The treatment of Senator Fatima Payman by the Labor Party shines a light on the brutal nature of party politics
Is this really how we want to run the country?
I guess most people can understand the basic concept, that if you join a club or a party or an organisation, you are obliged to play by the rules of that club or party or organisation; that in agreeing to join, you give up a certain level of autonomy and you don’t get to complain about being disciplined if you break the rules.
It’s their party and they’ll decry if they want to.
Even with that commonsense idea front of brain, there is still something brutal about the way the Labor Party is treating Senator Fatima Payman for crossing the floor in the Senate on a vote about recognising Palestine. Their decision to ban her permanently from caucusing with the party is tantamount to kicking her out of the party, with the cowardly twist that it puts the onus on Payman herself to decide whether she formally quits. As Karen Middleton writes in The Guardian:
Choosing this course, rather than formally expelling her, serves two purposes for the prime minister and the Labor party. It avoids the risk of a messy court challenge of the kind that ensued when Albanese actioned the expulsion of the controversial CFMEU leader John Setka. And it forces Payman to be the one who chooses permanent separation.
The fact that we have gone from this…
…to this ⬇️ in a matter of months speaks to the bigger issue of the exact role parties play in our politics and reminds us that often what is being pursued in our name is not the common good but the will of the party.
When I first began speaking with the people associated with the development of the Voices Of movement and with the voters in blue-ribbon Liberal Party seats like McKellar and Warringah, one of the issues that came through very strongly was that the people in those safe Liberal seats felt entirely neglected by the party. Even worse was that they felt that their local members didn’t see their role as conveying the concerns of the community to the party but as conveying the party’s priorities to the community.
This disconnect—that voters felt local members represented the party and not the community—was at the heart of the swing towards community independents across the country and it is part of the more general dissatisfaction people feel towards politicians in general. We often talk about how our elected representatives pay more attention to the views of the lobbyists representing various vested interests than they do to the views of ordinary voters, and the situation with Senator Payman brings this into sharp focus.
We really need to think harder about where the line is drawn between parties and communities.
Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said on Insiders on Sunday, justifying Labor’s reprimand of Senator Payman, that “we are members of a team,” and he continued to stress the point:
We only get the privilege of serving in this parliament, not because we are individuals, but because when we stand for election, the word Labor is next to our name, and that's obviously the case for Senator Payman. She wouldn't be a Senator but for the fact that “Labor” is next to her name…I cannot over emphasize enough how important all of us who are members of the team regard the obligations of being a member of the team is in terms of the way in which we behave.
I think that is right up to a point.
But at the end of the day, whatever garlands you hang from that argument, lauding the importance of being a team player, it is just another way of saying that the party is more important than the community, that the will of the party is what should take priority, and that an individual member who may represent an alternative view, even if it has wide community support, will be relieved of duty.
In discipling the Western Australian Senator, the Labor Party is not just enforcing its rules of membership—which I think many can understand—it is sending a broader message to communities that the party will simply stop listening if certain views clash with that of the party itself and the executive that dominates it.
I mean, think about it.
If an actual Labor Senator cannot convince party leadership to look at an issue differently—to bring some nuance and flexibility to a major political issue, especially one as fraught as what is happening in Gaza—how likely is that the Labor leadership will listen to we-the-people? If a Senator is kicked out of the party for expressing this particular view in this particular way, what chance do the rest of us have of convincing the party leadership to change their mind?
In disciplining Senator Payman, Labor is sending the message—not just to Payman but to that broader community—that the party line is more important than community opinion.
What makes this whole event even crazier is that the position Senator Payman supported by crossing the floor is actually part of the Labor Party platform they took to the last election:
So, in fact, what Payman is being punished for is not really the substance of the position she took, but the fact that she voted for it in a way that didn’t suit the needs of the party at a given moment in time:
All were furious that, having first raised her voice against Labor’s position in budget week in May [she had] distracted from the government’s message about cost-of-living relief…
Compounding the anger of Albanese and his colleagues last week, she led the government to believe, via the whip Anne Urquhart, that she was not going to cross the floor to support the Greens’ motion on Wednesday. Even her own staff allegedly were not aware that was her plan. She has said she made her decision at the last minute.
But the Labor leadership noted that in the Senate on Wednesday, as the government tried to amend the wording of the Greens motion into a form all Labor senators could support – from recognising a Palestinian state alone to endorsing a two-state solution – Payman sat not in her own seat nor with the opposition or crossbench but in the advisers’ box with a member of the independent senator David Pocock’s staff.
The offence, in other words, is against the will of the executive and in how it conducts its business in the parliament rather than against a broader notion of “the party” or even their position on the matter of Palestinian recognition. As Senator Payman herself noted, “her allegiance is to the wider Labor party, not the subset that sits in the parliament.” But her party bosses don’t care about that.
It is quite an incredible situation.
Notice, for instance, how this completely contradicts Marle’s point that people vote for a party, not an individual. Here the individual politician is actually trying to vote for something that is in the party platform but the party is punishing her because the way in which she is voting doesn’t suit their current purposes and priorities.
Marles can’t have it both ways.
We all know the old saying that if you can’t run your party, you can’t run the country, and so there is a huge premium put on the idea of “party discipline” as indicator of worthiness for office. But the other side of that coin is that it presents the party as an inflexible behemoth, divorced from the interests of communities and the voters within them, the sort of disconnect that is currently driving the rise of independents within our politics and the collapse of primary votes for the LNP and the ALP.
What we are really seeing is the corrupting nature of party discipline, that it forces people into taking positions that damage their fundamental beliefs—as happened with those people within Labor who clung to the party position against gay marriage for years and years—and we have to ask whether this is too big a price to pay. We need to recognise the damage such a notion of “party” does to the integrity of individuals and to politics more generally.
The idea that an individual member has to subsume all their views to that of party is abhorrent and it speaks to what an outdated concept the political party really is. This is a point made by former Conservative MP and Minister, Rory Stewart, in his recent memoir of his time in the British Parliament, and something he has highlighted in a number of interviews since the book came out late last year. He sums it up well in an interview with Novara Media:
I want this book to explain how shameful politics has become, how much worse than any conceivable version of ourselves we've become…the gap, I suppose, between the way in which we perceive politics and the reality of what it is; the kinds of corroded personalities that have formed not just in the Conservative Party, but in all parties; the way in which campaigning and the media cycle and the whips and the parties turn you into something you don't want to be. It's about the moral damage of politics and the ways in which that moral damage stops you from being able to govern well; that there's a connection between kind of dissolution of these institutions and the very poor quality of government.
The idea that Anthony Albanese is asserting his leadership and showing strength in treating Senator Payman in this way is, I suspect, a view at least as much contested as it is accepted. Regardless, we really need to think about the way in which subsuming our views to those of the party, any party, damages the integrity of our democracy and corrupts our politicians.
This again confirms my view of Albanese, an outright coward of a thug. He’ll only take on those he knows he can beat senseless. He sounds like and has the courage of Sylvester the cat.
If crossing the floor is that much of an issue what about Bridget Archer?
Fatima blew Wong’s 10 yr gay marriage argument out of the water, and in addition all that meant was Wong considered her career more important.
There is absolutely no conviction in the Labor party and that includes the unions, to a tee it’s all about positioning for power, money and prestige. Not a Labour man or women in the government to be seen, just a bunch of suits who mouth off about equality etc while doing nothing.
Labor's requirement for rigorous adherence to the party line made sense 100 years ago, when Labor was a third party, bargaining with Free Traders and Protectionists to win better conditions for workers. They couldn't do that if Caucus members made up their own minds on tariff policy.
And the big splits over conscription, the Premiers Plan and the Industrial Groups were deep enough that it was impossible for the party to hold together.
But for decades now, it's been a requirement for absolute obedience to whatever the Leader decides, regardless of what party policy might say. AFAIK, no other party in the democratic world demands this degree of obedience. The Caucus has ceased to matter, given the requirement that all ministers vote in line with the Cabinet, which can never defy the PM