Paul Murray: Payman is payback for Labor’s untenable alliance with the Greens

The casual observer could be excused for thinking that Labor Party refugee Fatima Payman won her seat in the Senate on Greens preferences.

It wouldn’t be out of place for someone who puts a passion for distant Palestine and her religion ahead of more pressing constituent concerns — like mortgages, grocery prices and educating the kids — to be beholden to the Greens for her unlikely win.

So what if you were told that the Senate’s first hijabi only just pipped One Nation into the final WA Senate spot — on Liberal votes?

And the reason for that was the high number of Liberals who held their noses about preferencing Pauline Hanson’s party and put Labor ahead.

Those Liberal voters created Senator Payman for their troubles. The unexpected delights of preferential voting. Never quite knowing what you elect.

But the rise of Senator Fatima Payman is even more curious than that.

Hers is a story about how WA Labor’s intense factionalism, the insidious spread of identity politics and the party’s love-hate relationship with the Greens conspired to create an unholy mess.

When Labor powerbrokers began their factional wrangling in 2021 over the party’s ticket for the next year’s Federal election, they had not won the third Senate spot since 1984.

Some saw this as a reason not to go to war because the two sitting senators up for re-election — United Workers Union spearthrower Sue Lines from the Broad Left and former Transport Workers Union organiser Glen Sterle from Progressive Labor — already had dibs on the top two positions.

But others realised that the prevailing mania over Premier Mark McGowan might create a similar outcome to Bob Hawke’s success in the 80s.

So how did an unknown like Payman with a very short track record get endorsed for what turned out to be a winnable Senate seat?

Party insiders say she was a classic Left “diversity pick”. That simple. Merit? Achievement?

Payman came out of Labor’s multicultural branch — yes there is such a thing — and had the backing of Left powerbroker Pierre Yang, no stranger to controversy himself through former undisclosed associations with Chinese communist party-linked organisations.

The Maritime Union, an entrenched factional opponent of the UWU, was pushing well-credentialled party activist Vicki Helps for the third spot, backed by the Right faction which was not represented in the two already-decided places.

But Labor State president Carolyn Smith used the UWU’s dominant numbers to force Payman into third. Helps, an MUA delegate to Labor national conferences as far back as 2018, got pushed into fourth place.

Party sources say that as a result Payman never had wide support. She was inflicted on Labor by the UWU, which partly explains the internal anger at her defection.

That anger hit boiling point, after her temporary suspension from the Caucus for crossing the floor to support the Greens over recognition of Palestine, when she claimed to have been “exiled” by her colleagues.

Many Labor MPs say that was untrue. She was not ostracised and many openly offered her comfort and friendship, if not political support.

Labor stalwarts who value solidarity as a basic party virtue see it as vitally important in the political struggle. The rogue Muslim senator represented a fracturing in the phalanx, threatening unity.

Success has many fathers. Payman is Carolyn Smith’s orphan.

Equally as significant, Payman calls into question Labor’s reliance on the Greens, given that she fell for its pro-Palestine bait, turning away from the party line which was already proving very difficult to negotiate.

Anthony Albanese now knows that’s what happens when you try to walk both sides of the Arab Street. And talk out both sides of your mouth.

Payman held the line for a while, even putting out a statement on March 28 attacking the Greens when she copped flak for not supporting a motion railing against Australia for supplying Israel with arms.

“The Greens motion was nothing more than political manipulation, making claims that are not true,” Payman said. “A vote on it was inconsequential.”

Most people realise that Labor is dependent on the Greens to get them into government when its primary vote is as low as 32.6 per cent for Albanese’s 2022 win.

In that poll, 16 of the 151 Lower House seats were won on preferences by candidates who didn’t finish first on primary votes.

Seven of them went to Labor on Greens preferences, which decided the election result and put Albanese in the Lodge.

Another seven seats were won by Teal independents in formerly blue-ribbon Liberal electorates, depriving the party of essential numbers to form government.

In 15 of those 16 seats, the Liberals polled the most primary votes. In the other, Fowler in NSW, Labor’s Kristina Keneally finished first on 36.6 per cent but lost to Independent Dai Le when Liberal preferences pushed her to 51.63 per cent on two-party preferred.

But back to Senator Payman and her remarkable win.

After a marathon 262 rounds of preference counts, the decision on the final WA Senate spot was between Payman, sitting Liberal senator Ben Small and One Nation’s Paul Filing, ironically a former Liberal MP for Moore.

ABC analyst Antony Green called the battle like a horse race on his election blog. It highlights the often ridiculous nature of preference distributions.

“On first preferences, the Greens were just short of a quota,” Green wrote. “It took until the exclusion of the low-polling Socialist Alliance at counts 173-177 for Greens senator Dorinda Cox to reach a quota and fill the fifth seat. Being so close to the quota meant that the Greens played little role in the preference distribution required to fill the sixth vacancy.

“The race for the final Senate seat was a contest between third Labor candidate Fatima Payman, who began the count on 0.4187 quotas, and a chasing pack led by One Nation’s Paul Filing on 0.2443 quotas, Nicola Johnson of Legalise Cannabis on 0.2365 quotas, and third Liberal candidate Ben Small on 0.2171 quotas.

“By Count 226, only nine groups remained in the race. So far preferences have favoured Legalise Cannabis and Labor, allowing Nicola Johnson (Legalise Cannabis) to pass Paul Filing (One Nation). Payman’s quota lead over Filing increased to 0.1955 quotas.”

Green then explains how those Liberal voters who preferred Labor over One Nation put Payman into the Senate. Many of them probably voted Teal in the Lower House.

“Counts 257-262 excluded Ben Small (Liberal) but preferences from his votes were of no help to Paul Filing, 39.4 per cent exhausted without choosing between Labor and One Nation, 31.0 per cent flowed to Payman and only 29.6 per cent to Filing,” Green says.

“With no more candidates remaining to be excluded, Payman was declared elected with less than a quota, 0.8531 quotas versus 0.7454 for Filing.”

It is said that two things the public should never see being made are sausages and laws. You can now add senators to the list.

All of Payman’s success was the result of Labor’s over-the-line ticket when her personal vote below the line represented 0.0077 per cent of the WA Senate vote.

A minnow among sharks. Of the 1,526,123 formal Senate votes polled in WA, she got just 1681. Filing, a sardine, got 3701.

It is clear that Payman had no mandate to do anything other than adhere to Labor policy. She was a party animal.

“Before I’m an Afghan or a Muslim, I’m an Australian Labor Senator, representing all Australians regardless of their faith, background, cultural identity or sexual orientation, age or ability,” she later said in her inaugural Senate speech.

When Australia adopted above-the-line Senate voting it enshrined the chamber as a party house, not one that independently represents the States, as it was envisaged.

That change should have included a provision to allow parties to replace Senators who defect in the same way as casual vacancies are treated.

While there is still an argument that defecting Lower House MPs have a mix of party and personal support, it doesn’t hold for the Senate.

Labor and the coalition parties could fix the issue easily by combining their numbers to change the law. But they rarely agree on electoral matters due to unprincipled concerns of possibly losing some advantage.

Both are imperilled if they fail to act together on the new threat of single-issue secular parties. The Muslim Vote is just the start.

The Payman mess exposes Labor’s existential reliance on Greens preferences and its reciprocal support as unsustainable.

This row flushed out the overt anti-semitism lurking within the Greens which should have fair-minded Labor supporters holding their noses about any further preference deals.

Greens MPs think vandalising our war memorials is OK. They refuse to denounce the murderous Hamas, which is a proscribed terrorist organisation under Australian law.

Fatima Payman cast her lot with them.

Her continued presence in the Senate is a constant reminder of an untenable alliance Labor can’t hide.