From Escaping Conflict to Getting Engaged in Just 10 Days: Meet Parliament's Freshest Faces

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Australia’s federal parliament has welcomed almost 40 new parliamentarians, including an ex mortuary worker, former diplomat posted to Afghanistan and the son of Palestinian refugees who fled war as a child.

The May election brought to Canberra greater numbers of women — with 112 women across the two houses now just slightly trailing men at 114 — and people from diverse cultural backgrounds.

There are now eight First Nations politicians, an increase of two from the last parliament.

As the dust settled on the first sitting fortnight, SBS News spoke to five new senators and MPs. Here’s what we found out.

Senator for SA Charlotte Walker

Australia’s youngest senator, Charlotte Walker, thinks her perspective makes her particularly qualified for the job, after an unlikely win in the third spot on Labor’s ticket in South Australia.

The 21-year-old has gone from uploading make-up tutorials to sitting in parliament and chatting policy while playing Minecraft to reach electorally important younger voters.

“Obviously, I am younger than my colleagues, it’s no secret, but I’ve still got my own experiences, and I think that my experience shouldn’t be devalued just because of my age,” she told SBS News.

That experience includes growing up in the country town of Yankallila, where she witnessed a domestic violence crisis and recalled seeing children miss class in primary school due to fights going on at home or parents fleeing abusive relationships.

A young woman in a white tshirt and black blazer smiling as she sits on an orange couch.

Charlotte Walker is Australia’s youngest senator. Source: SBS News / Rania Yallop

Walker says that, outside of government funding for services, there needs to be an shift in attitudes to domestic and family violence and encourages Australians to call out unacceptable behaviour by friends or family.

“It might have just been a friendly joke, and there wasn’t any bad intention there, but we really need to be calling people out when we see things like this. That’s where it starts,” she said.

Promising to advocate for the interests of fellow young Australians, she said: “we hear you and we will act on your demands for a better future.”

Last week, Walker cited young people’s fears of finding a rental property or being able to afford moving out of their childhood homes and said climate change wasn’t “a matter of faith or belief” for young people but “hard fact”.

Senator for NSW Jess Collins

Liberal senator Jess Collins insists suggestions women in the Coalition face a glass cliff or are put in unwinnable seats “is a total myth”.

She highlights the number of “amazing female candidates”, arguing the NSW branch would have been “close to gender parity” if the party had done better at the election.

In a first speech that drew several laughs, Collins revealed she got engaged to now-husband Ben only 10 days after their first date — although she did note they had been friends for decades beforehand.

A blonde woman in a navy suit, sitting on an orange couch.

Liberal senator Jess Collins says there is no “glass ceiling” for women in the party. Source: SBS News / James Smillie

After having four children in as many years, her time as a stay-at-home mum has informed her passion for recognising the “contribution of the family”, including changes to the tax system.

She said we need to “flip the script” on childcare subsidies, suggesting that — instead of pumping billions into the subsidy system — the government should make fees for child care while a parent is at work tax deductible.

“When you lodge a tax return at the end of the year, you can apply all of your childcare fees against the money that you earned, and that’ll effectively bring down the tax that you pay,” she told SBS News.

With a PhD in anthropology and fond memories of her research visits to Papua New Guinea, Collins would like to see development aid programs trickle down more effectively to people on the ground.

She emphasised the importance of links from “community to community, rather than government to government”.

The New Zealand-born senator is close to fulfilling another dream.

Collins hopes to acquire her first set of footy boots soon, enthusiastically telling SBS she played touch footy for the second time in her life with colleagues on a dewy Canberra morning during the first sitting week.

Banks MP Zhi Soon

Zhi Soon still finds it “a bit surreal” to sit in the chamber as the MP for the Sydney seat of Banks, having won the seat — held by the Liberals since 2013 — on his second go.

The Malaysian-born former diplomat, previously stationed in Afghanistan, is inspired to apply lessons learned from other countries and make Australia “an education superpower”.

Currently looking at early childhood options for eight-month-old daughter Dorothy, he is passionate about “making sure that every child in this country can access mobile childhood education right through to schooling from primary school to secondary school”.

A man in a black suit, sits smiling on an orange couch.

Banks MP Zhi Soon is passionate about education access. Source: SBS News / Rania Yallop

He says Australia can learn from the likes of South Korea, Singapore and Finland.

While Soon was elected to a suburban Sydney electorate, he’s no stranger to getting his hands dirty, with his in-laws often putting him to work on the farm.

“A bit of everything, from feeding potty lambs to chipping burrs [removing weeds], mending fences and helping out with drenching [giving sheep medication to prevent parasites], is pretty commonplace when I go out there,” he said.

In his first speech, Soon said multiculturalism is more than a word. Elaborating to SBS News, he recalled different families that have treated his “with such warmth”.

“It’s about bringing people together, no matter what background you come from and being able to share that culture with each other”.

This included food, and he said he grew up on Lebanese kibbeh.

Calwell MP Basem Abdo

New father Basem Abdo brought home his son Noah on election day, 3 May, a joy compounded by keeping the Victorian seat of Calwell in Labor’s hands after a tight race that involved 13 candidates.

While his focus is steadfast on his community, he finds being separated from the four-month-old tough, but says he has unlocked a new skill: “sleeping standing up”.

In an emotional first speech, Abdo shared several trials, from leaving Kuwait in 1990 at the outbreak of the First Gulf War to more recently, losing his mother.

Basem Adbo has experienced the effects of war first-hand. Source: SBS News / Rania Yallop

His memories of buildings shaking and taping windows, as well as being “confronted by Israeli occupation” during a 2011 visit to the the occupied West Bank, inform his advice to colleagues about war.

“When we turn off our television screens, those things are still happening. And it’s incumbent on all of us to consider that and to consider the long-term view of things when we’re trying to reshape things,” he told SBS News.

Abdo says he will champion issues of his community inside the private caucus process, including Palestinian statehood, which he views as more than symbolic.

“It’s the right of self-determination. I would view it as a right, not as just symbolism,” he said.

The first MP of Palestinian heritage represents a diverse electorate, with one in four residents Muslim.

He looks forward to tackling economic challenges important to his community, including aligning “skills policy with the jobs of the future”.

“It’s not just for young people coming out of high school, it’s also people in middle age [who are] going to reskill. As we transition the economy, we don’t want a generation gap,” he said.

Barton MP Ash Ambihaipaher

The young lawyer, who won the safe Labor seat of Barton in Sydney, is proud to have been raised by a diverse community from her Tamil Sri Lankan uncle, Thiru, to an Italian family that taught her to “brine olives, make salami and roast chestnuts”.

She used her inaugural speech to recognise how much Barton has changed, highlighting that Australia’s first prime minister Edmund Barton, for whom the seat is named, championed the White Australia policy, while over half of the seat’s residents are now born overseas.

“I think pointing it out was just to illustrate that we as a community, nationally, Australia has evolved, and that’s okay, and it’s about learning from the past,” she told SBS News.

The seat was previously held by former minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney, who retired from parliament at the election.

Ambihaipaher describes being “personally devastated” by the failure of the Voice to Parliament referendum.

However, she thinks a lack of information and understanding within her community highlights an opportunity to bridge an education gap about “what we’re trying to achieve”.

A woman smiling in a parliamentary hallway, wearing a spotted blouse with a black blazer.

Ash Ambihaipaher says she “lives and breathes multiculturalism”. Source: SBS News / Rania Yallop

“If we don’t fill that gap with education and truth-telling and talking about what has happened, then we’ve lost. We’re already on the back foot in that sense,” she said.

Adding later, “I think we end up living in little silos, and I think it’s important that any representative should be a conduit to make sure that people understand each other’s issues.”

Chatting to SBS amid the chaos of the first parliamentary fortnight, Ambihaipaher recalls “finding peace” and moments of reflection in a previous job, working in a mortuary.

“When there’s a lot going on in in this world you do reflect on those times when you’re in the mortuary, it’s very quiet. You’ve just got this little crackling radio in the background. It is a very peaceful place,” she said.