Agency: While about a quarter of Australia’s population is nonwhite, only about 6 percent of its Parliament is made up of members of minority groups. A debate over the lack of diversity has flared into the open.
When Tu Le, a young Australian lawyer with Vietnamese refugee parents who was set to be a Labor Party candidate for Parliament, was passed over for a white American-born woman, Le elected not to go away quietly. Instead, she and other young members of the political left began agitating for change in a Labor Party that casts itself as a bastion of diversity.
The Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, defended his party’s actions and said the white candidate who replaced Le was a migrant “success story.” But politicians from minority groups said they had experienced a political system that was quick to shut them out.
Quotable: “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. “It’s because people are not willing to step aside and actually make room for this representation.”
