CANBERRA – Amid escalating row over racism in Australia, Pakistan-born Mehreen Faruqi has joined the Australian senate as the first female Muslim member.
The Green Party member parliament for New South Wales was appointed by the senate to fill the vacancy on Wednesday.
https://twitter.com/AuSenate/status/1029608464551567362
Talking to BBC, the newly elected senator said that Australia’s future would be “stronger for our diversity”. She vowed to fight for a “positive future for Australia where we are stronger for our diversity” as senator.
Faruqi, who is set to take oath for new position next week, migrated to Australia from Pakistan in 1992. She is an academic by profession but also have a doctorate degree in envirnmental engineering.
https://twitter.com/MehreenFaruqi/status/1029956298631143424
She was also the first Muslim woman to achieve any political office in Australia after being elected to the state parliament in 2013.
In her leaving speech to the NSW parliament on Tuesday, she opened up about enduring “toxic, racist and sexist trolling” in her time as an MP “not because of what I’m doing but because of who I am, where I come from, and the colour of my skin”.
She was also among the prominent critics of Fraser Anning’s use of the Holocaust-associated term. Faruqi said that Anning had “spat in the face of millions of Australians, spewing hate and racism” in his first speech to parliament on Tuesday.
“I’m a Muslim migrant, I’m about to be a Senator and there’s not a damn thing Fraser Anning can do about it,” she wrote in an article for website Junkee on Wednesday.
The article was originally published by BBC.
