “top down” policy of multiculturalism in the 1970s.
That has generated recognition of
minority groups, though often in the form of “celebratory” multiculturalism, he
said, that uses food and cultural festivals as stand-ins for genuine
engagement.
When ethnic minorities get involved
in Australian politics, they are often pushed to become their communities’ de
facto representatives — expected to speak on multiculturalism issues, or
relegated to recruiting party members from the same cultural background — and
then are punished for supposedly not having broader appeal.
“The expectation from inside the
parties as well as the community is that you’re there to represent the
minority, the small portion of your community that’s from the same ethnic
background as you,” said Elizabeth Lee, a Korean Australian who is the leader
of the Australian Capital Territory’s Liberal Party. “It’s very hard to break
through that mold.”
Many ethnically diverse candidates
never make it to Parliament because their parties do not put them in winnable
races, said Peter Khalil, a Labor member of Parliament.
During his own election half a
decade ago, he was told to shave his goatee because it made him “look like a
Muslim,” he said. (Mr. Khalil is a Coptic Christian.)
“They want to bleach you, whiten
you,” he added, “because there’s a fear that you’ll scare people off.”
In the Australian political system,
the displacement of a local candidate by a higher-ranking party insider is not
unusual. Mr. Morrison was chosen to run for a seat in 2007 after a more popular
Lebanese Australian candidate, Michael Towke, said he was forced to withdraw by leaders of the
center-right Liberal Party.
Ms. Keneally moved to the safe
Labor seat, with the backing of party leaders, because she was in danger of
losing her current seat. Her backers also note that she has been endorsed by a
handful of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Middle Eastern community leaders.
Joseph Haweil, 32, the mayor of a
municipality in Melbourne and a Labor Party member, said that as a political
aspirant from a refugee background, he saw in the controversy over Ms. Le a
glimpse of his possible future. Mr. Haweil is Assyrian, a minority group from
the Middle East.
“You can spend years and years
doing the groundwork, the most important thing in politics — assisting local
communities, understanding your local community with a view to help them as a
public policy maker — and that’s not still enough to get you over the line,” he
said.
Osmond Chiu, 34, a party member who
is Chinese Australian, said “the message it sent was that culturally diverse
representation is an afterthought in Labor, and it will always be sacrificed
whenever it is politically inconvenient.”
Ms. Le spoke out in a way that
others in the past have avoided, perhaps to preserve future political
opportunities. She said that she was uncertain what she would do next, but that
she hoped political parties would now think twice before making a decision like
the one that shut her out.
“It’s definitely tapped into
something quite uncomfortable to discuss, but I think it needs to be out in the
open,” she said. “I don’t think people will stand for it anymore.”
