Albanese had to act on Payman, but doing so creates new headaches for Labor

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party leadership team have made the right decision by indefinitely suspending Senator Fatima Payman from the caucus.

But by removing Payman from the caucus until she is ready to respect the party’s iron law of solidarity, Labor now faces two new problems – one in parliament and one in the broader community.

Senator Fatima Payman leaves the Lodge in Canberra on Sunday afternoon after being suspended from caucus by Anthony Albanese.Credit: James Massola

Albanese had to act. This was the West Australian senator’s third strike against caucus solidarity.

Back in May, MPs were left quietly seething after Payman used the phrase “from the river to sea, Palestine will be free” – which some people interpret as a call for the abolition of the state of Israel – as it sucked up oxygen and distracted from the government’s budget sales job.

Then last week, Payman’s colleagues were furious after she crossed the floor to vote with the Greens on a motion recognising Palestinian statehood.

Unlike the Liberal Party, Labor does not generally allow its MPs to cross the floor. Caucus solidarity has been a guiding precept of the party for more than a century and breaking with that solidarity can be grounds for automatic expulsion.

Payman received a slap on the wrist, a one-week suspension from caucus, along with some thinly veiled warnings from senior colleagues including Albanese, Penny Wong and Richard Marles.

So when she appeared on the ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday morning and openly declared she would cross the floor again if another Greens motion on Palestine came forward – not to mention implicitly criticising Wong and arguing she was listening to the wishes of the broader labour movement on Palestine – something had to give.

In the hours after that appearance, Albanese told colleagues that Payman’s decision to appear on the show had been “gratuitous” and that by acting unilaterally, she had placed herself ahead of the other 103 members of the parliamentary party.

It is difficult to see Payman ever returning to the ranks of the ALP.

Fatima Payman in question time on Wednesday.Credit: James Brickwood

If the prime minister had not acted, he would only invite further disunity and, potentially, other MPs deciding to chance it and cross the floor on a policy issue.

But while Albanese has solved one problem, he now confronts two others.

First, Labor has potentially lost a vote it could count on in the Senate and will have to work harder to secure a majority in the upper house on contentious legislation.

Second, both in the party’s rank-and-file membership and the broader community, there is plenty of sympathy for the Palestinian cause.

By acting as he had to, Albanese and Labor are likely to face blow-back from Muslim Australians and in the community more broadly.

Fairly or unfairly, some voters will interpret this as Labor siding with Israel over the Palestinian people, regardless of the fact that a non-binding motion in the Senate will have zero impact on the war in Gaza.

That could have a material impact on Labor’s vote in half-a-dozen of seats in Melbourne and Sydney, where the suspension of a 29-year-old, hijab-wearing first-term senator – voting in accordance with her conscience – will be about as popular as a bucket of cold vomit.

Payman’s expulsion also underscores the difficulty for Labor in incorporating the disparate views of an increasingly multicultural and multi-religious caucus, while still imposing the tight party discipline that has long been one of the ALP’s hallmarks.

With increased diversity comes an increasing diversity of views.

Labor will have to work to repair the damage this has done in those communities, and that will take time.

But for Albanese, a 40-plus year veteran of Labor, party unity had to come first.

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