They know they're losing

Fatima Payman resigned from the Labor Party yesterday afternoon, and Australia’s media and political establishment has gone full mask-off. The scale and ferocity of Labor’s attacks against her, with the enthusiastic participation of some of Australia’s biggest media outlets, has so many different moving parts that it’s hard to keep up.

Depending on which hit piece you read, Payman is a sinister political manipulator who gaslit the entire parliamentary Labor caucus as part of a premeditated month-long plot to damage the party, a soulless party apparatchik who never should have been preselected to begin with, a closet fundamentalist who’s inflaming religious divisions, or all of the above.

The ABC’s Patricia Karvelas published a piece yesterday suggesting — without evidence, besides anonymous quotes from Payman’s “caucus colleagues” — that Payman had told the Labor party room she was being “guided by God” (apparently Payman used the common Arabic phrase “inshallah”). Citing numerous unnamed Labor sources, Herald columnist Niki Savva ran a ridiculous piece suggesting Payman decided to leave the party a month ago and has been play-acting ever since. The Herald’s national affairs editor, James Massola, accused Payman of “[seeking] to inflict maximum political damage on the party she claims to love” and of being “tone-deaf” for suggesting that the government is indifferent to the genocide in Gaza.

In the last few days alone, News.com.au’s Samantha Maiden revealed the identity of Payman’s husband, who she has tried to keep out of the public eye; published an “exclusive” detailing that Payman partakes in the common political practice of claiming a nightly accommodation allowance to stay in her own Canberra property; and suggested that Payman supports homophobic videos made by Islamic production company the OnePath Network.

Other journalists uncritically picked up the assertions made in many of these pieces and ran with them. During the press conference where Payman announced her resignation, Andrew Tillett from the Australian Financial Review raised “the suggestion you are being guided by God” and asked her if she intended to “campaign on other Islamic propositions”. Journalists from The West Australian tried to get WA Premier Roger Cook to comment on whether social media posts made by Payman’s newly-identified husband breached public servant rules (Payman’s husband is a state ministerial adviser).

Labor “sources” have even placed a story about Payman’s dual Australian-Afghan citizenship in The Australian, trying to raise the prospect that she is ineligible to sit in parliament. Besides the fact that Labor didn’t regard it as an issue for the last two years, Payman can’t revoke her Afghan citizenship — doing so would likely require her to travel to Afghanistan, which her family fled as refugees from the Taliban.

As juvenile and gratuitously cruel as this media backgrounding is, somehow Payman’s former Labor colleagues are behaving even worse. In her press conference yesterday, Payman spoke of “being escorted to the prime minister’s office almost on show, for everyone to see,” of “senators making it very clear that they didn’t want to sit next to me in the chamber,” and of MPs using “stand-up tactics” to “push” her towards falling into line.

In a statement on Monday, she detailed how she was frozen out of the party’s communal spaces after appearing on Insiders, including being removed from the party’s internal group chats. Labor national president Wayne Swan accused Payman of “[empowering] Labor’s opponents on the far-right and on the left”. MP for Higgins Michelle Ananda-Rajah is seemingly refusing to refer to Payman by name.

Because Payman is a visibly Muslim woman, because Muslim community groups are vocally supporting her as part of their efforts to contest seats at the next federal election, and because Australia’s political and media classes never pass up an opportunity to bring 2001-style Islamophobia back, they’re also going wide with it.

In a press conference yesterday, Peter Dutton warned that a minority government that “[included] Muslim candidates from western Sydney” would “be a disaster”. This email from Age chief reporter Chip Le Grand to Randa Abdel-Fattah, in which he asks if she’s an “October 7 denier,” has to be read in full to be believed. In its editorial yesterday, the Fin Review huffed that “Australia has given the Kabul-born daughter of a family who fled the barbarous Taliban a unique chance to promote her adopted country’s peaceful multiculturalism [and] political cohesion,” and that Payman “unfortunately risks creating a new sectarian divide”. Labor tragics on Twitter are now referring to Payman only as “the rat”.

The viciousness of this hate campaign is self-evident, but the sheer self-defeating idiocy of it is worth dwelling on. If the Labor Party was actively trying to lose some of its historically safest seats at the next election, either to western Sydney community independents or the Greens, it couldn’t have done better than to publicly brutalise a young, female Muslim senator for speaking out about the ongoing genocide in Gaza. (While all this was going on this week, Bill Shorten decided to co-host a press conference with Pauline Hanson about a completely unrelated issue.)

Besides the evergreen fact that these lifelong political operators are nowhere near as clever as they think they are, I think the hysterical lashing out can be explained pretty simply: they know they’re losing. You can smell the panic. The prospect of large sections of society choosing to exercise political power on their own terms, rather than being background dressing for photo ops, is terrifying to them.

The “social cohesion” that MPs and media commentators have been invoking to justify their silence on Gaza is predicated on enormous parts of Australian society being resigned to believing that none of us, really, can have a say in what kind of society we want to live in. Thanks to the government’s unquestioning support for a brutal apartheid regime as it wages a campaign of extermination against a captive civilian population, that resignation has given way to anger, to forms of political activism and organising that were previously unthinkable, and to the possibility of radical change.

Payman is the most visible manifestation of this new reality, but it’s much bigger than her. It always was. On the same day that the get-Payman campaign went into overdrive, Australia’s major-party parliamentarians collectively wet themselves at the sight of pro-Palestinian protesters draping banners over the front of Parliament House. The University of Sydney is trying to prevent a repeat of the Palestinian solidarity encampment by banning students from hanging signs, using megaphones or setting up stalls without a permit.

The crackdown will keep getting worse. It will take an enormous human toll on people like Payman who refuse to be compliant in the face of atrocity. But the more brutal and flagrant it becomes, the more those who are carrying it out will feel the ground slide out from under their feet. The anger and disgust that people of all stripes feel towards Labor and the media at their foul treatment of Payman will only fuel the rise of movements that render them obsolete.

All of which is to say: bring it on. Kill “social cohesion” with a baseball bat. Let no one who profits off the slaughter of innocents have another comfortable day. More protest. More disobedience. More sand in the gears of genocide. Whatever comes, it can’t be worse than this.

What I’m looking at

• Fatima Payman’s resignation press conference

• Watching the watchdogs: Palestinians resist unprecedented silencing

• vizier chat