The Albanese government’s response to the conflict in Gaza will come under fire when self-described “grassroots” campaigns target dissatisfied voters in numerous key electorates at the next federal election.
Senator Fatima Payman’s dramatic exit from Labor to the crossbench last week over disagreement on when and how to recognise Palestinian statehood has sparked fresh debate about the electoral impact of the issue.
Could Labor’s heartland seats in western and south-western Sydney and parts of Melbourne be vulnerable to campaigns run by pro-Palestine Muslim groups?
The prospect of such campaigns has prompted a round of hand-wringing from the major political parties and from prominent media outlets. So let’s take a look at the planned community campaigns and then put them in context.
Who are the Muslim groups expected to target seats at the next federal election?
Amid Payman’s split with Labor, a new political movement called the Muslim Vote was announced. The group says it plans to back candidates in at least three safe Labor seats in Sydney but is also looking to options in Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia and the Australian Capital Territory.
The Muslim Vote denies being a political party and says it does not intend to become one. Instead, it is focused on educating and mobilising voters about their local politicians’ stances on Palestine. It says it wants to mobilise volunteers who would support independent candidates. Its website says the group is guided by the ethical and moral framework of Islam, which requires followers to “act with integrity, justice, and compassion and drives our efforts to create a more equitable society”.
Another group, Muslim Votes Matter, has also been established. Like the Muslim Vote, it says it is primarily an educative and resources body striving for the “political engagement and voice of Australian Muslims” to strengthen national unity and promote values-driven policymaking.
The group says there are more than 20 seats where the Muslim community “collectively has the potential deciding vote” based on an analysis of the electoral margins and the share of Islamic voters in those seats.
Which MPs are they targeting and why?
Primarily, the groups are looking to influence electorates with a higher proportion of Muslim voters – and those seats have typically been traditional Labor strongholds.
One of those on the wishlist is Watson, which the workplace relations minister, Tony Burke, has held since 2004. Watson is held by Burke with a margin of 15.1% but Muslims make up 25.1% of the population in the seat, suggesting they could make a difference to the result.
Burke has been supportive of the pro-Palestinian movement but has not strayed from the party line on supporting a two-state solution during a peace process. On the Muslim Votes Matter’s scorecard, Burke is alleged to have not mentioned Gaza in parliament since October 2023, when he gave a speech saying it was legitimate for Palestinians to want to live “free of occupation [and] free of endless checkpoints” and called for international law to be upheld. But Burke did tell parliament on 5 June that the government was calling for a ceasefire.
Other target seats include Jason Clare’s Blaxland and Anne Stanley’s Werriwa – both also in Sydney.
Beyond New South Wales, the Victorian Labor-held seats of Calwell, Scullin, Bruce, Holt and Wills are being considered.
What are federal politicians saying about these moves?
Quite a bit, it turns out. The announcement of Muslim-focused political groups has drawn criticism from major party politicians, who say Australia’s political system should avoid sectarianism.
Anthony Albanese, who has previously described the Catholic church as one of “three great faiths that [he] was raised with” alongside the Labor party and the Rabbitohs NRL team, said faith-based political parties would “undermine social cohesion”.
The prime minister also said it was “beyond obvious that it is not in the interest of smaller minority groups to isolate themselves, which is what a faith-based party system would do”.
The opposition leader, Peter Dutton, said: “I don’t have any problem with a party that has a religious view … but when you say that your task is to, as a first order of priority, to support a Palestinian cause or a cause outside of Australia, that is a very different scenario.”
But the deputy leader of the Greens, Mehreen Faruqi, said “people of colour and Muslims have for too long been ignored in this country” and the major political parties had “for decades used us as tokens, as photo opportunities at our religious events”.
“So I don’t find it surprising at all that communities are organising and communities are saying, well, we want our voices heard,” she said.
Is mixing religion and politics in Australia a new phenomenon?
No. At the beginning of the House of Representatives each day, the speaker acknowledges country and then reads a parliamentary prayer that asks “Almighty God” to “Direct and prosper our deliberations to the advancement of Thy glory, and the true welfare of the people of Australia”. The Speaker then reads the Lord’s Prayer including the invocation: “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in Heaven.”
Numerous Australian political leaders have spoken about their faith, with the former prime minister Scott Morrison using his first speech to parliament as an MP in 2008 to ask God to “bless and guide us all in this place”.
For many years, Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic party held the balance of power in the NSW upper house and was influential in the passage of legislation, although it is no longer registered. Australian Christians, a Western Australia-based political party, remains registered and declares on its website: “We need a Christian voice in Parliament to cut through the political noise and promote accountability and integrity in government.”
It is also not unusual for faith groups to speak up on political issues of importance to them, including at election time. The Australian Christian Lobby, established in 1996, says that it “mobilises Christians across the country to take action on behalf of their faith, making a significant impact on the political landscape in Australia”. The ACL maintains that it does not “tell people who to vote for” but often publishes checklists ranking candidates and parties against its policy priorities. For example, in this year’s Tasmanian state election the ACL’s “Tas Votes” website urged Christians to “please consider voting on moral and ethical grounds” and to “choose those who are most likely to support God’s truth in Parliament”.
The Australian Christian Values Institute publishes checklists that give an opinion on the political parties’ stances on issues such as abortion, euthanasia and funding for Christian schools. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry surveyed political parties before the 2022 federal election and posted a compilation of answers under the heading: “Where do the Liberals, ALP and Greens stand as parties on issues affecting the Jewish community?” The questions included what conditions the parties would apply before recognising a Palestinian state and how they would approach UN votes relating to Israel.
What are the new groups’ chances of getting candidates elected?
Right now, political analysts and pollsters are watching this space. In the UK election last Thursday, despite Keir Starmer’s Labour party winning a thumping majority, it also lost four seats to independent candidates standing on an explicitly pro-Palestinian platform.
Kos Samaras, a former Victorian Labor party campaign director who now runs his own polling company, said the groups had “the potential for mass disruption”.
Samaras said the issue had already been brewing in Labor’s western Sydney seats for some time but Payman’s exit had taken the situation from “manageable” to “quite difficult”. Younger second- and third-generation Muslim voters could punish Labor at the polls, he said.
“Their parents have voted for Labor, but they’ve grown up in Australia, where they’ve watched the party really not make much of an effort to represent them,” he said. And all the [conflict in Gaza] has done has poured petrol on the fire.”
The electoral analyst Ben Raue said even if the independent candidates didn’t win seats from Labor, the impact would still be apparent.
“It means Labor is going to have to pay attention to electorates that they’ve largely been able to take for granted before,” he said.
