No-one remembers Joe Bullock. Amid all the coverage of Fatima Payman, not one political journalist recalled another WA Labor senator who was faced with his party supporting a position he couldn’t in good conscience hold. He resigned from the Senate in 2016 after Labor reached a compromise position on marriage equality at its 2015 conference: that it would be the subject of a conscience vote for two terms but then support for marriage equality would be required. Bullock, a conservative Baptist, said he couldn’t go to the 2016 election, even though he wasn’t up for election that year, backing marriage equality. Some on the left described it as a “hissy fit“.
If Bullock, who later joined the Liberal Party in Tasmania, had moved to the crossbench instead… well, you can imagine the febrile reaction from those who criticised him, and the demands from progressives that he instead quit the Senate. But substitute a young Muslim hijabi woman for an reactionary old white guy, and Palestine for marriage equality, and you have an instant hero for the left. The main difference is that marriage equality at least affected Australians, whereas there’s little Australia can do that will change what the Israeli Defence Forces are inflicting on Palestinians.
Along the way, erstwhile heroes of progressives like Penny Wong, who didn’t quit politics because of Labor’s opposition to marriage equality but stuck in there and fought against the likes of Bullock to change policy, are suddenly villains for oppressing and intimidating a young senator; the ghoulish custodians of an antediluvian Labor system imposing its collective will on the individual consciences of MPs.
There’s not much nuance in any of this. Payman is right that, even if Labor’s platform includes recognition of Palestine, the government has done little to implement that, and its persistent silence on Gaza (not to mention its lies about Elbit Systems) is a betrayal of that. But her statement yesterday that “unlike my colleagues, I know how it feels to be on the receiving end of injustice”, was deeply offensive. She could ask Wong about being denied the opportunity to marry her partner, or Anne Aly about being the target of horrific racism and sexism. She could have asked her former WA senate colleague Pat Dodson — Bullock’s replacement — last year about injustice. Instead, Payman thinks she’s the only one to do it tough.
But however dumb and offensive that remark was, it’s nothing compared to the backgrounding — swallowed by political journalists — by Labor against Payman, and particularly the suggestion that she’s some kind of religious zealot. For a party that continues to foist conservative Catholics on voters and didn’t bat an eyelid at Kevin Rudd’s religiosity, it’s suddenly a cause for concern that Payman is allegedly “guided by God” — a concern that buys into pretty much every offensive trope and stereotype about Muslims. This has now extended to the suggestion Payman might still be an Afghan citizen.
To call this dogwhistling is generous. There’s nothing inaudible about it — Labor is using a gullible (at best, more likely racist) media to paint Payman as a rogue Muslim, a religious extremist who may not even be One Of Us, not even a real Australian. So much for the endless social cohesion rhetoric the Albanese government has proffered in recent months.
Some went further and conjured the scene of Payman heading a new political grouping fueled by Muslim voters shifting their allegiance from its rightful place (i.e. Labor) to a sinister sectarian force — as if all Muslims are a religious monolith, as if they wouldn’t vote exactly as most other Australians vote, on the economy, on their finances, on jobs or on the health system.
News Corp must be scarcely able to believe its luck as it happily pumps Labor’s sewage out for it.
Lurking at the bottom of this young/hard-left/pro-Palestine/multicultural versus old Labor/the Pledge/pragmatism divide is an ironic ideological consequence. Payman is celebrated on the left for her decision to put her conscience ahead of the demands of her party, and Labor, we’re told, must modernise and accept that to be relevant to younger voters it must stop penalising individual decision-making by MPs when it’s at odds with the collective decisions of the party.
To do so would be one of the final triumphs of neoliberalism over its most vociferous critics. Elevating the individual at the expense of the collective is the very essence of neoliberalism, freeing each of us from the restraining bonds of community, enabling us to maximise our potential unconfined by the deadening demands of the collective. What’s good economically is surely good politically — as the conservative side of politics (where you can repeatedly cross the floor but still go on to become deputy prime minister) has long argued.
Meanwhile, a week that Labor hoped to devote to celebrating tax cuts and telling us all about how wonderful it is to make things here has instead been about divisions within its own ranks. That’s one of the few kinds of political news that 95% of voters, usually entirely disengaged, pick up on. Labor is in much more than just an ideological mess.
