October 7 - Shut out of power in Australia

[yum]

Tu Le, an Australian lawyer, in Cabramatta, a suburb of Sydney, on Thursday.  Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

Shut out of power in Australia

While about a quarter of Australia’s population is nonwhite, only about 6 percent of its Parliament is made up of members of minority groups. A debate over the lack of diversity has flared into the open.

When Tu Le, a young Australian lawyer with Vietnamese refugee parents who was set to be a Labor Party candidate for Parliament, was passed over for a white American-born woman, Le elected not to go away quietly. Instead, she and other young members of the political left began agitating for change in a Labor Party that casts itself as a bastion of diversity.

- pass somebody over : (특히 자격이 있는 사람을 승진에서) 제외시키다

- bastion 1. (생활 방식·주의 등의) 수호자 2. 보루, 요새

The Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, defended his party’s actions and said the white candidate who replaced Le was a migrant “success story.” But politicians from minority groups said they had experienced a political system that was quick to shut them out.

Quotable: “The Australia that I live in and the one that I work in, Parliament, are two completely different worlds,” said Mehreen Faruqi, a Greens party senator. “It’s because people are not willing to step aside and actually make room for this representation.”

- 녹색당 : the Green Party, (informal) Greens