People who know about these things tell me that American football lost its thrill once cheap camcorders came on the market. Teams could now film not merely actual games, but every practice from multiple angles. Coaching became a fascinated, endless rewatching of the particular moment when a sequence of play went one way, and one could hear bones cracking beneath a pile of bodies. It is possible, in such circumstances, to conclude that though everything went wrong, the play was right.
Which brings us to the Albanese government, and the departure of Senator Fatima Payman from Labor. Talk about the sound of bones cracking under a pile-on. From the bleachers it looks like nothing was done right. Anyone with the most basic sense of the world would surely have realised that Senator Payman, an Afghanistan-born Muslim, would feel enormous moral disgust and horror at what is happening in Gaza, and at some point be unable to rubber-stamp Labor’s weak position on Palestinian statehood.
The obvious solution would have been to make this a one-time conscience vote on foreign policy, acknowledge it as a special category, and let the pressure out. Why that hasn’t happened has multiple possible explanations. Has Labor been scared straight by the permanent Defence establishment, and told in no uncertain terms that there can’t be a sheet of parchment between Australia and the US on this matter?
Did Labor’s right-wing Defence establishment enforce this anyway, as sycophants to power who don’t need to be bullied into doing the US’ bidding? Was it influenced by the Right faction’s need to keep the Left — ostensibly in power — on a leash? Was it simple, utter, blitheness on the part of Labor, not really understanding that at some point, Payman would not be existentially able to support some of these votes?
To all of these scenarios, the answer was surely to arrange a situation where a Labor loyalist, and an asset, could acquit her conscience while remaining true to her party. The onus is on the leadership to do that. Politics isn’t about imposing rules. That’s science. Politics is the art of knowing when the exception applies, when it must apply, and bringing it to fruition. A successful political career of a leader is simply a series of applied exceptions.
The Labor leadership forced Payman out. The notion that she had engineered this for any length of time (there may have been a little politicking at the end) is surely ludicrous. She has been a teenage Laborista, an early leader, and won the unlikely third place in the 2022 West Australian Laborslide. No-one knocks that back, for reasons political or personal, for the insurgent/fringe world of community campaigns and Glenn Druery, unless they really have to.
Look, there’s probably layers within that, who knows. But watching the pile-on and hearing the crunch last week, one could also conclude that Labor was playing triage. That it had concluded that any accommodation with Payman would be a net negative, and the Anglo/European-Australian mainstream would see it as weakness in relation to “multiculturalism” etc etc. To be stern and unyielding would then be a ruthless triage that would signal to the mainstream that Labor was not captive to special interests.
That may well have worked. In the progressive heartland, there were near-universal howls of dismay at Labor’s unyieldingness to conscience, of its fetish of caucus etc. Further out, many people had little interest in the politics of caucus solidarity. Most — I can attest from a week spent in Victorian country newsagents, which are either reflections of the zeitgeist or gully traps of rural cranks — saw Payman as a troublemaker and Palestinians as terrorists, when they were aware of the story at all. These electorates are not Labor’s, but it is reasonable to believe that there is the same moral panic in Mill Park too. So the brutal politics of forcing out a senator gets some reward, or at least cuts the party’s losses.
This case, the rational angle, is strengthened if polling shows that Labor is not being hit as hard in the high Middle Eastern-Australian areas of western Sydney and northern Melbourne as first thought. There is palpable anger with Labor in these areas. But there is perpetual palpable anger in rural seats too, but people always troop back to the Nats in the end. It is going to take a great deal of work and a bit of luck to detach this vote en bloc from Labor. Labor may be counting on that.
But of course there’s always the other explanation, which is simple incomprehension and incompetence. The possibility that European-Australian Laboristas — Albanese, Plibersek, Marles — simply have not understood the full moral horror of what has occurred in Gaza. The dimwit section of the press corps certainly hasn’t, the dozy suburban mentality at its worst on display in the notion that the politics of Gaza are “identity politics”, as if it were an argument over whether falafel could be called an Israeli food or not. If the pronouncements of Hartcher et al on this are genuine, then they are either genuinely ignorant, or simply unable to see the significance of what is happening to a non-European people, because they’re a non-European people.
The howl is now going up that Fatima Payman is creating a fractured, religious politics by leaving Labor. One junior senator from WA is doing that, is she? Truly her powers must be awesome. The better explanation for the beginning of the great fracturing is that you can’t create the most high-immigrant, multicultural society in the world and then run a Labor Party as if it’s 1934 and we’re all eating stewed lamb and playing two-up. Albanese Labor, and the Left faction that leads it, has relied on the votes of multiple nationalities, and then betrayed them with the AUKUS deal, which is simply the continuation of American overextension across the world. AUKUS is glued together with Anglicity. It treats non-white people as subject colonials, inside or outside our borders.
The Labor Right, bound up with the permanent security establishment, are enforcing it on the Left, which is taking it far from unwillingly. Its capacity to do so represents the lag in multiculturalising our polity, which has lagged behind our social multiculturalisation. The two are on a collision course, brought about by the haphazard way we have run immigration over the past decade or so, a true major-party unity ticket. The right is utterly hypocritical on this, conjuring up a fantasy multicultural policy, without which the hundreds of thousands of people streaming in from ancient cultures would all drop all affiliations immediately and subsist on footy and the vegemite song.
It’s either stupid, again, or a cynical way to support high immigration, while beating the progressives over the head about it. The left, well the left won’t even admit one can have political positions on the volume of immigration at all, still less that a multi-source fully multiculturalised country must have a process of conscious social integration — one not reliant on the right’s fantasy of assimilation — which we are not doing.
Fracture? Of course we’re going to fracture. Our two major cities are gaining huge Chinese populations at the same as we might go to war with it over Taiwan, a Chinese civil dispute. If, like Hartcher and others, you go around thinking that solidarity with your people is “identity politics”, and that the “real” political divide is over interest rates, then of course you will never see this coming. Or you will understand it only in social technocratic terms, as a matter of social cohesion.
By that logic, no slaughter of your own people, however brutal, justifies crossing the floor God forbid. It is a conclusion you can only come to from within deep and unreflective Anglicity, in which your own ethnicity and its bonds have been so generalised that their history disappears. Like most moral and intelligence defaults, at its root is a failure of the imagination. And a lack of will to imagine the lives of others.
Labor’s fault lies not in the enforcement of caucus solidarity — though its ritualistic clog dancing cry cry over it marked the party as out of step with an individualistic post 60s society, who regarded the performance in amazement. The failure, if it was that at all, is in the choices Labor is making about how exterior powers relate to interior politics, and the belief that these can remain separate. If we are going to play American football, or be one, there are going to be a few painful breaks along the way.
Was Labor’s handling of Fatima Payman a political strategy or just plain incompetence? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
