Despite its Aboriginal roots and a large Asian population, Australia’s politics are almost exclusively white with just a handful of ethnic minority candidates in this month’s elections.
Australia’s diversity — from Outback townships to Sydney’s Chinatown and growing numbers of South and Southeast Asians — is poorly reflected in its leaders, who remain typically Caucasian, middle-aged and male.
Malaysian-born Senator Penny Wong is the government’s lone Asian face, while the candidates of both major parties include only half a dozen of obvious Asian ancestry, from a list of more than 300.
Labor’s Tauto Sansbury is the only Aboriginal candidate, highlighting the extent to which native Australians are sidelined.
“I’m doing this to try and create a lot more interest from the Aboriginal community that we have a place in politics and that there should be more people like myself running for politics,” he said.
Australia’s history is steeped in Asian immigration, from Gold Rush Chinese miners and Japanese pearl-divers of the late 1800s, to Vietnamese refugees and Chinese students given residency after the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
More recently, large numbers of Chinese and Indian students have settled here, along with smaller groups of Indonesian, Timorese, Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum-seekers, pushing Australia’s Asian population to about 10 percent.
Liberal candidate John Nguyen exemplifies the trend, after fleeing Vietnam on a rickety boat aged five and arriving in Australia via a Malaysian refugee camp in 1980.
Nguyen, who is standing in Melbourne’s ethnically diverse seat of Chisholm, said a less monochrome government could help Australia’s standing in the region, where it is often regarded as white-dominated and anti-immigration.
“I know a lot of people from Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong. They still talk about the Pauline Hanson episode, which is quite unfortunate,” he said. “They say Australia is a country that is not tolerant of migrants, which is totally untrue because Australia is a country of migrants.”
In 1996, Hanson was elected to parliament on an anti-immigration platform, and told the lower house that Australia was in danger of being “swamped by Asians” in her maiden speech.
The country also suffers from memories of the “White Australia” policy, which restricted Asian immigration until the mid-1970s.
Recently, hundreds of attacks on students from India outraged that country’s media, while both Labor and the Liberals have promised tough policies to stop the scores of refugee boats that have arrived this year.
Labor candidate Joy Banerji — who became the nation’s first Indian-born city mayor in 2004 — said it would take time for the various waves of migrants to reach the political classes.
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