Labor evicts its conscience as it expels Payman

The Albanese government has decided to remove its youngest senator over her stance on Gaza.

Senator Fatima Payman made her case clear on the ABC Insiders program on Sunday. (Source: YouTube)

The Albanese government has suspended Western Australian Senator Fatima Payman from caucus ‘indefinitely’ in response to her principled stance to cross the floor in support of the Greens motion to recognise a Palestinian State, and her warning that she would cross the floor again should the motion appear again. Although breaking caucus solidarity is codified as a punishable offence in Labor’s rulebook, Payman’s stance is in line with the policy adopted by the party at the National Conference. It also reflects public opinion, and Labor’s response to suspend Payman does not adequately reflect the complexities, nuances and perception of the situation, it also threatens to distract from other issues it may wish to focus on.

Richard Marles appeared on the ‘Insiders’ program on ABC as a guest on Sunday. The Deputy PM is a senior enforcer of his party’s position, and his open support for Israel is embodied in a $917 million dollar defence procurement contract, awarded as it continues to devastate Gaza. Marles bellowed out a few words clearly meant for Payman: “We are all members of a team, we only get the privilege of serving in this Parliament, not because of who we are as individuals, but because when we stand for election the word ‘Labor’ is next to our name”.

“And that’s obviously the case for Senator Payman as well, she would not be a Senator but for the fact that Labor is next to her name.” - Richard Marles

Marles sent a chilling message through the screen, around the studio and away to Payman, who sat off camera in the green room waiting to join the very same program only moments later, “I cannot over emphasise enough how important all of us who are members of the team regard the obligations of being a member of the team in terms of the way we behave”.  It seemed like a stark warning from one of the ideological bagmen of a Labor party, trying to play a version of small target, this time on his government’s current support for a country undertaking a genocide.

Just after the Defence Minister’s “caveat interview”, Payman somewhat surreally appeared on the program shortly after, her poise and calm contrasting with the fidgeting mumbling of Marles just earlier, and made her position clear: “If the same motion on recognising the state of Palestine was brought forward again tomorrow, I would cross the floor”. She calmly recognised that she knew she was risking her Labor membership by undertaking these actions, but harkened to the urgency of the over 40,000 civilians that have been killed in Gaza Since October 2023, and pointed to the importance in upholding the principles of Labor. When asked if she was “leaving the party”, she educated the host and the viewers that the people are the party, not the caucus. And following up, seemingly speaking in response to Marles’ jarring off-handed warnings moments earlier, Payman signalled to the need for a “diversity of views”, and challenged Labor to hold a place for them, taking the point with a perfect serve-volley.

Within moments of the Payman interview, the closest Murdoch journalist readily available as usual on the “Insiders” couch chimed in and moved heaven and hell to paint the baseline of the story for the national broadcaster, and the severity of the message to the senior figures in the Albanese government. “That was an incredibly defiant interview”, “the fact she has done it at all”, “a statement of war on the Labor Caucus”, “what she is saying is, ‘you don’t tell me what to do, you can’t dictate to me”, “that’s not a conciliatory interview there”, “she’s saying ‘I’ve done it once, I’ll do it again’”, barked out Samantha Maiden in a single breath, with the effectiveness of an airfryer in under a minute, sending a hail of shallow fried disapproval at the Senator towards the senior Labor caucus.

Payman was suspended from the party later that day.

In the lead up to this saga, Payman’s stance, reflecting the views of the party, but not that of the senior Labor caucus, was destined for some kind of kinetic contact. Penny Wong was reported chiding Payman about her stance, asking her to reconsider the situation, comparing it to the ten-year period that saw her tow the party line against gay marriage and her own position for the greater good. But Wong’s advice felt contrived, for it was one thing to justify it to herself, but another to offset some of her own self-disappointment by asking a young senator to morally compromise and do the same. Payman pointed out in her interview that perhaps the comparison put down by her senate leader does not work so well when their government has had a hand in the 40,000 plus dead in Gaza, and the thousands displaced in the West Bank, some of whom die as the result of Australian military, economic and diplomatic connections to Israel that haven’t changed since October 7. “They don’t have ten years”, Payman calmly reminded.

So, on the day of Labor’s augmented version of the Scomo tax cuts they didn’t have the courage to scrap, the ALP barged ahead with their cost-of-living panacea that every senior Labor member is talking up like a Whitlamesque grand reform, and the party announced officially that it had voted to suspend the third youngest Senator in history for making them look bad for supporting a genocide. As the news broke, and began instantly tainting the July 1^st cost-of-living package from Canberra, bitter senior Labor figures were joined by the party faithful, denigrating Payman for taking the limelight off Labor’s hardly reformational income tax cuts & electricity subsidies and putting it on a genocide that they are trying to pretend doesn’t exist.

Labor still tried to forge ahead on its small-potato economic offerings, most of which were hand crafted at the blessing of the productivity commission, while Senator Payman announced that she would abstain from voting on senate matters for the rest of the week, unless a "matter of conscience" comes up and in that case she will uphold the values of the Labor Party, standing to her convictions to cross the floor as per party policy.

Her removal may be a procedural thing, a fait accompli that is a consequence of breaking with party unity, and Payman herself knows that if she defies caucus, she jeopardises her party membership, but she crosses the floor with a sense of urgency that reflects the stance of most Australians, and a sense of morality that is sorely missing from this iteration of the Australian Labor Party. And that is a hard thing for Albanese and Marles to stuff back into a box.

Payman walks out into exile with the last courage the party ever knew. Labor may come to regret that it chose to snuff out the youngest member of the party, choosing to isolate her crossing the floor to support a policy they don’t have the will to uphold. The young senator holds a mirror to the Albanese government, and is being punished for showing Labor their own moral untethering, pointing out the reactionary hypocrisy used to justify their support for a genocide. Penny Wong was a senior aspirationalist in the Gillard government when she chose to support her career over her own beliefs, and that is her choice to make alone, but Payman sits as a backbencher who can’t stand the killing in Gaza like the rest of us, and her removal will take many humanitarian Labor voters away for good, making moribund the remnants of human dignity left in the ALP.

Among claims that some of her fellow members tried to “intimidate” her to quit, Payman released an official statement in which she claimed “I have been exiled”. With a tide of public opinion supporting her action, and against the party position, combined with a wave of irrefutable evidence from international bodies in consensus on Israels crimes against humanity in Gaza, Labor’s response all in the name of collective party solidarity that may look like a normal procedural matter on any other given day, ends up looking like a further example of this government’s critical failure on Gaza.