And her message about multicultural Australia was met with cheers from public galleries filled with more colours and creeds than have ever made it to the floor of the House of Representatives.
“I thought that what best represents me and the Australian story is the Australian flag and a Vietnamese dress,which is my heritage,” Le toldThe Sydney Morning Herald andThe Age afterwards.
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“I’m somebody who has embraced both the Australian culture and the Vietnamese culture and that’s what I want to celebrate – the multicultural Australia that we have here. And that’s me,and that’s why I wore the dress.”
Born in Vietnam in 1968,Le spent several years in refugee camps before arriving in Australia with her mother and siblings in 1979. She became a journalist and,later,a city councillor in Fairfield in western Sydney. She stormed into parliament in the May election with ashock defeat for Labor and its candidate,former NSW premier Kristina Keneally.
Le’s speech included an account of her escape from Vietnam by boat – “all I could hear was a storm,terrified we couldn’t survive because none of us could swim” – and her decision to run (unsuccessfully) as a Liberal candidate for NSW parliament in 2008 and then become an independent councillor for a decade.
She also spoke of her dismay at state government orders during the COVID-19 pandemic that kept the residents of western Sydney in their homes.