EDITORIAL: Fatima Payman’s ignorant comments on women in Iran show she’s lost the plot

Jina Mahsa Amini was 22 when she was arrested by Iran’s so-called morality police in September 2022.

Her alleged crime was the violation of a law requiring women to wear a headscarf in public.

Three days later while still in custody, she died — Iranian authorities say from natural causes. Witnesses say she was murdered, the victim of a merciless beating inside a police van.

Widespread protests across Iran in response to Ms Amini’s death and the nation’s barbaric treatment of women were met with ruthless brutality from authorities. An estimated 500 people were killed. Tens of thousands more were arrested, some of whom were executed following what human rights organisations said were sham trials.

This is the nation that WA Senator Fatima Payman describes as an “incredible place” for women.

It is a nation in which women cannot travel abroad or work without the permission of their husbands.

It is a nation in which women and girls who report sexual assault are themselves at risk of punishment for “adultery”, and where tens of thousands of pre-teen girls are married off to men many times their own age.

But according to Ms Payman, that’s all just “propaganda”.

In an interview with Iranian state-controlled broadcaster PressTV, the Labor reject painted a far rosier picture of life under the Islamic Republic.

“The incredible place that Iran is, allowing for women to participate in the workforce to ensure that they have a voice, that their voices are heard, that their (voices) involved in a democratic process — realities that we’re not privy to living here and listening to the propaganda that we receive from very single-sided organisations with specific agenda,” Ms Payman said.

After her fawning comments in support of Iran’s despotic and fanatical regime made headlines in Australia, Ms Payman admitted she has never actually been to the nation of which she is evidently so fond.

“I don’t know what the situation is like and, frankly speaking, as an Australian Senator, I have a lot more pressing matters to be across and to represent my constituents here,” she told The Australian.

We would suggest then that she shuts up and stops making a fool of herself by speaking about things of which she knows nothing.

Her appalling ignorance is all the made all the more baffling by her own remarkable story. Ms Payman was eight when she arrived in Australia from Afghanistan, having fled the Taliban with her family. She has spoken passionately in Parliament about the plight of women and girls in her home country following Afghanistan’s collapse.

Her comments are a betrayal of those women and the many millions more around the world whose rights are abused by authoritarian governments.

They are a betrayal of Jina Mahsa Amini and the hundreds of courageous Iranians killed standing up against oppression and inequality. And they are a betrayal of the Australian citizens she is failing to represent in Parliament.