How Fatima Payman killed Change From Within

Since Labor Senator Fatima Payman crossed the floor last week to vote for Palestinian state recognition, the campaign to force her out of the party has gone into overdrive. She was suspended indefinitely from Labor’s federal caucus on Sunday afternoon, and may be expelled from the party at a caucus meeting on Tuesday.

While anonymous Labor MPs are badmouthing Payman in friendly news outlets, two politicians in particular — Senator for WA Louise Pratt and foreign minister Penny Wong — have been especially vocal in their criticism. Both are LGBTQA+ women who voted and publicly argued against same-sex marriage until federal Labor allowed a conscience vote on the issue in 2011. Since Payman’s vote, both have held up their conduct during that debate as the model of how Labor politicians should push for change when they disagree with party policy.

As it did fifteen years ago, this line of argument has proven irresistible to Press Gallery journalists. From Mohammad Tawhidi, the “fake sheikh” who used to pop up on Sky News warning about the supposed imminent Australian caliphate, to Nelly Yoa, the Sudanese “community leader”-slash-serial fantastist raised to prominence by The Age during Victoria’s confected African gangs crisis in 2018, the thought of a public figure from an ethnic, sexual, cultural or religious minority agitating against their own rights has been catnip to Australia’s media class for a long time.

The only thing they love more is an ostensibly progressive politician arguing against progressive policy, whether for reasons of “hard-headed pragmatism,” the need to “appeal to the centre” or — in this case — because pushing for more radical change is Against The Rules, even if those rules means as much to the average person as the bylaws at the local bowls club. When Anthony Albanese became Labor leader, he sat down for a rush of puff pieces about how the former left-wing firebrand was putting away the megaphone and finally growing up.

In Wong, the media establishment got their dream politician — a gay, socially liberal woman of East Asian heritage who rigorously upheld the status quo, even when doing so meant her own family was deemed lesser under the law. In return, they showered Wong with perks — gauzy profiles about how hard it was for her to vote against LGBTQA+ rights, endless descriptors of her stoicism and toughness, and a whitewashing of history where her selling out of LGBTQA+ people somehow made marriage equality inevitable.

The holes in this thinking were obvious even back then. The government Wong apparently achieved “substantial change” inside never put marriage equality to a vote. It took another six years, a Liberal government, and an expensive and unnecessary national plebiscite that inflicted profound harm on LGBTQA+ people to pass a single piece of legislation that had broad community support. Giving Wong credit for opposing marriage equality as some kind of five-dimensional chess move ignores the people for whom her stance was a profound and unforgivable betrayal.

With Payman demonstrating that there are other paths to follow than that of the model minority, Wong’s career choices have never looked more hollow. She is now foreign minister, and her day-to-day job largely consists of repeating the phrase “deeply concerned” whenever Israel commits some new atrocity.

Payman isn’t just being punished for embarrassing Labor over Palestine; she’s being punished for not being subservient. The media holding Wong up as a shining example of how a progressive female politician of colour “should” behave is a warning for any other would-be Fatima Paymans (or Lidia Thorpes) out there: shut up, smile, and do as you’re told.

The approved way for a politician of a marginalised background to behave has been established — sell out your community to climb the ladder, let the media fetishise your suffering, and get your career on the fast-track in return. If someone chooses another way — to resist, to question, to rock the boat — they’re in for it. This is especially true of Palestine. Aided by pro-Israel media outlets, Labor has driven MPs like Melissa Parke and Lisa Singh out of parliament for speaking out of turn.

If Payman had followed in Wong’s footsteps and become an in-house apologist for Labor’s failings, there would be half a dozen columns published this week about her “toughness,” her “composure,” her “maturity,” and her bright future in the party. She would be assured of an eventual Cabinet position, the phrase “leader in the Muslim community” attached to her bio every time she appeared on Q+A, and a career of well-paid impotence.

Instead, she is given the worst descriptor Australia’s Press Gallery set can imagine for a woman of colour: defiant.

Payman seems acutely aware that the media establishment now has it out for her. It’s telling that she chose to give her first interview about crossing the floor to 6 News, an online news channel run by a 16-year-old child who asks more intelligent questions in political interviews than most journalists three times his age. It was also apparent in her remarks immediately after the vote, when she declared she “was not elected as a token representative of diversity”.

On Insiders yesterday, Payman repeatedly had to bring the interview back to the real issue — Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians — rather than Speers’ indignation on Labor’s behalf that she had broken one of their precious rules. When Speers raised Wong and Pratt’s loyalty to caucus over their own families, Payman responded:

“This is about 40,000 Palestinians who have been massacred and slaughtered since October 7. It took ten years to legislate same-sex marriage. We’re talking about 40,000 Palestinians being massacred here. These Palestinians do not have ten years.”

I don’t want to over-egg the strength of the stance Payman is actually taking — she has emphasised that she supports a two-state solution and Israel’s right to continue its existence as a Jewish state, which puts her at odds with the broader Palestinian justice movement, major human rights organisations and the Israeli government itself. Her views in that regard should be interrogated.

But given she will likely be either expelled or forced out of the party for having the audacity to publicly say that genocide is bad, she has set an important example. She has given up the chance of a long and lucrative career as a professional atrocity apologist to take a principled stand on one of the most important issues any of us will face in our lives. The fact that her party and our national media luminaries are equally enraged and baffled by that shows the state we’re in.

Fundraiser update

After a ridiculous couple of weeks in which more than $10,000 came in, fundraising for Noor Hammad and her family has hit a bit of a wall. A bunch of weirdly large donations turned out to be fake and were refunded by GoFundMe — I’ve asked them to look into what’s going on and whether the campaign is being spammed or targeted.

However, all the money we’ve raised so far has successfully made its way to Noor, her daughter Hoor and her husband in Khan Younis. Rent, food and baby supplies are prohibitively expensive in Gaza at the moment for obvious reasons, so if you’ve got any spare cash handy, please give a little.

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