Watching Australia's federal election campaign unfold, it might be easy to forget that we ever repealed the White Australia Policy.
Across the political spectrum, Australia's major and minor parties are failing to reflect the multicultural Australia of the 21st century.
We have fallen far behind similar nations like Canada, who elected 19 Indian-Canadians alone, and ten indigenous parliamentarians, at their last election.
Who we elect to our parliament is not just about the gesture, it is also a reflection of where power lies within our society, and whose voices are given the space to be heard to represent the community.
Jen Kwok, research fellow at the University of Queensland and cofounder of the Asian Australian Democratic Caucus, says political parties don't take cultural diversity seriously. 'They are more clubs than civic institutions in that they have a particular culture and set of priorities that contributes to disengagement not only from Asian Australian populations but entire, very large groups of Australians.'
Kwok says that while we don't have accurate data on the ethnic backgrounds of representatives, let alone candidates, in a response to a question from retiring MP Anna Burke in 2014 the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library compiled a list of representatives with Asian backgrounds, drawing on publicly available sources such as party material and newspaper articles.
Based on that limited analysis, we can put the number of Asian Australians in parliament at either 1.8 per cent or 2.2 per cent. This is compared to 2011 ABS Census data which said 8.4 per cent of our population had one of the top five Asian nations for migration as their country of origin.
All these numbers are sticky and it's incredible we don't have clear government data on diversity. The above stats only refer to country of origin and don't include those who may have complex migrant backgrounds or identify themselves as Asian Australian.
"The reason we need diversity in parliament is that that diversity is symptomatic of the health of the system." — Jen Kwok
The same data puts the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at 0.9 per cent of our parliament compared to 3 per cent of the population, though the number has gone up slightly since Pat Dodson entered the senate.
After this election our parliament may actuallty get less diverse. In a factional deal, Labor moved Australia's only Indian-Australian MP Lisa Singh (pictured) to an unwinnable seat on the Tasmanian senate ticket, and Palmer United's Dio Wang