Anne Aly, the new member for Cowan, told SBS she's not prepared to be a single-issue politician.
Some people will think that because she is an Egyptian-born Muslim she will be the Labor party’s poster girl for everything Islam, she said.
“I know there’s an expectation on me to speak out against Pauline Hanson and I fully understand that responsibility," Dr Aly said.
But she believes that responsibility lies with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.
“As the Prime Minister of Australia, there is an expectation on him and the fact that he created the opportunity for such a diverse senate in the double dissolution then it is squarely on his shoulders to manage that diverse senate,” she said.
“And I’ve yet to hear him come out very strongly.”
Dr Aly, 49, gained a national profile for her research into countering violent extremism and deradicalising disaffected youth.
She formed People Against Violent Extremism, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to redirect anyone, from any religion, off the path of violence.
The journey into politics
Feeling she had more to do, the next step for Dr Aly, a university professor at Edith Cowan University, was the move into politics.
It would be her son Adam Rida, a Labor member since his university days, who would sign up his mother, a former half-hearted Greens candidate, to the party.
She went on to wrest the seat of Cowan, in Perth’s northern suburbs, from Liberal’s Luke Simpkins, who had held it for nine years.
“I’m immensely proud,” Mr Rida said.
“I never thought that she would go this direction and she said as much as well, she never thought she’d get into politics.
Anne Aly’s two sons Adam and Karim Rida when they were children. Source: Supplied
“She asked me and asked me what I thought and I said, ‘Look, I think you’ll be great at it, but ultimately you’ve got to make the decision about what you think you’d be best at’.”
Dr Aly said her first priority was her Cowan constituents.
She won the seat with a 5.2 per cent swing against the Liberal incumbent compared to the 3.12 per cent national swing, but it is still Western Australia’s most marginal seat with a little over 1,100 votes in Dr Aly’s favour.
“I do think that I have to be a little bit wary of being only one issue, of only being one dimension,” Dr Aly said.
“Because that can prevent me, or limit me, from doing the kind of work that needs to be done for the electorate.”
Dr Aly taught English as a foreign language on a casual basis to make ends meet. Source: Supplied
But Dr Aly said she would still try to use her academic expertise and experience to improve Muslim and non-Muslim relations in Australia and to counter violent extremism.
She said there was also a need to rebuild trust in the nation’s politicians and institutions.
“There is a disengagement of people from the political process and this is part of social cohesion,” she said.
“One aspect of social cohesion is that individuals and groups have trust in the institutions that govern them and what we’re seeing, particularly with this last election, is a disintegration of that trust that people have in the political process and political institutions.
“And you hear it on the streets every day, people just don’t have that level of trust.
“We need to be actively rebuilding those bridges of trust.”
Dr Aly is a mother of two, and currently happily married to her third husband, former police officer and Canadian ice hockey player David Allen, and financially stable.
But in 1996, at the age of 26 she was in tears leaning against the wall of a welfare office in Perth.
She had been told she would have to wait up to five weeks for her first payment.
She had no money and two young boys, three and one, to care for alone after she had left their Egyptian-born father.
Dr Aly’s two sons, Adam Rida and his younger brother Karim, were mostly raised by their single mother. Source: Supplied
She had married their father at 21 while completing a degree in English Literature at the American University in Cairo.
“It was a really troubled marriage,” she said.
“We were both young when we got married and it was very troubled.
“I did the best thing for my children. I had to do it.”
While on welfare, she completed a Masters in Education in nine months instead of two years.
Then she taught English as a foreign language for several years on a casual basis before finally finding full-time work in government policy.
In 2005, she started studying again and would go on to complete her PhD into the fear of terrorism by Muslim and non-Muslim communities following 9/11.
Anne Aly with her masters certificate. Source: Supplied
A second marriage lasted ten years.
'Not feeling good enough drove me to succeed'
Dr Aly said she had never felt good enough and it drove her to succeed.
“It comes from as a child growing up in predominantly white western Sydney, at the time, you were never good enough because you were the brown kid, often mistaken for Aboriginal,” she said.
She recalled being excluded from her peers when she was seven years old.
"I had a best friend who I used to play with every single day and one day she just stopped talking to me,” she said.
“I didn’t know why and her cousin came up to me at the end of the day and said it was because her parents had seen me and they had told her: ‘Don’t talk to the blackie, you’re not to play with that girl because she's Aboriginal’.”
Dr Aly was born in Egypt in 1967 and came to Australia with her engineering father and nurse mother when she was two years old.
They lived in Sydney and Queensland and her father was a bus driver.
Dr Aly and her family came to Australia when she was two years old from Egypt. Source: Supplied
She returned to Egypt to study at university when she was 17, the first step on a long academic ladder.
“People used to say to me, ‘Oh, you’re so smart, you’ve got a PhD’ and I would say, 'You don’t need smarts to get a PhD, you just need tenacity’,” she said.
“And I think that’s one thing that I’ve got, I’ve got a lot of tenacity and I know that if I want to achieve something, I’ll pull out all stops to achieve it.”
