Words by Margaret Simons

Pictures by Damien Pleming

Fleeing Iran for Australia as a child, Rita Panahi knew only two words of English. Her family was penniless. Today, she's an opinion columnist and controversial critic of Islam, a single mum with a real estate portfolio. But are her views as mainstream as she thinks?

Suddenly, it seemed, Rita Panahi was everywhere: on TV panel shows, talkback radio and in News Corp newspapers, full of right-wing opinions – like Andrew Bolt, yet very unlike him. Her Twitter account, which she uses to tangle with her critics and attack "leftie lemmings", has this quote from British wartime prime minister Winston Churchill in the space where most people say something about themselves: "The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is." It captures two things about Panahi. She sees herself as a woman of integrity and of truth. And, like so many commentators from both the left and the right in these opinionated times, there is a strong sense of incipient persecution – of a courageous truth-teller under attack. Tweeting pictures from her Tehran childhood, when she wore a hijab and chanted anti-American slogans at school, hints at major change. How did that little girl grow up to be Rita Panahi, Australian public figure? It is surprising that she is being interviewed at all for this profile, given that she claims her colleagues have warned her the result will be biased, nasty, distorted and an example of exactly the kind of left-wing stupidity she so often attacks.

To Panahi, radical Islam and Western values cannot peacefully co-exist and Australia is the least racist of nations.

Nevertheless she has agreed to co-operate and be interviewed, once in print and once for video. She first meets me in the cafe on the ground floor of the Herald Sun building. In person, Panahi belies her belligerent style. She is likeable – physically small, obviously fit and full of barely-suppressed energy. We talk for over an hour and she is frank, considerate, apparently trusting, sometimes vulnerable. She is clearly tough, but at one point she cries. She says she doesn't trust me – and yet she is trusting. Towards the end of the interview, she asks why I think it is that most journalists are left-wing. It doesn't seem to be a rhetorical question. Even at the Herald Sun, she says, a paper which reflects middle Melbourne, which she "adores" and has worked very hard indeed at breaking into, most of her colleagues are to the left of her – and she sees herself as mainstream. Why should this be? Perhaps, I suggest, those in occupations that deal with ideas and are dominated by the white middle class are more likely to consider radical change. Whereas those like her, who bear the patina of hard knocks, are more inclined to conservatism, valuing the security of what is already there. She listens with a care that might surprise her readers. As the most recent recruit to the stable of News Corp right-wing columnists, Panahi is not normally open-minded about those on the left. Read her work and you come away with the impression that she regards those with whom she disagrees as mad, sad, stupid or bad – sometimes all four.

Is Australia a racist country? Are Muslims treated badly in Australia? Rita Panahi talks about her views.



Anyone with an IQ above room temperature, to coin a favourite Panahism, would surely see that Islam has a problem, that women should be banned from wearing the burqa, that radical Islam and Western values cannot peacefully co-exist and that Australia is the most accepting and least racist of nations. To Panahi, anyone who is not a "wing-nut" would know that a good deal of university education is of dubious value and that while gender equality is an admirable aim, feminists are hypocritical nut jobs who don't care for truly marginalised women but instead make a fuss about trivia and harmless jokes. Those who protested against the East West link, in Melbourne's suburbs during the last Victorian election, she sees as a "ratbag gang of unionists, unwashed hippies, NIMBY greenies, bellicose socialists, confused pensioners and progress-hating layabouts". Giving money to beggars is "akin to voting for the Greens – it only encourages them, and prevents them from doing something useful with their lives". And in Panahi's view, Tony Abbott lost popular support partly because of his inability to communicate, but mostly because of a vehement media campaign by left wing journalists. Was his downfall evidence that the majority of Australians are less right-wing than she might think? Not at all: "I think the centre is a lot more to the right than most people in the media would like it to be," she says. It's the left-wing commentators, the feminists who write for Fairfax's Daily Life – and the "nut jobs" who deride her on social media – who are the controversial ones, on the fringe. As for herself: "I am, for the most part, reflecting mainstream Australian values."

"I'm not your plastic conservative. I'm ethnic, a migrant, an atheist. I'm a single mum."