Payman breaks ”the unwritten rules of multiculturalism” (whatever they’re supposed to be)

Fatima Payman visiting students from the Melbourne Uni Gaza solidarity encampment (Source: Fatima Payman / Meta)

A prejudicially motivated attack against outgoing Labor Senator Fatima Payman is raging. The attackers are the government, angry to see her take their senate seat, assisted by an opposition looking to open up a portal of social division in lieu of their nuclear policy even having a single skerrik of merit, and the media, desperate to make bank off culture wars while helping to implement the objectives of the industrial class. The reason, as usual, is the lightly sleeping spectre of racism that seems to rear its head anytime a person of colour in the public eye makes a political statement that differs from the status quo. In the case of Payman, it was her defiant stance to recognise a Palestinian state that woke it from its slumber.

In the days that seem like eternities, a concentrated girth of sound, image and print circles like swarm of drones. ‘The Australian’, a paragon of diversity and inclusion, deduced that Payman broke ”the unwritten rules of multiculturalism”. “Will Fatima Payman become the Pauline Hanson of the left? That’s up to her”, smeared Peter Hartcher with the entrails of a channel Nine goat, like an establishment haruspex, showing that when it comes to instilling visions of fear and division, from China to Muslims, he can bend time and space to plant the seeds to make that happen. Harkening to the irrepressible reanimation of Islamophobia, and pointing towards a unrequired drama and uncertainty, Patricia Karvelas wrote an article talking about Payman as being guided by “god” on her decision. That’s right, the inshallah type of God. Even the Saturday Paper failed to make its thinly veiled analysis stick, completing the circle of total establishment media slander directed towards Payman, with a cadence and vitriol that comes from that good old feeling that saw Pauline Hanson elected in the 90s.

So with the proverbial lay-the-boot-into-brown-people-that-run-their-mouth hat back on, according to the increasingly hostile baying press and a adolescent Labor caucus bent on some kind of “Lord of the flies” knifefight, Payman and an imaginary bogey man Muslim party were joining to march on the gates of Constantinople (Canberra), where inside its wall a cowering inbred uniparty and their press nobility cry out for help. Except the inhabitants are not the last of a once great dying empire, but Anthony Albanese’s corporate-facing, modular-moraled automatons that have commandeered the last vestiges of the Labor party, and Payman isn’t Mehmet the Conqueror looking to conquer the known world, but quite simply one of the few parliamentarians left with a conscience wanting to end a genocide.

Throughout the week, NewsCorp’s lights were on later than usual, and the Nine Papers called on the life experience of Peter Hartcher and Parnel Palme-McGuiness to talk to us about the spectre of Militant Islam from some beautiful enclave in Sydney. From the inner sanctum, Wayne Swan issued a decree from the imperial palace of the ALP in an attempt to protect the realm, speaking to the sacrosanct and holy nature of “caucus solidarity”, like Payman had dared to cross the floor on something as holy as a tax policy, before getting stuck back into in to the Senator along with the rest of the party for crossing the floor on the need to unconditionally recognise the party line, even if tens of thousands of kids are being slaughtered and the ALP is tacitly supporting it with economic, diplomatic and military help.

So Labor hangs effigies off Payman on pikes with the paid up press mercenaries upon the castle wall, the moat ever-growing in a chasmic divide with the rest of us, its bridge too far for most reasonable Australians to walk over, and those who get to the gates are met with an insecure and vicious party of political sociopaths that are barely a shade of what they think their former selves used to be, and thus what they still think they are. In an attempt to reactively absolve their shitty position, in solidarity, their vitriol against Payman has become normalised and proceeds to roll out all over the lands, away from the capital in a moral lockdown, and into the dark corners of Dutton’s Australia.

Not completely ignorant of how bad they are looking in the current state of things, the ALP coordinated a photo op by offering the disingenuous recognition again under “lasting peace process” caveat that Netanyahu will never give, knowingly null-and-voiding the recognition in the first place with a purely cynical move. The Labor MPs bulk tweeted out carbon copy Tweets with arrows pointing to the bad guys, lobbing volleys at the Greens and opening trebuchets filled with classical and unashamed old party racism towards Payman in a familiar bigoted unison we haven’t seen so charged since the Cronulla riots.

As governments fail to do their jobs, they set social traps on the ground to distract us from their consequential negligence, preferring to see us perish in ideological culture wars rather than have us see how they no longer work for us. The Payman fallout perfectly captures this syndrome, as they fire up the Islamophobic Tiki-Torches, to the delight of the paradigmatic shifters in Dutton’s Coalition and the press, as both major parties barge forward away from their public mandates, to open coal and gas for taxless foreign multinational resource hoovers, and to create a hateful house of smoke and mirrors to distract from their abject failures to govern as per the memo.

Unmitigated by any responsible and objective media, and allowed to fester in an adolescent tantrum by an insecure and shallow government, the death threats and vile letters started coming into Paiman’s office. On either side, the press pounded out racially charged accusations, unleashing a vitriol for crossing the floor that wasn’t imposed on Bridgitte Archer, who did so three times and remains in her party, and who instead received praise for her pragmatism, and respect from the party she asked to do better.

The articles about political Islam and sharia law are being written by the hour, and the fear mongers sharpen up their knives, calling on “Quiet Australians to start making noise”. They’d be well aware of the existence of dozens of faith-based parties over the years, the lack of cause for alarm, and entirely cognisant of their willing role in breaking ”the unwritten rules of multiculturalism”. But after successively horrible governments in the post-Packed-to-the Rafters-post-cooker-Pete-Evans-MKR era of Australian jingoism, the bleached blonde Home and Away Lara Bingle Australia died at Cronulla, the early Pauline Hanson album pastiche feels aged and hateful, and every attempt after by the Kerry Stokes’ of the world to socially engineer this country to hate has failed spectacularly. 

One of the most alarming factors, as a majority of Australians demand more action from the government on Gaza is the disregard and lack of recognition for the sheer scale and horror of the genocide in Gaza. As the large section of our society grieves for Palestinians and gets angry at government complicity in the actions of Gaza, the full gamut of words and soundbites lobbed by the collective political and media classes at Payman are ugly and heartless and politically sociopathic, revealing the stark and worrying human disconnect of our political and media establishment, and all that remains is the ugly political Machiavellianism that motivates them.

But surely, if caucus solidarity is sacrosanct, then the multiculturalism that defines the caucus, and the diverse voices that come with that, are sacrosanct too. It should be protected as a national imperative by any government, but Labor in particular, as it is the bedrock of our society and one of the key ingredients of our nation’s success. Labor especially has made it a priority to promote gender and ethnic diversity as the essence of its identity, because of the gigantic political consequences if it doesn’t, but also because it told us it really, really believed in it.

Payman’s treatment, the fallout and the subsequent culture wars that will arise after the fact, highlight the true perception of “the rules of multiculturalism” by the ruling class. It is one thing to load multiculturism into productivity figures and the insatiable services and gig economy -- you can build the snowy, and ride an E-Bike through the winter frosts -- but if they let you sit in the Senate wearing a hijab, you better act like one of them. Labor has alluded to the token status of Payman in the wake of her departure, an ugly and petty revelation, damaging the brand, and opening up challenge to the motivation behind Labor party diversity, as the cold political calculus that motivates it is all the public now sees.  

Payman gets to walk back into Senate as an independent with her head held high, but not the Labor party. For all the whinging about wanting to focus on its economic announcements, it has dedicated unedifying amounts of time to denigrating Payman, motivated by a form of enmity that stinks to high heaven. In their jealous rage, they have unleashed the dark forces of racism in the national discussion, and in their callous insolence, have deferred the discussion to those who thrive in culture wars and social upheaval. Labor has done more to crack the multicultural experiment than its predecessor for revealing the hollow nature of diversity in their own party, the party that swore that it stood for the values of multiculturalism fundamentally. The Payman scandal reveals the emptiness of their oath.