The six weeks that turned Fatima Payman’s rift with Labor into a chasm

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.

The 29-year-old first-term senator had been voted into parliament as the third name on the ticket in the wave of Western Australian votes for the ALP, and had spent most of her first two years as a low-profile backbencher.

The first federal politician to wear the hijab, Payman was fresh from breaking her silence on the war in Gaza after holding a press conference on May 15 to call on her party to end trade with Israel, implement sanctions and immediately recognise a Palestinian state.

“My conscience has been uneasy for far too long and I must call this out for what it is,” she said at the small, snap press conference for a handful of journalists.

“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.”

Parliament rose after the budget sitting and government MPs went back to sell the economic road map to voters. In the time between parliament sittings, Payman quietly attended the meeting of Muslim groups.

Come Thursday, Payman held another press conference. When she announced her resignation from the Labor Party she had become, if not quite a household name, one of the best-known public critics of the Australian Labor Party’s response to the war in Gaza.

She quit in the full glare of live TV, fielding questions about her links to controversial preference whisperer Druery and her future intentions – chiefly: could she become the face of a new, Muslim political party seeking protest votes in Labor electorates?

Payman would only say she had no immediate plans to join any parties but added: “Stay tuned.”

“I was not elected as a token representative of diversity, I was elected to serve the people of Western Australia and uphold the values instilled in me by my late father,” Payman said after she crossed the Senate floor on June 25 to vote with the Greens on their motion calling for immediate recognition of Palestinian statehood.

The Afghanistan-born senator has won sympathy for acting on her conscience and voting against her own party on an issue that has clearly tormented her since October 7 last year.

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.

But revelations from this masthead that she has been working with a political strategist who is no friend of the Labor Party have also damaged her, testing claims that her decision to leave the party was only made on Thursday morning.

She bristled on Thursday when asked, now that she had moved to the Senate crossbench, whether she would campaign on other issues that affected the Islamic community.

“I don’t know how to respond to that question without feeling offended or insulted that just because I’m a visibly Muslim woman that I would only care about Muslim issues. This topic on Palestinian recognition, Palestinian liberation, is a matter that has impacted everyone with a conscience, it is a matter that’s not just a Jewish versus Muslim issue,” she shot back.

Yes, she said later, she had wrestled with her conscience before crossing the floor and, yes, she had prayed – but as an observant Muslim, she prayed every day.

Path to Canberra

Payman’s pathway into federal politics was remarkably quick.

As she outlined in her first speech, she was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1995, only a year before her family fled to Pakistan to escape the Taliban. Her father, Abdul Wakil Payman, arrived in Australia via boat in 1999 and spent time in immigration detention, before the family was finally reunited in Western Australia in 2003 when the future politician was eight years old.

Abdul Wakil advised his daughter to study pharmacy “to serve humanity”, but it was while volunteering for community and university groups that Payman met WA state Labor MP Pierre Yang.

After 18 months working as an electorate officer in 2019-20, Payman became president of Young Labor WA in 2021 and joined the United Workers Union as an organiser.

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 – got her through.

Her first two years in Canberra were uneventful. In May this year, Labor was blindsided by Payman’s first act of public defiance: to utter the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. It is a chant used by pro-Palestinian protesters that Albanese has disavowed, and which is interpreted by some as antisemitic and calling for the state of Israel to be abolished.

Payman herself has said the phrase is not antisemitic and simply recognises the desire of Palestinians to be able to live freely in their own homeland.

That comment, the day after budget day, prompted a public rebuke from the prime minister. A few weeks later, when she crossed the floor and voted with the Greens on a motion recognising Palestine, it finally dawned on Labor’s hard heads that she could be headed for the exit.

The minor penalty imposed on Payman – a one-week suspension from caucus – surprised some MPs. But when she then went on the ABC’s Insiders program and declared she would be prepared to cross the floor again, Labor went into crisis mode.

Albanese and the other three members of the leadership team – Penny Wong, Richard Marles and Don Farrell – agreed she had to be suspended indefinitely.

And when this masthead revealed on Tuesday that Payman was talking to Druery and anti-Labor groups, while still serving as a Labor MP, colleagues were furious at her brazen disloyalty.

Movements and meetings

The website for the group Payman met with last month and where she first met Druery, “Muslim Votes Matter”, makes clear who the targets are: ministers Jim Chalmers, Jason Clare, Tony Burke, Chris Bowen, Andrew Giles, Linda Burney, Brendan O’Connor, and Ed Husic and Anne Aly, both of whom are Muslims.

On the agenda at that meeting: Should the groups create a party? Should that party have the word “Muslim” in it? Would candidates run in both the upper and lower house?

The Muslim leaders at that meeting were furious with Labor MPs with whom they long shared close relations. Since October 7, as Labor has found it increasingly tricky to maintain long-standing support for Israel, some of those MPs have been blocked from attending local mosques.

When Payman finally defected on Thursday, she described Labor as “indifferent” to Palestinian suffering, bolstering the political movement with which she denied any formal affiliation. Payman also said she had spoken with Druery only in the past few days, “just like I’ve had many conversations with many other advisers and political strategists”.

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.

Days before, Payman appeared on Insiders 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.

If she chose to cross the floor again, Albanese said she should consider resigning from parliament and handing her seat back to Labor.

But even as the prime minister spoke to Payman, Druery rang a handful of journalists to let them know the senator could hold a doorstop interview outside The Lodge at 3.30pm. Instead, she sent out a statement that made clear she was on the brink of quitting.

By Wednesday, the day before she quit, Albanese was no longer trying to bring her back into line.

“I expect further announcements in the coming days, which will explain exactly what [Payman’s] strategy has been over now more than a month,” he told parliament.

Labor, by that point, believed Payman’s move to the Senate crossbench had been in train for weeks, despite her claims to the contrary.

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.

But for months Payman had been agonising over Labor’s response to the war and talking to close confidants about her future, torn between her party and her religious faith.

On the week of the key Greens vote, she told associates she was being guided by God and had made up her mind to cross the floor only seconds before doing so.

An angry Payman said on Friday that it was “condescending” and “ridiculing” that her former colleagues had shared with journalists the fact that she had turned to prayer before the vote.

“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.

“[It was] almost in a condescending, ridiculing way, like, ‘Oh, look at this one, she’s praying to this almighty being’.”

House rules

Some in Labor are seething that the WA branch of the party saw fit to select someone so unfamiliar with party rules that she did not seem to realise she would be banned from crossing the floor and voting against government colleagues.

In conversations with journalists and strategists as she considered her future, she regularly expressed surprise about the protocols that guide Labor members.

One example of Payman’s relative isolation is that back in January, when she married Jacob Stokes, a political staffer in the WA Labor state government who converted to Islam prior to their wedding, just two of her east coast colleagues – Victorian senator Jana Stewart and South Australian senator Karen Grogan – were invited to the event.

Her departure from the ranks reanimates debate about whether Labor’s decades-old party solidarity rules are fit for purpose in 2024.

A decent proportion of the rank and file agree with Payman on Palestine, and allowing MPs to cross the floor in some circumstances would relieve the pressure on those wrestling with their beliefs and loyalties.

A case in point: Payman’s pointed response after Wong urged her last week to seek change from within as she herself had done for more than a decade to change the party’s position on same-sex marriage.

“It took 10 years to legislate same-sex marriage,” Payman said on Thursday. “We’re talking about 40,000 Palestinians being massacred here. These Palestinians do not have 10 years.”

Australia’s political capital is convulsing over responses to the war in Gaza, and politicians are doing little to soothe local tensions over the conflict. This week, protesters breached security to roll out a Hamas-linked symbol underneath the coat of arms at Parliament House. The night before, in a fiery House of Representatives debate as political leaders and journalists were filing into the midwinter ball, MPs on either side of the debate let loose, calling each other “disgusting” and “vile”.

Nobody could have predicted the political earthquake that would unfold as the world watched the horrific scenes of October 7 and the subsequent invasion of Gaza.

As many people struggle through a cold winter and an ailing economy, the sight of their representatives shouting about a far-flung war, over which Australia has next to no influence, must be galling.

Losing Payman to the crossbench represents a failure by the government to hang onto a young, forthright woman of colour, and it sends a disturbing message to Muslim communities who have backed the party.

But if Labor people thought Payman was an inexperienced political ingenue who could be managed and contained, the dramatic events of the last week suggest otherwise.

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