Senator Fatima Payman has cut a lonely figure in the past week. The first-time senator has spoken with a clarity that is rare among politicians from the major parties. Having found her voice dissenting from her party’s tepid position on Palestine, Payman seems to have hit her stride. Her departure from the Labor party is no surprise, but as the decision loomed, it was clear that she had resonated with communities with strong ties to Palestine.
Since October last year, the Labor party has tried to walk a cautious path in the face of unfolding atrocities in Gaza. As Sarah Schwartz, executive officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, wrote this week: “While our government has called for a ceasefire, they refuse to name Israel’s crimes or take the material action many have called for under international law including implementing sanctions and throwing our weight behind a global arms embargo.”
Payman’s actions have put her former party’s failure to lead with a conscience in the face of horror under a microscope. In making Gaza an issue worth breaking with tradition for, Payman achieved a cut-through on Labor’s position on Palestine the party has thus far evaded. The spotlight was clearly not welcome.
In this fractious week, Payman has shown the nation that you don’t have to be the most powerful person in the room to have an impact.
The path Payman has walked is familiar to many people from marginalised communities across Australia. We are often the most vulnerable people in an organisation – lower paid, most burdened by systemic inequalities, most precariously contracted. And yet, because of the nature of the society we live in, we are frequently called upon to be courageous and to take hard stands in defence of the values of the communities we represent. We are often aware that if we don’t speak up, people in the mainstream are unlikely to understand the issues we are putting on the table.
A week ago, at the beginning of this saga, Payman invoked the memory of her father to explain the responsibility she felt to support Palestinian statehood. Insisting that she would not simply go along with party policy on a matter of principle, Payman said: “I was not elected as a token representative of diversity, I was elected to serve the people of Western Australia and uphold the values instilled in me by my late father.”
Those words resonated with many people I have spoken to in migrant communities across the country. Payman is like so many other women of colour who have pushed for change inside organisations that – whether intentionally or not – are hostile to ideas they don’t like or tone deaf to the effect they are having on minority groups. And like many others before her, Payman has had to make tough choices about whether to work within the system or seek to make change in more visibly disruptive ways.
Payman has refused to deny one of the defining issue of our times, but hers is also a story about what it means to try to play a broken game when you are part of a minoritised group in this country.
Though Labor has improved its diversity, its caucus is still overwhelmingly white. According to Per Capita thinktank research fellow and Labor activist Osmond Chiu, the proportion of non-European-background, non-Indigenous MPs in federal Labor is close to 10% whereas in the general population that figure is 25%.
Like others who enter largely monocultural spaces, Payman is confronted with a set of rules and procedures that have worked well for the majority but have significant drawbacks for those who haven’t always belonged to the club. To sway a caucus room, you need seniority and a certain kind of standing – commodities that take time to build and are not guaranteed even when young people, women and people of colour are outstanding at their jobs.
Even if Payman had been persuasive (and to be clear, the Labor party did not seem to be interested in being persuaded on this matter), she would likely have encountered an age-old problem: those who defend the status quo thrive by claiming issues raised by people from ethnic minority communities are themselves minor or tangential. We saw this in action when the PM expressed frustration this week about the fact that he was talking about Payman and Palestine instead of tax cuts.
The message was clear – Payman was a distraction and what he really wanted to talk about was cost of living and other matters regular Australians care about. The sub-text was rich.
As it turns out, Australians can walk and chew gum at the same time. They can appreciate the tax cuts and empathise with a young senator who has managed to elevate an issue that has been bubbling away for months but that has largely been treated as a foreign policy matter by the major parties. The war on Gaza isn’t simply happening over there. Seven decades into the Israeli occupation, Palestinians have created a formidable diaspora, and many of those people have created lives in Australia. They in turn have created networks and have friends and neighbours. In a multicultural society it is these types of ties that make it hard for so many of us to tolerate the bombing of Gaza.
As she leaves Labor, Payman reminds her colleagues that genocide is not someone else’s problem. Importantly, she is seeking to prove that if you choose to ignore a genocide, communities that have families, relatives and loved ones at risk overseas may feel that you don’t care about them either.
Politics is not easy for anyone, least of all for leaders from ethnic and religious minority groups. Some play an inside game, while others seek to make change from the outside. Both strategies are important. Pushing the destruct button can sometimes make progress easier for those who choose to remain inside.
This fierce woman, whose family made a new life here after fleeing Afghanistan, has much to teach us about self-determination. Surely the country that has praised itself for giving her shelter can accept that human rights for all means exactly that – in Gaza now more urgently than ever. Payman’s actions this week have been a reminder that if we allow it to be, speaking truth to power is the most powerful gift multiculturalism can give this society. We can all learn from that.
Sisonke Msimang is the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018)
