A woman who turned 21 on the day of Australia’s federal election in May has been declared the nation’s youngest ever senator.
And like many female candidates who run for election in Australia, Charlotte Walker wasn’t expected to win.
The former union official won the governing center-left Labour Party’s third Senate seat for South Australia state in a complicated rank order voting system. A party’s third choice rarely wins.
She had the lowest vote count of the six newly elected senators for the state. The Australian Electoral Commission officially declared the poll Tuesday.
The new job will be a “big adjustment,” said Walker, who starts her six-year term July 1. A federal lawmaker’s base salary is more than 205,000 Australian dollars ($133,000) annually.
“There’s a few feelings. Obviously, there’s a lot of pressure,” Walker told Australian Broadcasting Corp. after the results were announced late Monday.
“I want to do a good job for South Australians, but I also want to show young people, particularly young women, that this is achievable and this is something that they can do also. I’m also really excited. Not many people my age get to … go to Canberra and have the ability to contribute in the way that I will,” she added.
Previous young lawmakers
Before Walker, the youngest senator was Jordon Steele-John of the Greens party, who was elected for Western Australia state in 2017 at the age of 23.
Australia’s youngest-ever federal lawmaker was Wyatt Roy, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2010 at the age of 20. He lasted two three-year terms before he was voted out of his Queensland state seat.
Large swings at elections as occurred May 3 typically bring a larger proportion of women into the Parliament in seats that their parties hadn’t realistically expected to win. Often the newcomers lose their seats when votes swing back at the next election.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expects 57 percent of Labor lawmakers in the Senate and House of Representatives will be women when the new Parliament first sits on July 22. The proportion of women was 52 percent during Albanese’s first term in government.
Australian governments usually lose seats in their second term. Albanese leads the first federal government not to lose a single seat at an election since 1966. Labor is expected to hold 94 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives, up from 78 in the last Parliament.
Australian National University political historian Frank Bongiorno said unexpected swings can put women candidates into Parliament after seeking apparently unwinnable seats .
But Bongiorno said Labor had been working on increasing women’s representation since the party introduced a quota in 1994 that stated 35 percent of candidates in winnable seats had to be female.
“The fact that we now have not 50 percent, but 57 percent is partly a function of obviously just the size of the swing, but it is also, I think, very deliberate changes that have occurred within the Labour Party over about 30 years from what was a very male-dominated culture and environment,” Bongiorno said.
The odds had been stacked against Walker being elected as her party’s third choice in South Australia, Bongiorno said.
Australia’s new youngest senator elected at 21 with unexpected win
https://arab.news/5u7xn
Australia’s new youngest senator elected at 21 with unexpected win
Top entertainment figures back under-fire UN Palestinians expert
PARIS: Over a hundred top figures from the world of entertainment signed an open letter Saturday in support of UN Palestinian human rights expert Francesca Albanese who faces calls to resign over comments about the war in Gaza.
France and Germany have called for Albanese to step down over remarks last weekend in which she referred to a “common enemy of humanity” after criticizing “most of the world” and the media for enabling Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza.
Critics and Israel have accused the UN Special Rapporteur of referring to Israel as a “common enemy,” while Albanese has denounced this as a “manipulation” and “completely false.”
In a letter organized by the Artists for Palestine group and shared with AFP, over a 100 cultural figures backed her, including actors Mark Ruffalo and Javier Bardem, Nobel-winning author Annie Ernaux and British musician Annie Lennox.
The signatories “offer our full support to Francesca Albanese, a defender of human rights and therefore also of the Palestinian people’s right to exist,” the letter says.
“There are infinitely more of us, in every corner of the Earth, who want force no longer to be the law. Who know what the word ‘law’ truly means,” it concludes.
Published in French on the website of Artists for Palestine, it also reproduces the full remarks by Albanese who was speaking via videoconference at a forum last Saturday organized by the Al Jazeera TV network.
Other celebrities to offer support for her include actresses Rosa Salazar and Asia Argento, Oscar-nominated film directors Yorgos Lanthimos and Kaouther Ben Hania, Latin music star Residente, and photographer Nan Goldin.
A group of French MPs sent a letter to French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot on Tuesday denouncing Albanese’s remarks as “antisemitic.”
Barrot called for her to step down a day later, saying that France “unreservedly condemns the outrageous and reprehensible remarks.”
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul on Thursday said her position was “untenable.”
‘Shame of our time’
Albanese is one of the most outspoken critics of Israel’s more-than-two-year bombardment of Gaza which has resulted in the deaths of over 70,000 people and the destruction of most of the territory’s infrastructure.
She has called it the “the shame of our time” and says she always asks prime ministers, presidents and foreign ministers the same question: “How do you sleep? When will you act?“
The Italian-born legal expert, who began her unpaid role in 2022, was targeted with sanctions by the Trump administration in July last year over what it called her “biased and malicious” work.
UN special rapporteurs like Albanese are independent experts who are appointed by the UN rights council, but do not speak on behalf of the United Nations.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres distanced himself from Albanese on Thursday when his spokesman said “we don’t agree with much of what she says.”
“We wouldn’t use the language that she’s using in describing the situation,” his spokesman Stephane Dujarric added.
The Gaza war was sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, which resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people.
On that day, militants abducted 251 people into Gaza.
The open letter and signatories can be seen here.
