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The days of the Australian Labor Party being dictated by pale, stale and male career bureaucrats are over!
This follows the news that the Las Vegas-born immigrant Kristina Keneally is set to run the ball up for lower house as an ALP candidate for Western Sydney.
After twenty years of politickin’ in and out of different NSW Labor factions, the former Bradbury NSW Premier yesterday confirmed her plans to oust the Fowler Electorate’s current Vietnamese-Australian candidate from pre-selection – and give the immigrants the opportunity to vote for one of their own.
The move sparked further backlash from Labor MP Anne Aly and multiculturalism advocate Osmond Chiu, who have led a grassroots push to have a Labor Party that runs candidates that look and talk like the people they want to vote for them – a bizarre political strategy which is known as ‘representation’.
However, supporters of Keneally say that these kinds of comments are nothing more than a hurtful attempt at erasing the Shadow Minister For Home Affairs’ true immigrant status.
Keneally’s immigrant story is very similar to the voters in her soon-to-be electorate, who are mostly first and second generation Vietnamese and Fijian immigrants.
In fact the similarities between fleeing the Viet Cong in a fishing boat and arriving here on an economy class flight from Boston are almost eery.
As a bright young American college student, the Senator met her husband Ben Keneally, who is also an Australian Labor politician, at World Youth Day 1991 in Poland. They married in Boston in 1996, where he held a position with the Boston Consulting Group, before returning to his native Australia in 1998. She renounced U.S. citizenship in 2002, prior to standing for election for NSW state parliament.
It’s this kind of diversity that many say will be key to Labor consolidating their hold on Western Sydney, especially when paired with the day trips Keneally plans to make to the electorate during campaign.
Her current address is listed as Scotland Island in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, a proud working class island community of retirees and tech millionaires situated in the Pittwater estuary right up next to Avalon.
And, it seems like she might already be in election mode, after arriving in Cabramatta for the first time today.
“Greetings, fellow immigrants” said Keneally, as she adjusted her Gucci lad cap and took a bite from one of these new types of sandwiches called a ‘banh mi’.
“I understand you people are sick of being trodden on… Well, so am I!”
“I say we stick it to these Liberal Party elites!”
