Australia will lose if Payman’s identity politics triumphs

First they ignore you, then they call you a culture warrior, and then you win. The argument, that is. The big picture is that Australia will lose if Fatima Payman’s brand of identity politics triumphs. Pundits who have warned of the dangers of identity politics may feel vindicated. Vindication is a sorry consolation prize.

In 2018, political scientist Francis Fukuyama predicted that identity politics would shatter liberal democracy. In fact, he argued that it was already doing so. Australia has always liked to show up fashionably late to global trends, but in 2024, Senator Fatima Payman has got us caught up quickly.

Her timing is devastating. She has derailed the Labor Party’s key election messages (some tax thingies happened this week and some kind of policy on local manufacturing was announced, FYI). And she chose a week that will inevitably put her politics in the context of a grand political moment in time.

The European parliamentary elections have demonstrated that anxiety over the failure to integrate immigrants is now pushing many voters to the right. In France’s national election (the second round of voting takes place on Sunday), Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen’s hard-right candidate, looks set to become France’s youngest prime minister, reinforcing that the French are scared they are losing their pluralist secular culture to assertive new groups.

In the UK election, which Labour has won by a landslide, “The Muslim Vote” campaign which supported independents against both major parties is “sending a message”.

The message is that there is a new type of political power alignment in the West, based on political Islam. Not to be confused with non-political Islam, which seeks to coexist in pluralist societies.

Political Islam is one of the types of identity politics which Fukuyama called out in his book Identity: The Demand For Dignity And The Politics Of Resentment, along with white nationalism and just old-fashioned ethnic nationalism.

Fukuyama warns against the rise of all kinds of identity politics because they create sectarianism, the reverse of social cohesion. In a cohesive liberal society, people unite and agree to work together towards a set of values that transcend ethnic, religious or other intersectional identities. This is what makes democratic multicultural societies work.

When Senator Payman crossed the floor to vote with the Greens last week, she explained that she had to do it for her “Muslim brothers and sisters”, with whom she was aligning herself over her membership of the party that made her a senator.

And because she was breaking from the Labor Party, the contrast between a religious, identity-based allegiance and a pluralist collective was especially stark. In Labor, elected members from all walks of life are expected to advocate for matters which are of importance to them in caucus, but then act collectively, speaking with a single voice to defend the decision arrived at behind closed doors.

Essentially, Labor is being told to take its diversity, equity and inclusion and stick it because inclusion isn’t enough.

In the Islamic concept of ummah, the community of Muslim believers is supposed to see faith as their primary identity. Fukuyama couldn’t have come up with a better illustration of identity politics’ conflict with social cohesion if he’d set out to imagine one.

We now know how Payman’s choice played out. She quit the party, taking with her the senatorship she won entirely by association with Labor (she got 1681 below-the-line “direct” votes, while Labor got over half a million above-the-line votes for its ticket).

She may well have also shattered Labor’s base. In recent times, the left has made a big deal of celebrating identity-based groups. Indeed, special identities have become part of left-wing lore under the mantra of “diversity, equity and inclusion”.

Many commentators have observed that there was a growing divide between the old-school left and progressive identitarians that was increasingly causing tension. Payman has formalised the schism.

ALP national president and former treasurer Wayne Swan condemned Fatima Payman for her defection.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Suddenly, the collectivist left is being viewed as old-fashioned and “out of touch” with the young voters it wants and needs to appeal to. It’s almost conservative. “History matters,” ALP National president Wayne Swan asserted in a statement on Payman’s defection.

In doing so, he aligned Labor with the father of conservatism, Edmund Burke, and his condemnation of revolutionaries who tear down social structures they have inherited but don’t understand, like 100 years of almost uninterrupted caucus solidarity which has made the Labor Party a force to be reckoned with.

“They,” Burke warned sarcastically, anticipating Payman’s claim that her way of doing things is the only way to fight for human rights, “Have ‘the rights of men”’. And “against these there can be no prescriptions”.

It also does not yet seem to have fully dawned on some on the left who are celebrating this young, hijab-wearing daughter of a refugee, who came to Australia by boat, that the particular identity group which she has chosen to prioritise over the Labor Party is socially reactionary.

During the same-sex marriage postal ballot, 70 per cent of Labor MP Tony Burke’s electorate voted “no”. Burke’s seat is now one of those which will be targeted by a candidate run by a new Australian group, also called The Muslim Vote. Essentially, Labor is being told to take its diversity, equity and inclusion and stick it because inclusion isn’t enough.

It is particularly poignant that this Australian political crisis has arisen from the tragedy of a war unfolding in Gaza. Two identities have found themselves fundamentally unable to coexist peacefully in a part of the world that is sacred to both of them.

There are many in both camps who would like this conflict to be over so they can find a way to live side by side in a two-state solution. But then there are those whose passionate identity politics renders such compromise unpalatable. The last thing we should want is to bring this type of politics to Australia.

Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.

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