Fieldnotes on Humanity

The guy got trounced. I’m talking about Zahid Safi, the same man who attempted to enter the Australian Parliament under false pretenses. He allegedly faked his MA degree , misled people about his business record , and has a troubling history of hostility toward the Hazara community. Most recently, he tried to win support from Bruce through fear and intimidation . But the residents saw through the facade and rejected him, sending a clear message: he is dangerous and unfit for public office. Earlier, I unintentionally predicted the outcome of the election in the Division of Bruce in one of my blog posts titled “ Fake it to break it ,” referring to a candidate whose credibility was questionable due to a pattern of deception. The Liberal Party's decision to endorse him was flawed from the beginning. Now, some within the party are calling for a “ serious review ” of what went wrong. But the core issue is already clear: you didn’t listen to the people. Members of the Hazara community in ...

In my previous post, when I wrote that Afghans brought the persecution of the Hazaras to Australia, there was a reason. Clear signs of this persecution have emerged. Just yesterday, The Guardian Australia reported that Zahid Safi's campaign team has escalated their tactics. According to journalist Henry Belot, the team is now pressuring members of the Hazara diaspora, claiming that voting for anyone other than the Liberal Party constitutes a betrayal of Abdur Rahman Khan, often referred to as "Afghanistan's Hitler." Zahid campaign volunteers, mostly made up of Pashtuns, have told the Hazaras that we have to resurrect Abdur Rahman Khan.  Labor alleges the volunteer told people that a vote for anyone other than the Liberals would betray Khan, and called for him to be “brought back”. Khan is linked to the Hazara genocide in the late 1800s. “I am concerned that the reason Liberal volunteers are invoking Abdur Rahman Khan’s name is to harass and intimidate members of the ...

Afghans, and more precisely, in this case, a small number of Pashtuns residents of Bruce, are now rallying to support Zahid Safi. His campaign has already taken a hit: the manager has stepped down following backlash over offensive online remarks, and notably, there’s no Australian presence within Safi's team. In Bruce, the Safi clan, a large network of families sharing the same last names, has stepped in. Wearing matching blue, round-necked T-shirts and covering their paunches with bold “SAFI” lettering, they pose with forced smiles for the cameras. It may look like a campaign gaining momentum, but beyond appearances, what’s missing is substance, brain power, integrity, and a genuine understanding of basic responsibilities, such as not lying, not discriminating against people based on their ethnicity or race. Someone should tell this guy to go to the community and apologize for your blatant racism and take down the submission. Learn some decency. Someone needs to say it plainly: d...

In my previous post , I wrote: “The rotten stench is rising from the corpse of the Australian Liberal Party’s pitch for the division of Bruce in the upcoming federal election.” There was a reason for that choice of words. The Liberal candidate, Zahid Safi, has now been revealed as a university dropout. It reminds me of George Santos, who successfully made his debut in the US Congress for a brief period but was recently sentenced to seven years in a New York federal court for a slew of deceptions. So how did someone like Zahid slip into the ranks of the Liberal Party? The answer is clear: fake it to make it but now, it ironically translates as fake it to break it. The candidate has become a laughingstock. Touted as a wildly successful businessman, Safi’s record tells a very different story: businesses that were de-registered because of being unable to pay the fees, listed under a fake address, peppered with phony reviews, and littered with stock images. The most successful part in h...

The rotten stench is rising from the corpse of the Australian Liberal Party’s pitch for the division of Bruce for the upcoming federal election. In a recent exposé for The Age , journalist Charlotte Grieve uncovers a disturbing truth: Zahi Safi, the man being paraded as a "successful businessman" by the party, is little more than a fraud. Many of Safi’s businesses appear to exist only on paper, at best. Take Willow Support Services, an NDIS provider supposedly owned by Safi. When Grieve visited its listed address, she found not an office or facility, but a private residence. It gets worse: multiple Safi-affiliated businesses have been deregistered since March for failing to pay basic fees. His websites are padded with fake reviews, featuring photos recycled across countless unrelated pages. The so-called reviewers? Their LinkedIn profiles list them as being overseas and spread across hundreds of pages on the web. Faced with this mountain of fakery, Grieve wonders the obvious:...