Tangney MP Sam Lim on remarkable journey to Federal Parliament: Aussie health system saved daughter’s life

The Malaysian dolphin trainer-turned-Buddhist monk who became an award-winning policeman in WA has detailed his remarkable story in his maiden speech to Parliament, paying tribute to Labor heroes Gough Whitlam and “legend” Mark McGowan.

Sam Lim grew up in poverty in Johor, where his late parents worked tapping rubber and could not afford electricity and running water in their house with its leaky roof, rammed earth floor and a hole in the ground for a toilet.

He was able to go to school, unlike his family’s generations before him, and felt enormous pressure to study hard but couldn’t afford to go to university, so joined the police in 1980.

It was a career he returned to after immigrating to Perth in 2002, but only lasted two years the first time around as the pay was too low to support his family.

Those extraordinary years in between - including four as a dolphin trainer and a few weeks as a Bhuddist monk in Thailand - grabbed headlines during Mr Lim’s campaign for the blue-ribbon seat of Tangney, which he seized from Liberal heavy-hitter Ben Morton with a massive swing.

Labor had not held the multiculturally diverse seat for 39 years.

In Perth, his children got the university education they moved here for, and together, the family ran a coffee shop in the CBD, learning words like “flat white” and “lamington”.

When he joined WA Police in 2006 aged 45, his eldest daughter won her battle with cancer “thanks to our amazing health system, all of this underpinned by the great Labor Party initiative we know as Medicare”.

The work took him from Eucla to Karratha back to Perth, and he won the Police Officer of the Year Award in 2020, with the assaults and abuse officers often endured contrasting enormously to those serene weeks in Thailand.

The 61-year-old said one man made all of this possible: former prime minister Gough Whitlam, who abolished the White Australia Policy in 1973.

“He is a hero to me as well as to many. Because of him we can call Australia home.”

Mr Lim also showered praise on Mr McGowan, “a gentleman and a statesman over and above his position as premier”.

New WA Senator Fatima Payman gave her maiden speech too, also crediting the Labor Party for abolishing the White Australia Policy, describing how her family fled to Pakistan from Afghanistan as the Taliban wreaked havoc in 1996 when she was aged just one.

Her father then risked his life in 1999 by traversing the Indian Ocean for 11 days on a small boat in stormy weather “in the hope of finding safety and security for his wife, two daughters and a son on his way”.

In Australia, he worked around the clock as a kitchen hand, security guard and taxi driver while learning English and saving up enough money to sponsor his family to reunite with him in Perth in 2003.

Senator Payman, 27, said she felt at home in the WA capital but she was made feel like “the other” at university, when a young man ridiculed her for wearing a hijab.

“Comments like ‘go back to where you came from’ or inferences to extremism forced me to feel like I didn’t belong,” she said.

“Let us quit the bigotry, racism and discrimination. Australia is way beyond that.

“Let us not settle on multiculturalism being just a brand we associate with and take pride in as a nation but rather fully embrace it.”