EDITORIAL: Ego-driven Fatima Payman’s party move is exploitative

Fatima Payman owes her career to Australia’s quirky Senate electoral system.

The West Australian received just 1681 first preference votes at the 2022 election which catapulted her into Parliament and onto a collision course with Anthony Albanese.

To put that into perspective: just one-tenth of 1 per cent of West Australian voters put a 1 next to her name on the ballot paper. Individual candidates for the Australian Christians Party and Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party received more first preference votes than Payman.

WA voters didn’t elect her, they elected the Labor party for whom she stood at that election. It simply happened to be her name occupying third place on the ticket.

Fast forward two years from that election and Payman finds herself still in the Senate chamber, but no longer a Labor member, having joined the crossbench after she defied party rules to cross the floor on Palestinian statehood.

Not that she’s done much since her defection from Labor.

Payman has bothered to take part in just five of 57 Senate votes on legislation since then — an abstention rate of 91 per cent.

Despite her apparent lack of interest in performing the job she is paid to do, she now wants Australians to back her new political party, the vaguely named Australia’s Voice.

She told a news conference on Wednesday that the party was “for the disenfranchised, the unheard, and those yearning for real change”.

What changes are the disenfranchised and unheard yearning for exactly?

Details TBD.

Also, TBD are any candidates or policies.

Or even where the party sits on the ideological spectrum of left and right. That, according to Payman is “not what we’re talking about”.

What Payman had plenty of were grandiose motherhood statements.

“(Many have felt) a feeling of being left behind, of shouting into a void, only for their concerns to fall on deaf ears.

“So many of you have told me, with emotion in your hearts. ‘We need something different We need a voice’.

“It is this cry for change that has brought us here today. Because we can no longer sit by while our voices are drowned out by the same old politics. It’s time to stand up, to rise together, and to take control of our future.”

Right.

Payman, who came to Australia aged eight having fled Afghanistan with her family, is clearly an articulate, intelligent and thoughtful young woman.

But it’s difficult to view this move to establish a party that stands for everything and nothing as anything other than a cynical and exploitative act to further her own career while giving back little to the Australians she is supposed to represent.

Ultimately, without the backing of a major party, she will likely flame out, like other defectors before her. They may be Payman’s ideological opposites, but the examples of former Liberals Craig Kelly and Cory Bernardi spring to mind.

However, thanks to another quirk of the Senate electoral system, that will take some time. She won’t face voters at an election again until 2028.

The Prime Minister has previously called on Payman to put her money where her mouth is by resigning from Parliament and re-contesting under her own name and her own steam at next year’s election.

She won’t. She knows to do so would be the end of her political career. She might be cynical, but she’s not stupid.