When they are first elected and enter their party room for the first time, Labor MPs sign the Pledge. They pledge themselves to support the party’s platform and accept the collective decisions of their caucus. If they cannot do that, and cross the floor in defiance of their party whip, the normal punishment is suspension or, more commonly, expulsion.
Yet when it comes to Labor senator Fatima Payman, the normal rules of Labor parliamentary culture don’t apply. She proved this on Tuesday when she crossed the floor to vote with the Greens on a motion, opposed by Labor and the Coalition, to recognise Palestinian statehood immediately, without question or qualification. No mention of a two-state solution, nor any denunciation of Hamas and its pogrom of atrocities October 7.
Payman got away with her act of disloyalty because (1) she is young; (2) she is a (telegenic) women; and, above all, (3) because she is a Muslim. If she was pale, male, and Christian, her bottom would be aching from the rapidity and force of her being booted out of the Labor party.
But no. Payman is untouchable in her failure to denounce Hamas’s barbaric terror, and in her demanding that Palestine be a state while denying Israel’s right to exist. On Wednesday morning, Deputy PM Richard Marles told Sky News Australia that ‘there’s not going to be any expulsion or anything at that kind’ because ‘Fatima Payman is making a real contribution in the Senate on behalf of the Australian Labor Party. She wants to continue that, and she will’.
I bet Mal Colston would have said in 1996 that he was making a real contribution in the Senate on behalf of the Australian Labor Party. But he got a very swift boot, easily justified because he was fat, lazy, and greedy. He got what he deserved under Labor’s code of conduct: he voted against his own party and was booted. Payman is an ideological Colston, but she is untouchable for those three factors that protect her.
Why is one act of treachery evil and another brushed off by Labor? In deliberately convoluted language, Marles told us why. ‘The thing which has become very apparent is the whole question of social cohesion in this country, and we’re at a point where we need to be doing everything we can as a government, but in fact, beyond the government … to bring others together.’ That’s code for: ‘She’s a Muslim, and we can’t afford to get Muslims offside with an election not far away.’
As Terry Barnes recently wrote, of the 27 Labor-held seats where Muslims constitute more than five per cent of the population, nine have a Muslim population proportionally greater than the margin by which Labor currently holds the seat. That’s all that matters to Labor: crude numbers that assume all Muslims think like Fatima Payman (they don’t, and many are just as horrified and appalled at what Hamas has wrought as are most of their fellow Australians).
Payman deserves some grudging respect for standing on her conscience and crossing the floor but, like the Greens she voted with, equally deserves utter contempt for her failure to denounce the butchers of Hamas for the death and destruction they have unleashed in both Israel and Gaza. But that Payman gets a free pass from Labor and is lionised by the Greens and pro-Hamas activists for her defiance, while other Labor MPs who defy the Pledge and rat on their party are made pariahs, shows the moral bankruptcy of the Prime Minister and the Labor leadership, who for months have been crab-walking away from solidarity with Israel after the barbarity of October 7, putting Labor’s electoral survival in its western Sydney and Melbourne seats ahead of moral consistency.
What is happening in Gaza is a human tragedy, but never forget its root cause is Hamas and nothing but Hamas. If Mr Albanese truly supports Israel’s right to exist and defend herself, he should be calling a special caucus meeting to expel Senator Payman. But, playing crude electoral politics instead of showing conviction and principle, he’s tolerating Payman and rewarding the Hamas methods of barbarism that effectively she is supporting. Weak, weak, weak.
