It’s been the greatest eruption of overt racism in the Australian media in years. It’s not been confined to the usual suspects at News Corp and Seven, either; the ABC and the Nine newspapers have been at the forefront. Almost as one, and led by their supposedly elite political journalists, media companies have gathered, chanting, around a straw man called “Muslim Sectarianism” and proceeded to denounce it as an imminent threat to civilization. All triggered by the actions of Fatima Payman.
The young WA senator seems to have unleashed something ugly lurking deep in the unconscious minds of both the Labor Party and the media. There was the groundless claim from the ABC that Payman was a religious zealot allowing herself to be “guided by God”, later quietly downplayed in amendments to the article. Then the insistence from the prime minister that Payman was engaged in sectarian politics that will undermine multiculturalism and end up hurting minority groups — a statement that in its media form sounded more like a threat than a warning.
“One senior minister says it will be a ‘disaster’ for Australia’s almost 1 million Muslim population and in time spark an Islamophobic backlash,” according to the Financial Review. Said senior minister claimed Australia “doesn’t have a Farage, or a Le Pen”, an extraordinary statement given Pauline Hanson’s long career. Peter Hartcher belatedly weighed in on the weekend to call Payman “a left analogue to Pauline Hanson”. So, either Hanson doesn’t exist or she’s a model for Payman — an extraordinarily offensive suggestion given Hanson’s history of vilifying Muslims.
That protest votes against Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza cost UK Labour four seats sharpened the knives and raised the stakes here. A piece from the UK Telegraph gave the impression Keir Starmer had barely scraped into office against the sinister plottings of The Muslim Vote. And political Islam will destroy the West, we were told yesterday by one of Nine’s lesser columnists.
Here, The Muslim Vote — a hitherto unknown outfit that examines politicians’ voting records on issues notionally of interest to people of Islamic faith — has been beaten up into a nascent political party that Fatima Payman would be joining (inconveniently, she’s sitting as an independent) and has become the emblem of the dreaded sectarianism that is poised to destroy Australia’s social cohesion. That UK Telegraph piece, in a wonderful case of having it both ways, denounced the UK version of The Muslim Vote because it “shadows a political party without having to conform to the requirements of being one”.
Those sinister Muslims — cheating the political system with faux-parties! What will they think of next?
Meanwhile, WA Premier Roger Cook was reported as saying “just like cane toads, we need to resist the poison that comes from Canberra or from over east at times.” Presumably he was referring to the threat of “sectarianism”, and not Senator Payman herself.
This febrile reaction by journalists and politicians, and the construction of an existential threat of sectarianism from such meagre fare, is wildly disproportionate to the stimulus even of a (Trigger Warning!) young, female, hijab-wearing daughter of refugees moving to the crossbenches as an independent.
It’s also profoundly ahistorical — as if sectarianism isn’t a staple of Australia politics. The sectarianism that marked post-war Australian politics — not just the DLP, but the Protestantism of Menzies’ Liberals, where Catholicism was conspicuous by its absence. The seemingly endless career of Fred Nile and assorted hangers-on in NSW. The success in the early 2000s of Family First in propelling devout Christians into swing-vote positions in the Senate. The ongoing attempts by hard-right Christian factions to control the Victorian and Western Australian (and occasionally NSW) Liberal Parties, usually to their detriment. All have all been reported as normal politics by the media, rather than harbingers of the political apocalypse that would bring about retribution a backlash to Christians.
Of course, I’m being deliberately naive — this is Christian sectarianism by white people. Christian fundamentalists who’d dearly love to impose their bizarre moral codes on the electorate infiltrating existing political parties is perfectly normal; people, especially brown people, protesting against the mass slaughter of Palestinians is sinister sectarianism. Thus is born a new political monster to demonise, one groaning under the weight of the clichés and assumptions loaded onto it — that Muslims remain an unassimilated Other, that they behave monolithically, that they are eternally “angry”, that they uniquely want to import foreign conflicts into Australia — basically, they’re not really One Of Us.
That a nearly all white political class — like many things in Canberra, the parliamentary press gallery looks like Australia in the 1930s — tunes out white sectarianism but spots political activity by brown people a mile away is a classic example of double standards. But the implied threat to Muslim communities, elicited not even by any actual electoral results as in the UK but by a myth conjured up by an affronted Labor, points to the dark side of the much-vaunted “social cohesion”.
The cohesion articulated by Labor and the media is not one that recognises difference but instead demands homogeneity and punishes dissent; it is the cohesion of assimilation and suppression. Anyone who protests — whether lawfully or unlawfully — against war crimes in Gaza is framed as placing themselves outside Australian norms (not to mention engaging in hate speech); the mere idea that some voters may feel strongly enough about Gaza to shift their vote from Labor is portrayed as a perversion of Australian democracy. But the collective exercise in savaging a straw man of Muslim political separatism says far more about the fears and values of a white political and media class than it does about the voters they’re obsessing about.
Are you concerned about the way the media has framed Fatima Payman’s fight with the Labor Party? 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.
