Who is Fatima Payman?
Fatima Payman is an Australian politician and member-elect of the Australian Senate at the 2022 Australian federal election.
Fatima is an Australian Muslim with cultural roots from Afghanistan. The eldest daughter of four children, she was raised in the Northern suburbs of Perth.
She was declared elected to the Senate for Western Australia on 20 June 2022 and will begin her term on 1 July.
Fatima Payman was born in Afghanistan around 1995, arrived in Australia as a refugee in 2003 age 8 years old, and settled in Perth.
Her father had already arrived in Australia via boat in 1999, fleeing the Taliban.
After leaving immigration detention, her father worked as a security guard, kitchen hand, and taxi driver, in order to earn enough money to sponsor his wife and four children to also migrate.
Once in Australia, her mother started a business giving driving lessons.
Payman’s grandfather was also a member of parliament in Afghanistan.
Payman was naturalized as an Australian citizen in 2005, although this did not automatically revoke her Afghan citizenship.
As Section 44 of the Constitution of Australia requires all candidates to be a citizen of Australia only, she approached the Afghanistan embassy in Australia in October 2021 to renounce her Afghan citizenship.
She was told she had followed the correct steps, but the embassy could not finalize it because it had no contact with the new Taliban government that seized control of the country in August.
