Gay One Nation MP Jason Virgo Thanks His Muslim Migrant Boyfriend In Tearful Maiden Speech
A gay One Nation MP broke down in tears thanking his Indonesian-born Muslim partner during his first speech to South Australia’s parliament, and told the chamber plainly: “I love migrants.”
Jason Virgo, who won the South East seat of MacKillop for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation at the March 2026 state election, used his maiden address on 21 May to confirm he is gay.
He said he had been “openly gay throughout my entire adult life” but wanted his community to hear it from him rather than from an opponent or through whispers. “If someone does seek to weaponise who I am, that says more about them than it does about me,” he said.
A coming out that sits oddly with the party brand
The optics are hard to ignore. One Nation has traditionally campaigned against immigration, opposed Muslim migration specifically, and built a hostile record on LGBTQIA+ rights under founder Pauline Hanson. Virgo breaks all three moulds at once. His own past makes it stranger still. He ran as an Australian Sex Party candidate at the 2010 and 2013 federal elections, and 17 years ago, as a teenager, he started 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,” he said.
He framed the move as a family story. His was a Labor-leaning household that drifted to One Nation in recent years, feeling left behind by what he called the “uniparty.”
The moment he stopped
Virgo paused, visibly emotional, when he turned to his partner of 11 years. He called the man the love of his life and said he was “born in Indonesia, a Muslim and is now a proud Australian.” He said his friendship circle was largely made up of immigrants.
Then came the line that has travelled furthest. “I love migrants,” he said, before adding that migration levels in recent years had been too high and that “two things can be true at once.” He also spoke about 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,” he told parliament.
One MP is not a policy shift
Worth keeping in perspective. A single MP breaking ranks on sexuality, faith and migration does not signal a coordinated change in One Nation policy, and Virgo did not directly criticise his party in the speech. His address landed a day after Labor’s David Wilkins, the new member for Lee, gave his own emotional maiden speech.
Wilkins spoke about being a victim-survivor of child sexual abuse, and the two men became South Australia’s first openly gay lower house MPs. Two out gay men, same chamber, same week, opposite ends of politics.
