Aussie politicians court Chinese vote
MELBOURNE: Politicians courting Australia’s 1.2 million ethnicChinese citizens ahead of Saturday’s election are struggling to navigate a strikingly diverse community and fraught geopolitics.
The click-clack of mahjong tiles barely registers amid the din of chatter at the Box Hill senior citizens club here.
This band of elderly Australians gathered around the game tables are prime targets for politicians, who need to win every vote they can at the nailbiter May 18 election.
Chinese-Australians make up almost six per cent of the population, almost as many as Italianand Greek-Australians combined.
In the tightly contested Melbourne electorate of Chisholm, one in five households speak either Mandarin or Cantonese.
Responding to these changing demographics, the ruling Liberal party and its Labor challengers have run Chinese-Australian candidates. They have also turned to Chinese platforms like WeChat to get their message across.
At the next Parliament, Chisholm is all but certain to be represented by either Hong Kong-born Liberal Gladys Liu or the Taiwan-born Labor candidate Jennifer Yang.
“Their policies consider Chinese immigrants as one group and do not distinguish between those from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, et cetera,” 78-year-old William Lam said.
He approves of the equal treatment, but any sense of a single community can also mask vastly different life experiences and political preferences among the ethnic Chinese diaspora.
Some in the community arrived as students from China in the 1980s and feel an allegiance to the opposition Labor party, whose then prime minister promised they could remain in the country after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Other ethnic Chinese arrived as refugees from the war in Vietnam, or from Cambodia’s genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, and want fairer treatment of asylumseekers languishing on Manus Island and Nauru.
“Chinese-Australian voters are like every other Australian voter — interested in politics, interested to have their say — but with a slight Chinese cultural lens on some of these matters,” ChineseAustralian commentator JiehYung Lo said.