Fatima Payman was a quiet backbencher for her first two years in the Senate. But for the past six weeks the former union official has become a household name.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.Fatima Payman wasn’t someone campaign strategist Glenn Druery had ever heard of when he first met her in south-west Sydney last month, at a gathering of Muslim groups pondering a political alliance to contest Labor MPs at the next election.
“This is a genocide and we need to stop pretending otherwise. The lack of clarity, the moral confusion, the indecisiveness is eating at the heart of this nation.” The vote was a political win for the Greens, who can claim Payman’s now-former colleagues are cowards compared with the renegade senator. It prompted a debate about sectarianism in a highly secularised Australian political culture. The previously obscure former union official has challenged norms about self-expression and party unity in politics and asked tricky questions about what Labor’s commitment to diversity means.
By May 2022 she was third on Labor’s WA Senate ticket and not expecting to win a seat. But the party’s abnormally high primary vote – attributed to the state Labor government’s pandemic performance – saw her through. Albanese and the other three members of the leadership team – Penny Wong, Richard Marles and Don Farrell – agreed she had to be suspended indefinitely.
In reality, the controversial “preference whisperer”, who has previously worked with anti-Islamic party Rise Up, has become her closest adviser and was already managing her contact with journalists.on Sunday morning. After seeing her interview, Albanese summoned her to the Lodge where he laid it on the line: she could follow the party’s rules and vote in line with the rest of the caucus as Labor’s 122-year-old loyalty pledge requires, or she would be suspended.
Government MPs insist they had been checking in on her, asking her around for a chat, making sure she was invited to dinners put on by the Left faction. Wong and other senior senators say they’d spent a lot of time with Payman, trying to get her up to speed and at ease with political life. “When I told them that I would be praying and seeking guidance from God, that was in confidence and I did not expect that they would go around telling people,” she told Radio National.
Her departure from the ranks reanimates debate about whether Labor’s decades-old party solidarity rules are fit for purpose in 2024.
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