I’m an award-winning poet, novelist, and essayist who works in community arts and cultural development. I was born and raised in Liverpool to Arab and Turkish Muslim migrants, and I’ve lived in the Blaxland electorate for the past five years with my wife and kids.
I am a Western Sydney man through and through: this is where I’ve spent my life, and this is the community I know and love. I live in Granville, and work in Fairfield for an independent arts charity that develops multilingual creative programs for migrant and refugee women and their kids. As someone who grew up in a low socioeconomic area, and went to public schools, I’m invested in giving back to and improving my community’s access to education and the arts.
My entire life I have seen the Arab and Muslim community subjected to discrimination, hyper surveillance, police violence, and relentlessly demonised in our media and even in Parliament. It’s not just that our armed forces have been involved in war crimes overseas, for which no one has been imprisoned except David McBride, the whistleblower who exposed the injustice in the first place, it’s that anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiment has no consequence whatsoever, it’s tolerated at the highest level, as is the violence that follows.
We desperately need informed, educated representation that can speak to the issues that are impacting our lives. More than that, we need good people in Parliament—people who will do the right thing, and oppose injustices and discrimination consistently. This is the foundation on which everything rests. If you can’t trust someone to oppose the blatant evil of genocide, how can you trust them to create fair legislation, to govern justly, to uphold our values?
The major parties are not listening to us, and I’m determined to be a voice for change. With your support, we can and will ensure a more just and sustainable future for our children.
