List of Asian Australian politicians

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In 1966, Lebanese-Australian Country Party MP Bob Katter Sr. became the first person of known Asian ancestry to sit in the Parliament of Australia

This list of Asian Australian politicians includes Asian Australians — that is, Australians belonging to an ethnic group of Asia, who can attribute part or all of their ancestry to Asia — who have been members of Australian federal, state, or territory legislatures. It is limited to official representatives at these levels, and as such excludes councilors and mayors (such as John So and Katrina Fong Lim), Governors and Governors-General (such as Marie Bashir and Hieu Van Le), leaders of non-parliamentary parties (such as Andrea Leong), Asian Australians actively involved in political institutions (such as Tim Soutphommasane and Tarang Chawla), and candidates who lost their bids for election.

Throughout Australian history, dating back to the White Australia policy and subsequent racism in Australia, there have been significant barriers restricting people of Asian ancestry from participating in Australian politics. Despite Australia's proximity to Asia, as well as the significant and increasing minority of Australians belonging to an Asian ethnicity,[1][2] the Australian Parliament is considered to be particularly under-representative of its Asian constituents in comparison to other settler societies.[3][4]

The first Asian Australian community to attain political representation was the Lebanese Australian community, who overcame some race-based discrimination in Australia due to their shared Christian religious beliefs.[5] Alexander Alam was perhaps the first Lebanese-Australian legislator, entering the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1925 and serving for 43 years.[6] Australians of East and South Asian descent began to enter politics in the 1980s: Japanese-Australian Rob Lucas MLC,[7] Indian-Australian Anne Warner MLA,[8] and Chinese-Australian Helen Sham-Ho MLC[9] were among the earliest.

Federal Parliament[]

19 Asian Australian people have been members of the Parliament of Australia (the Federal Parliament), including nine in the Senate and ten in the House of Representatives. The most common represented ethnicities are Chinese Australian (nine), Lebanese Australian (four), and Indian Australian (three). There are eight incumbent Asian Australian parliamentarians as of 2021.

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by with reliable sources.
Name Party Chamber Constituency Ethnicity Term start Term end Ref
Bob Katter, Sr.   National House Kennedy (Qld) Lebanese/British 26 November 1966 19 February 1990 [10]
Irina Dunn   NDP Senate New South Wales Macanese Chinese/European 21 July 1988 30 June 1990 [11]
Daryl Melham   Labor House Banks (NSW) Lebanese 24 March 1990 7 September 2013 [12]
Bill O'Chee   National Senate Queensland Chinese/Irish 8 May 1990 30 June 1999 [13]
Bob Katter, Jr.[a]   KAP House Kennedy (Qld) Lebanese/British 13 March 1993 incumbent [10]
Tsebin Tchen   Liberal Senate Victoria Chinese 1 July 1999 30 June 2005 [15]
Michael Johnson   Liberal House Ryan (Qld) Chinese/British (born in Hong Kong) 10 November 2001 21 August 2010 [16]
Penny Wong   Labor Senate South Australia Hakka/British (born in Malaysia) 1 July 2002 incumbent [17]
Gai Brodtmann   Labor House Canberra (ACT) Chinese/European 21 August 2010 11 April 2019 [18]
Ken Wyatt   Liberal House Hasluck (WA) Indian/Indigenous Australian/European 21 August 2010 incumbent [19]
Lisa Singh   Labor Senate Tasmania Indo-Fijian/English 1 July 2011 30 June 2019 [20]
Mehmet Tillem   Labor Senate Victoria Turkish 21 August 2013 30 June 2014 [21]
Sam Dastyari   Labor Senate New South Wales Iranian-Azeri and Mazanderani 21 August 2013 25 January 2018 [22]
Ian Goodenough   Liberal House Moore (WA) Malaysian Chinese/European (born in Singapore) 7 September 2013 incumbent [23]
Michael Sukkar   Liberal House Deakin (Vic.) Lebanese/European 7 September 2013 incumbent [24]
Dio Wang   PUP Senate Western Australia Chinese 1 July 2014 2 July 2016 [25]
Mehreen Faruqi   Greens Senate New South Wales Pakistani 15 August 2018 incumbent [26]
Gladys Liu   Liberal House Chisholm (Vic.) Chinese (born in Hong Kong) 18 May 2019 incumbent [27]
Dave Sharma   Liberal House Wentworth (NSW) Indo-Caribbean/British 18 May 2019 incumbent [28]

Legislative Assembly for the Australian Capital Territory[]

In 2020, Korean-Australian Liberal Party MLA Elizabeth Lee became the Opposition Leader of the ACT

Parliament of New South Wales[]

Parliament of the Northern Territory[]

In 2020, Chinese-Australian and Indigenous Australian Labor Party MLA Ngaree Ah Kit became the Speaker of the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly

Parliament of Queensland[]

Parliament of South Australia[]

In 1997 (and 2018), Japanese-Australian Liberal Party MLC Rob Lucas became the Treasurer of South Australia

Parliament of Tasmania[]

Parliament of Victoria[]

In 1999, Lebanese-Australian Labor Party MP Steve Bracks became the Premier of Victoria

Parliament of Western Australia[]

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ While Katter attracted media attention in 2018 for "resent[ing] strongly" the description of his grandfather as Lebanese,[14] he does not contest that his grandfather was born in Lebanon with Lebanese ancestry.
  1. ^ "What "Asian" really means in the Census". NewsComAu. June 28, 2017.
  2. ^ "Australia's Growing Asian Minority: The Impact on Foreign Policy - AIIA".
  3. ^ Pietsch, Juliet (May 4, 2017). "Explaining the political under-representation of Asian Australians: geographical concentration and voting patterns". Political Science. 69 (2): 161–174. doi:10.1080/00323187.2017.1345283 – via Taylor and Francis+NEJM.
  4. ^ "The under-representation of Asian-Australians: political order and political delay". February 24, 2021.
  5. ^ Ahmed, Aliya (2015). "How did the White Australia Policy affect the constructed identities of immigrants coming from Greater Syria to Australia between the 1890s to the 1940s?". University of Melbourne Archives.
  6. ^ "ALEXANADER & THERESE ALAM". Australian Lebanese Historical Society. 18 February 2015.
  7. ^ Richardson, Tom (27 February 2015). "Tears flow as Lucas tells of mother's journey". InDaily.
  8. ^ Armbruster, Stefan (30 October 2020). "India-born candidates hope to break 25-year drought in Queensland parliament". SBS Punjabi.
  9. ^ Fernandes, Andrea (17 April 2007). "Helen Sham-Ho". NSW Migration Heritage Centre.
  10. ^ a b Pringle, Helen (August 27, 2018). "Bob Katter and the colour of Australian law". ABC Religion & Ethics. [Carlyle Assad Khittar] was born on 21 August 1881 at Bosyrie (Bcharre) in Mount Lebanon in Assyria... the Governor-General's Secretary informed the young man: "It appears from your Statutory Declaration that you are a native of Syria."
  11. ^ "Senator Irina Dunn, Environment Independents policies for the Federal Election 1990". Parliament of Australia. 1990. Irina Dunn was born in Shanghai, China. Her mother was a Russian émigré and her father, a journalist, was Irish and Macanese (Macau Portuguese/Chinese) in origin.
  12. ^ McWilliams, Evelyn (December 1993). "Daryl Melham, MP" (PDF). Reform. His father migrated to Australia from Lebanon in 1926 at the age of twelve and worked in Panania as a bootmaker and market gardener. On a return visit to Lebanon he married and brought his wife back to Panania.
  13. ^ "O'CHEE, William George (1965– )Senator for Queensland, 1990–99 (National Party of Australia)". The Biographical Dictionary of the Australian Senate. 2017. Bill O’Chee was an unconventional parliamentarian: at twenty-four years of age he was the youngest person to sit in the Senate, the first with Chinese ancestry to be elected to the federal Parliament... the eldest of three children of Chinese-born William O’Chee and his wife, Australian-born Theresa Josephine, née O’Brien.
  14. ^ SBS News (14 August 2018). "The explosive press conference where Bob Katter defends Fraser Anning's 'Final Solution' speech". Facebook.
  15. ^ Yang, Samuel (December 10, 2019). "Tributes flow for first Chinese-born federal parliamentarian after fatal car accident". ABC News (Australia). Australian politicians and the Chinese-Australian community have paid tribute to former senator Tsebin Tchen, the first Chinese-born federal parliamentarian
  16. ^ Davis, Mark (May 19, 2010). "A Queenslander with a thirst for networking overseas". The Sydney Morning Herald. with a British father and a mother from the Chinese province of Guangzhou, he was the first member of the House of Representatives with Chinese heritage.
  17. ^ "Meet Penny Wong, the jewel of Malaysia in Australia politics". Kitson Migration Advisory. October 9, 2018. Being born in Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, she was the elder child to her Australian mother [and] Malaysian father who was of Chinese Hakka origin.
  18. ^ Brodtmann, Gai (25 June 2012). "HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS: Chinese Australians SPEECH". Commonwealth of Australia Parliamentary Debates. My father's mother's family came out from China to Australia during the 1850s as part of the gold rush in Ballarat. Members of my family on my father's father's side also came from Germany in the 1850s, when there was a huge influx of Germans making the voyage to Australia's shores. My mother's family came out from Ireland and Scotland in the late 1800s.
  19. ^ Hills, Ben (2015). "The barefoot kid from the bush". SBS News. In fact, his mother, Mona Abdullah, gets her surname from an ancestor who migrated from India to be a cameleer, laying the trans-Australia telegraph line. She has both Noongar (Ken’s tribal robe) and Wongi bloodlines. His father, Donald, nearly two metres tall and built like an ox, was from the Yamatji people. There is also some Irish and English in the family tree.
  20. ^ Kumar, Vivek (9 September 2020). "Indian diaspora in Australia continues to amaze, says Lisa Singh". SBS Hindi. The granddaughter of an Indo-Fijian member of the Parliament of Fiji, Ms Singh says Indian diaspora in Australia continues to amaze.
  21. ^ "Former Victorian senator Mehmet Tillem dies after long illness". The Sydney Morning Herald. November 10, 2019. The Turkish-born former senator moved to Australia when he was two and joined the Labor Party when he was 19.
  22. ^ Varnham O'Regan, Sylvia (12 December 2017). "First Day: Iranian migrant and Labor politician Sam Dastyari". SBS News. In the 1970s, a young Iranian couple made the decision to hide out in a small town on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. Left-wing and pro-democracy engineering students, Naser and Ella had been expelled from university in Tehran for joining the Iranian revolution and feared the wrath of the country's repressive regime. Speaking from an office in central Sydney, their son Sam, now a high-profile Labor senator...
  23. ^ "The changing face of Australian politics". SBS News. 5 April 2014. Of mixed English, Portuguese and Malaysian-Chinese heritage, Mr Goodenough is just one of a handful of overseas-born federal politicians.
  24. ^ Sukkar, Michael (18 November 2013). "Maiden Speech". www.michaelsukkar.com.au. My father was a migrant who came to Australia at the age of 18 in 1966, from Bcharre, a small farming town in the Maronite Christian region of Lebanon.
  25. ^ Barrett, Jonathan (6 June 2015). "PUP's lone senator Dio Wang goes out on a limb". Australian Financial Review. Palmer United Party's (PUP) sole remaining senator, Chinese-born Dio Wang...
  26. ^ Faruqi, Mehreen (2013). "INAUGURAL SPEECH OF DR MEHREEN FARUQI" (PDF). Parliament of New South Wales. This all seems though quite far removed from the Pakistan that I grew up in... When I left Pakistan, I arrived in Australia with just my husband, my one-year-old son, and two suitcases.
  27. ^ Cadzow, Jane (January 31, 2020). "Pawn or player? The competing narratives about controversial Liberal MP Gladys Liu". The Sydney Morning Herald. Liu sometimes refers to herself as Australia’s first Chinese-born MP, though in fact she was born in Hong Kong in 1964, when it was still a British colony. Her parents had moved there from the southern Chinese province of Guangdong, where they were poor farmers.
  28. ^ Hutton, James (January 21, 2020). "Dave Sharma... The Comeback King". The Beast. [Sharma's father is] Indian, but he’s Diaspora Indian. His parents came from India. He was born in Trinidad and Tobago in the West Indies, in the Caribbean... His dad was a Hindu priest, a Brahmin priest.
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