
Australia's new youngest senator elected at 21 with unexpected win
A woman who turned 21 on the day of Australia's federal election in May has been declared the nation's youngest ever senator.
And like many female candidates who run for election in Australia, Charlotte Walker wasn't expected to win.
The former union official won the governing center-left Labour Party's third Senate seat for South Australia state in a complicated rank order voting system. A party's third choice rarely wins.
She had the lowest vote count of the six newly elected senators for the state. The Australian Electoral Commission officially declared the poll Tuesday.
The new job will be a 'big adjustment,' said Walker, who starts her six-year term July 1. A federal lawmaker's base salary is more than 205,000 Australian dollars ($133,000) annually.
'There's a few feelings. Obviously, there's a lot of pressure,' Walker told Australian Broadcasting Corp. after the results were announced late Monday.
'I want to do a good job for South Australians, but I also want to show young people, particularly young women, that this is achievable and this is something that they can do also. I'm also really excited. Not many people my age get to … go to Canberra and have the ability to contribute in the way that I will,' she added.
Previous young lawmakers
Before Walker, the youngest senator was Jordon Steele-John of the Greens party, who was elected for Western Australia state in 2017 at the age of 23.
Australia's youngest-ever federal lawmaker was Wyatt Roy, who was elected to the House of Representatives in 2010 at the age of 20. He lasted two three-year terms before he was voted out of his Queensland state seat.
Large swings at elections as occurred May 3 typically bring a larger proportion of women into the Parliament in seats that their parties hadn't realistically expected to win. Often the newcomers lose their seats when votes swing back at the next election.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expects 57 percent of Labor lawmakers in the Senate and House of Representatives will be women when the new Parliament first sits on July 22. The proportion of women was 52 percent during Albanese's first term in government.
Australian governments usually lose seats in their second term. Albanese leads the first federal government not to lose a single seat at an election since 1966. Labor is expected to hold 94 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives, up from 78 in the last Parliament.
Australian National University political historian Frank Bongiorno said unexpected swings can put women candidates into Parliament after seeking apparently unwinnable seats .
But Bongiorno said Labor had been working on increasing women's representation since the party introduced a quota in 1994 that stated 35 percent of candidates in winnable seats had to be female.
'The fact that we now have not 50 percent, but 57 percent is partly a function of obviously just the size of the swing, but it is also, I think, very deliberate changes that have occurred within the Labour Party over about 30 years from what was a very male-dominated culture and environment,' Bongiorno said.
The odds had been stacked against Walker being elected as her party's third choice in South Australia, Bongiorno said.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Arab News
3 hours ago
- Arab News
UK to trim asylum backlog, saving ‘$1.3 billion a year'
LONDON: Britain's Labour government pledged to cut a backlog in asylum applications and end 'the costly use of hotels to house asylum seekers,' saving £1 billion ($1.3 billion) annually, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves announced on Wednesday. 'Funding that I have provided today ... will cut the asylum backlog, hear more appeal cases and return people who have no rights to be here, saving the taxpayer a billion pounds a year,' Reeves said in her Spending Review that sets out Treasury expenditure and savings over the next few years. The number of UK asylum seekers has risen sharply in recent years, with tens of thousands of applications waiting to be decided, according to official figures. Labour, which came to power last July, has set about tackling the situation. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has started formal talks with unspecified countries to create 'return centers' outside the UK for those who have exhausted all legal avenues to remain in the country. The number of asylum seekers in the UK tripled to 84,200 in 2024 from an average of 27,500 between 2011 and 2020. In 2022, there were approximately 13 asylum applications per 10,000 people in the UK, compared with 25 applications per 10,000 people in the EU at the same time. Some 11 percent of migrants in the UK were asylum seekers or refugees in 2023 — almost twice as high as the 2019 figure of six percent. The number of people crossing the Channel in makeshift boats, a route that virtually did not exist before 2018, has meanwhile increased sharply in recent years. In 2024, the largest group of asylum seekers hailed from Pakistan, followed by Afghanistan. In previous years, they came mainly from Syria and Iran.

Al Arabiya
10 hours ago
- Al Arabiya
US House speaker Johnson will travel to Israel June 22
US House Speaker Mike Johnson will travel to Israel to address the parliament on June 22, he said on Wednesday. 'Our ties run deeper than military partnerships and trade agreements,' Johnson said in an emailed statement. Punchbowl News, which first reported Johnson's plan, said the House Speaker was expected to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem during the trip. Johnson did not provide further details on the planned trip. Johnson announced the visit as Israel presses on with its military campaign in the Gaza Strip, more than 20 months after it launched its offensive there in response to a deadly incursion into Israel led by Palestinian militant group Hamas. On Tuesday, Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Norway imposed sanctions on far-right Israeli cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, accusing them of repeatedly inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Israel called the action 'outrageous' and said the Israeli government would hold a meeting early next week to decide how to respond.


Asharq Al-Awsat
11 hours ago
- Asharq Al-Awsat
US House Speaker Johnson Will Travel to Israel on June 22
US House Speaker Mike Johnson will travel to Israel to address the parliament on June 22, he said on Wednesday. "Our ties run deeper than military partnerships and trade agreements," Johnson said in an emailed statement. Punchbowl News, which first reported Johnson's plan, said the House Speaker was expected to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem during the trip. Johnson did not provide further details on the planned trip. Johnson announced the visit as Israel presses on with its military campaign in the Gaza Strip, more than 20 months after it launched its offensive there in response to a deadly incursion into Israel led by the Palestinian group Hamas. On Tuesday, Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Norway imposed sanctions on far-right Israeli cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, accusing them of repeatedly inciting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Israel called the action "outrageous" and said the Israeli government would hold a meeting early next week to decide how to respond.