PATHANAMTHITTA: Lawyer-activist Hannah Thomas, who has ancestral roots in Pathanamthitta district, is preparing to contest against Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in his constituency of Grayndler on May 3, on a Greens ticket.
Grayndler is an electoral division in the Australian House of Representatives, located in the Inner West region of Sydney, New South Wales, the very seat Albanese has controlled since 1996. In her 30s, Hannah is also the youngest candidate in the fray. Born in Malaysia, she is the daughter of former attorney-general Tommy Thomas, the first non-Malay and non-Muslim Malaysian to hold the post in that country. Her mother is Anny Iype.
Having moved to Australia in 2009 as an international student, Hannah has been vocal on various issues ranging from the Palestine-Israel conflict to immigrants and refugees.
According to the firebrand leader, she was driven by Albanese’s failure to stand up against the horrors happening in Gaza.
“If someone had told me 16 years ago -- when I first arrived in this country as a shy, awkward and culture-shocked international student -- that I’d be running against the Prime Minister of this country, there’s no chance I would have believed them,” reads Hannah’s profile on The Greens website.
According to a family friend, the Thomas family, in search of better prospects, migrated from Pathanamthitta in the late 1940s, after World War II, when there was a trend of migration from the Central Travancore to the Malay region. Her grandfather, K Thomas, who belonged to the Keluthara family, was from Maramon in Kozhenchery while her grandmother Dr Vijayamma Thomas’s family roots trace back to Kumbanad near Tiruvalla. Dr Vijayamma, who was an associate professor with the department of parasitology, was a life member of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene and the Indian Society of Malaria and Communicable Diseases.
Hannah’s father Tommy was born in Kuala Lumpur in 1952 and was appointed attorney general in 2018. On February 28, 2020, he resigned from the post in response to the Malaysian political crisis.
Hannah also states that as an immigrant, she found it offensive that Albanese had blamed the housing and cost of living crisis on people like her.
The Greens candidate also highlights her upbringing and family background.
“I’m lucky to have grown up in Malaysia in a family with a long history of strong progressive values, where political engagement and activism was always encouraged. So it was probably inevitable that I’d eventually join the Greens once Australia became home,” she says.
The Australian federal election will elect members to the 48th Parliament, where voters will decide all 150 seats in the House of Representatives and 40 out of 76 seats in the Senate.
The Labour government, headed by Albanese, is striving for a second term, facing off against the Liberal/National Coalition led by opposition leader Peter Dutton.
Several minor parties and independents, including the Greens party, are also contesting the election.