Labor pariah, now a traitor: PM, sack Fatima Payman and sack her now
OPINION: If Labor doesn’t dump Fatima Payman then she will surely dump Labor. It’s only a matter of who emerges with any remaining pride, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Opinion
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Last week Fatima Payman was a Labor pariah. This week that has changed.
She is now both a traitor and a saboteur. Anthony Albanese needs to sack her and sack her now.
The WA Senator’s foolish decision to cross the floor to support a pointless Greens motion on Palestine was both stupid and self-indulgent. The PM was typically merciful in merely suspending her from caucus for a week.
Her embarrassingly self-entitled declaration on the ABC’s Insiders that she would do it all again was, by contrast, not just idiotic but aggressive. The PM was yet again merciful in merely suspending her from caucus indefinitely.
But her bleating heart lament that she has been exiled and victimised — and the suggestion she could abandon the party that is the only reason she even exists in public life — goes far beyond the realm of any human decency or functioning intelligence.
What kind of outrageously naive narcissist could possibly lap up a Senate seat for a major party in their 20s only to betray the party that gave her that privilege in its most difficult hour?
And what genuinely deranged mind could, after contributing nothing to the caucus and refusing to abide by even its most basic rules, nonetheless declare that they are somehow the oppressed victim in all of this.
Some say it’s a Muslim thing, I suspect it’s a Millennial thing. Either way Payman is more cooked than a Thanksgiving turkey. She clearly neither understands nor cares about the party that is the sole reason she even has the APH email address to send out her sooky press releases.
As shocking as it may be to learn, Payman was not elevated to the august chamber of the Senate on the basis of her family name but because she was a Labor candidate, both expected and required to uphold a party platform which she now apparently holds in contempt.
It is horrendously embarrassing for her, which nobody cares about. The problem is it is also embarrassing for the PM, whom she has been disgracefully disrespectful of.
Yes, every Australian has a right to slag off Labor leaders as much as they want. But when you’re an actual Labor member of the Australian Parliament not so much. Who knew?
Thus Payman will never be preselected again.
But that only brings with it another injustice: It means she has four years left as a sitting Senator to shit on the ALP and cultivate her own cult of personality. She is Labor’s Lidia Thorpe.
Would she win a spot as an Independent? I’m not sure there are enough Palestinians or socialists in WA to achieve that result.
Instead it all boils down to the ultimate teen dilemma of who dumped who first. If Labor doesn’t dump Payman then she will surely dump Labor. It is only a matter of who emerges with any remaining pride.
This is what happens when the Left get their gum in the gears. It is horrible to see.
Albo has already been strong in standing up to the Left that both made him and which he made. This is another litmus test.
And so she must go and must go now.
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