A One Nation MP has addressed his sexuality in his first speech to parliament after an election win that also shone a spotlight on his previous campaign alliances.

New MP Jason Virgo, who won the seat of MacKillop for One Nation at the South Australian election in March, said he had been “openly gay throughout my entire adult life” in his first speech to the state parliament, which saw him tear up in the chamber.

Virgo’s speech last week came a day after Labor MP David Wilkins made an emotional first speech where he also addressed his sexuality, with the pair becoming South Australia’s first openly gay lower house MPs.

It also followed reports from March that he had previously campaigned for same sex marriage and ran for the Australian Sex Party at the 2010 and 2013 federal elections.

“Some 17 years ago, when I was a teenager, I began organising rallies for marriage equality. I know that when the awards were getting handed out for that campaign, I most certainly didn’t receive one. However, now that I’ve become a One Nation MP, suddenly all that hard work seems to have been rediscovered,” Virgo said.

“I do not wave the flag in the air as I walk down the street.

“I would rather my community hear it from me than from a potential political opponent or whispers and if someone does seek to weaponise who I am, that says more about them than it does about me.”

Virgo thanked his partner, “the love of my life”, who he said was “born in Indonesia, a Muslim and is now a proud Australian” and said his friends were largely Asian immigrants.

On immigration policy, he said “I love migrants” but that migration levels were too high and “two things can be true at once”.

His speech also detailed his time working on Christmas Island.

“We would see people arriving wearing spray overalls because their boats had sunk and they had even lost the shirts on their backs. There were drownings, there were deaths. I asked many, would they ever take that journey again, and every single one said no,” Virgo said.

‘Slowly I stopped fighting it’

A day earlier, Wilkins had also addressed his sexuality and revealed he was a victim-survivor of child sexual abuse.

Wilkins, who won the Adelaide seat of Lee in March, said in his first speech that his “voice was not heard”.

“At the time I knew something was not right, but like many young people in that position, I did not speak up. The abuse only came to light as a result of mandatory reporting laws passed by this parliament,” he said.

“In the years since, I have found myself returning to that experience more often than I would like to admit, grappling with the concept that a jury determined the evidence of my experience was not sufficient to meet the standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt.

“Like many who go through such processes, I was left feeling that neither my voice nor the impact of my experience was fully heard.”

Wilkins also detailed sharing his experiences grappling with his sexuality in his youth, saying he “tried desperately to do anything I could to convince others and myself that I wasn’t gay”.

“But no matter how hard I tried to control it or suppress it, it never really went away. Instead, what should have been a natural process of self-discovery became something far more complicated, far more confusing and far more damaging,” he said.

“Slowly I stopped fighting it, not in a single moment of clarity, but in a gradual acceptance that this was part of who I am. Despite this, a sense of ease has never fully arrived because I have not managed to fully shake the lingering fear of judgment and shame.

“To be elected to this place as an openly gay man is significant, not because of who I am but because of what it says about who we are.”

One Nation SA president Carlos Quaremba also gave his first address to the upper house last week. He reflected on his upbringing as an Argentinian migrant and his time as a Victor Harbor councillor, a move he said party leader Pauline Hanson had encouraged.

Republished from InDaily