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).