Let’s stop pretending Payman defection is unremarkable

Senator Fatima Payman holds a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Some of the best descriptions of individual human characters come from the animal kingdom. I am brave as a lion. You are obedient as a dog. He is treacherous as a snake.

So in the defection of senator Fatima Payman from the Labor Party, it is amazing one of the great Australian animal tropes has been so sparingly used.

In the ancient dialect of Labor, Payman is “a rat”.

A rat is someone who pledges themselves to Labor, then betrays it. The worst sort of rat is someone who not only pledges themselves but also sucks a benefit from the party – like a well-paid, influential seat in the Senate.

Sadly, there have been plenty of rats in Labor history.

The worst was William Morris Hughes, who as prime minister in 1916 destroyed his own Labor government to head a new polyglot cabinet. There still are people who know him only as “Hughes the Rat”. But there have been others.

Jack Lang, rogue NSW Labor premier – and boyhood hero of Paul Keating – quit the party to set up his own splinter “Lang Labor”. It wandered like a walking ghost for years.

Neither of these renegades was ever forgiven, and swarms of lesser rats have been demonised for the rest of their lives.

Which is why it is puzzling Payman is receiving more plaudits than Molotov cocktails from many of her erstwhile colleagues.

She is “brave”, “honest” and an “activist”. She stands up for her beliefs. She is on the right side of history in bravely demanding a Palestinian state. And presumably the destruction of Israel, given that she uses that aquatic metaphor, that Palestine should run “from the river to the sea”.

Parts of Young Labor lionise her and demand she address the party faithful. They even rant that the historic Labor “plank” – that its members of parliament are bound to vote according to the decisions of caucus – be chopped up for environmentally friendly firewood.

How all this sits with generations of Labor history and culture is anyone’s guess.

Can you imagine what would have happened to any Labor member who had dared to vote against a darling cause of the Left, such as the Indigenous voice? Their future would have been proverbially short, brutish and nasty.

Perhaps remarkably, Payman is one of those political micro-rodents that occupy a tiny evolutionary niche. She has no policy platform. Indeed, she has no policies at all. She has nothing to say about the cost of living, domestic violence or the rise of China.

Her entire political payload is a single proposition on a single aspect of foreign policy. There should be a two-state solution that recognises a Palestinian state, and presumably Israel as a footnote. Although once the land between the river and the sea has been occupied by the new Palestinian regime, it is hard to see where Israel would fit.

Perhaps there is a convenient offshore island. Naturally, this program is about liberation, not anti-Semitism.

Bob Santamaria

It is indisputable that the base of Payman’s position is a mix of religion and quasi-ethnic commitment. As a Muslim in solidarity with other Muslims, especially those in Palestine, she sincerely believes in a Palestinian state. Fine, however practically implausible that proposition may be.

But to base an entire political persona, let alone a potential movement, on a single demand geographically extraneous to the Australian commonwealth gives a new meaning to micro party. This is the amoeba of micro politics.

All of which has given rise to an apologist Fitzroy terrace industry in trying to discover other parties in Australian politics that were religiously (and perhaps a little ethnically) based.

It has been a mighty struggle to provide Payman with cover, but the seers of the Left naturally have landed on one of the great historic bugbears – the Democratic Labor Party.

The DLP did indeed split from Labor in 1955. Its core certainly was dominated by Catholics, typically of Irish origin, though its ideological leader – BA Santamaria – was a Brunswick Italian.

That is where any similarity to Payman’s movement of Australian Muslim politics ends. The DLP actually was a party, not a complaint.

At heart, the DLP was not about being Catholic, Irish or Calathumpian. It was about politics, not religion. The overwhelming cause of the DLP was the defeat of world communism, not advancing the interests of any particular religious or ethnic group.

The party was formed when communism was a genuine threat to world democracy. The DLP was one small antipodean part of the international opposition to totalitarianism that ultimately triumphed in the 1990s.

As an anti-communist party devoted to free democracy and an anthropology of individual human value, the DLP had a range of policies as sophisticated as that of any other party. As well as foreign policy, there was a compendium of social and economic positions.

In fact, a comparison of the Labor and DLP policies during the 1950s would leave you wondering just which group was more serious about social justice.

Robert Menzies

Critically, the DLP did not appeal only to particular ethnic or religious groups. There were plenty of vile English Protestants who voted DLP, particularly in the Senate, where it was widely trusted to hold the balance of power.

Famously, even Robert Menzies claimed that, disappointed with the Liberal Party he had founded, he voted DLP in his final years.

The truth is that there is no precedent for the Payman phenomenon. She represents a new fracturing of Australian politics along ethno-religious lines. She is a harbinger of danger and conflict.

The irony is that the Left-lauded Payman is the soft face of one of the most reactionary forces in Australian and international politics. Her real importance is as a minimiser of kidnapping, torture, rape and murder by horrific Hamas gangsters. Her river and sea rhetoric marks her as someone committed to the elimination of Israel.

Where is the DLP when you need it?

Greg Craven is a constitutional lawyer and former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.