New Zealand's first refugee MP, Golriz Ghahraman, has spoken about the abuse she received online in the lead up to the general election last month.
From being labelled a terrorist, to being questioned how she could have graduated from Oxford as a refugee, the Green Party list MP endured a raft of abusive comments on social media.
"The one I wasn't expecting is a lot of people think you shouldn't be allowed to take part in politics because you're a refugee," Ghahraman told Lemonwood Photography during a recent photo shoot.
"Like, we gave you freedom, why are you criticising the government? – which is … a really fundamental misunderstanding of democracy.
"No, I'm literally partaking in that freedom. If I didn't criticise the government I may as well have stayed in Iran."
Online abuse hasn't stopped the 36-year-old from firmly advocating for the refugee quota in New Zealand to rise.
Having fled Iran at nine years old with her family, Ghahraman knows first-hand the importance of countries opening their doors to those fleeing from war.
"I was born just at the cusp when things were getting really real, the Islamic dress had just been introduced," she said.
Q+A talks to former human rights lawyer and refugee Golriz Ghahraman and former women's refuge manager Angie Warren-Clark.
"Things really disintegrated into chaos just when I was born."
The Oxford graduate says her family felt "lucky" to have escaped the dangers of war and famine in Iran and to begin their new lives in New Zealand.
"The pressure from the regime had been on us and we had been trying to escape it for such a long time that all the hardships were kind of balanced out by knowing that we were very lucky, knowing how many people got left behind," she said.
Despite her own experience as a child refugee, Ghahraman says being a representative of refugees in New Zealand hasn't always made her feel comfortable.
"I was very uncomfortable with that when I started to get into refugee activism," she said.
"I was so uncomfortable with that narrative of the "deserving refugee".
It was the flood of refugees coming out of Africa and the Middle East that changed her perspective on this and put aside her own personal feelings on being known as a former refugee.
"I had to get over it. Representation matters. We have to be at those decision-making tables or the system is going to swallow us whole."
SHARE ME