Will Fatima Payman become the Pauline Hanson of the left? That’s up to her

It’s not terribly rare for Australia’s members of parliament and senators to defect from their political parties, although it’s rarer on the Labor side. The last “Labor rat”, to use the party’s rich vernacular, was Mark Latham after leaving parliament and taking leave of his senses.

The last one to defect while still in parliament was senator Mal Colston in 1996 in the noble cause of pursuing a pay rise.

And while each of the defectors has a colourful story, the case of senator Fatima Payman this week stands out. She is the first in the modern era to reject her party on the basis of identity politics.

“This seems to be the first one around ethnic and religious identity of this type,” observes Frank Bongiorno, professor of history at the Australian National University.

Announcing her resignation from Labor while staying on in the Senate, Payman on Thursday said: “Unlike my colleagues, I know how it feels to be on the receiving end of injustice. My family did not flee from a war-torn country to come here as refugees for me to remain silent when I see atrocities inflicted on innocent people.”

She’s speaking of the Palestinian people. Payman’s family is from Afghanistan, where her father served as a politician before the Taliban took over. She arrived in Australia as an eight-year-old.

She’s speaking of an explicit identification with the Palestinian people, and a unique personal credential of shared injustice. “The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions. It is a crisis that pierces the heart and soul, calling us to action with a sense of urgency and moral clarity.”

Many in Labor share her pain. One Labor minister said after her resignation: “The thing that hurts is that there’s not much difference – everyone in Labor wants the war to stop, everyone wants to get to a place where Palestine is recognised.”

So what, exactly, was the difference between the Payman position and the Labor position? The career-defining difference was this: Payman crossed the floor to support a Greens motion that called on the Senate to “recognise the state of Palestine”. Labor’s motion added “as part of a peace process with support for the two-state solution and a just and enduring peace”.

Asked at her resignation press conference to explain why the Labor motion was so radioactive that she would quit the party over it, she replied that “it was the conditionality of that recognition I was not OK with”. In other words, it had to be unconditional recognition; it couldn’t await a peace process.

Elsewhere in her remarks, Payman said that she’s not a single-issue politician, yet she has left Labor over this single issue. And this decision largely defines her as a single-issue politician, like it or not.

She said she is acting in defence of humanity, but in earlier statements she’d called for Palestine to be free “from the river to the sea”. This slogan is synonymous with the call for destruction of Israel, though Payman has disavowed this intention. That doesn’t cut it. She is young but not that naive.

The Renegade Activist protesters who climbed onto the roof of Parliament House on Thursday got the message. They hung the giant banner – “From the river to the sea Palestine will be free” – across the front entrance. They’d met her a week earlier. They said they wanted to “give as much support to Fatima” as possible. How much humanity is there in calling for the destruction of Israel?

Payman earlier had criticised leaders for “performative gestures”. But what has she now done? Of course, the Australian government’s position is immaterial to the war in Gaza. Much less the position of an independent sitting on the Senate backbench. None of this will shorten the war by one hour. Who’s making performative gestures now? This is full-blown identity politics.

Australia has had another politician from a major party strike out as an independent in modern times, also on the basis of identity politics. In fact, she’ll be sitting not far from Payman in the Senate. Pauline Hanson was preselected as a Liberal for the 1996 election, but the party disendorsed her for remarks about Aboriginal welfare that were damned as racist. It was too late to reprint the ballot papers, however. Hanson won the Queensland seat of Oxley listed as a Liberal but sat as an independent.

In her first speech to the House, Hanson revelled in her status as an accused racist, and extended her bigotry with her notorious remark that Australia was in danger of being “swamped by Asians”. Hanson’s entire political career has been based on this strand of pugnacious racism.

Neither woman will enjoy the comparison, but Payman is a left analogue to Hanson: riding the ticket of one of the major parties to enter parliament, striking out as an independent, forging a profile based on identity.

In Payman’s case, it’s a positive advocacy for Palestinians, an ethno-religious identity with which she claims a special, personal affinity, while opposing Israel.

In Hanson’s, she claims to be the advocate for Anglo-Celtic cultural tradition, while opposing the other – black, yellow or Muslim – depending on the needs of the day.

According to the right of politics, it’s the left that’s guilty of playing identity politics, fomenting and exploiting the resentments of minorities. In truth, the right plays it just as hard. The difference is that the right tries to foment and exploit the resentments of the majority.

Identity is a force for good as long as it is deployed in the quest for equality. Identity is the “powerful moral idea that has come down to us”, in the words of Canadian political theorist Charles Taylor. But the moment identity is asserted as the basis for superior rights for one group over another, it is a divisive and hateful force.

Identity politics is sweeping the US and Europe. When practised by the left, the right derides it as “wokeness”. When deployed by the right, it’s attacked as racism. We know its faces. The leading proponents in the US are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left and Donald Trump for the right.

Australia has been fortunate so far. Pauline Hanson has made a long career from right-wing identity politics of bigotry and division, but has failed to inflame a major national movement. Some Coalition figures flirt with it from time to time, but it remains fringe.

The Greens are giving left-wing identity politics a red-hot go, excusing antisemitic vandalism and fomenting hate speech. The war in Gaza is providing the fuel and the Greens are gleefully lighting the fire. The Greens are more than fringe, yet they are not mainstream.

How far will Fatima Payman take her identity politics? It’s a delicate moment. “Stay tuned,” she’s said in response to questions about her future. She tells us that she’s met a group called The Muslim Vote, among others who’d like to enlist her as their parliamentary candidate. Much speculation swirls.

Australia has a history of sectarian politics, a rabid competition between Catholics and Protestants for dominance. The great Labor split of 1955, for instance, had strong denominational undertones. The breakaway Democratic Labor Party was avowedly anti-communist but its binding identity was Catholic.

But Australia never has had a declared religious party at the national level. Religious, ethnic and sexuality-based movements have come and gone, but no actual political parties have formed at the national level.

A couple of explicitly religious political parties have flared in NSW, says Bongiorno – the Protestant Labor Party in the 1920s, which never won a seat, and Reverend Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party, which dissolved when Nile retired – but nothing at the national level.

If Muslim Vote or suchlike manages to sign up Payman for an explicitly Muslim political party, it would be new ground for Australia. It would introduce a new sectarianism into the Australian parliament. It would give not only Payman a new party, it’d also give Hanson a new cause.

In her first speech to the Senate, in 2022, Payman cited Penny Wong’s words as her own ideal: “I seek a nation that is truly one nation, one in which all Australians can share regardless of race or gender, or other attribute, and regardless of where they live, and where difference is not a basis for exclusion.”

If Wong had chosen to play identity politics, she has the trifecta – woman, lesbian, Asian. She never has. “The recognition of someone’s experience as an Aboriginal person or a person of disability is to make the country stronger,” says Wong. Identity shouldn’t be used to divide, in other words, but to unite.

What do you choose, Fatima?

Peter Hartcher is political editor

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