Anthony Albanese takes aim at Fatima Payman’s pledge to stand up for WA

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has taken a huge swipe at renegade Labor senator Fatima Payman’s intention to be a voice for Western Australia, saying she never once stood up to put the State’s perspective in caucus meetings. He has also warned against anyone wanting to push Australia “down the road of faith-based political parties” because it would undermine social cohesion. The first-term senator spectacularly quit the ALP on Thursday, citing what she saw as the party’s “indifference” on the conflict in Gaza and saying she did not feel she could do anything that would move its position further towards a pro-Palestinian stance. Mr Albanese said many people who are refugees here had fled theocratic regimes and Australia’s secular system of politics was important. “My party has around the cabinet and ministerial tables, people who are Catholic, people who are Uniting Church, people who are Muslim, people who are Jewish,” he said. “That is the way that we’ve conducted politics in Australia, that’s the way you bring cohesion. “And it seems to me as well beyond obvious that it is not in the interests of smaller minority groups to isolate themselves, which is what a faith-based party system would do.” Senator Payman told The West Australian in her first print interview after quitting that she intended to “truly represent (WA voters) without boundaries”. But Mr Albanese said voters in WA had “wanted to elect a Labor government” at the 2022 election. “Fatima Payman received around about 1600 votes in the WA election. The ALP box above the line received 511,000 votes,” he told reporters on Friday. “It’s very clear that Fatima Payman is in the Senate because people in WA wanted to elect a Labor government and that’s why they put a number one in the box above the line next to Australian Labor Party rather than vote below the line for any individual.” One of the chief causes of anger from Senator Payman’s colleagues over the past fortnight since she crossed the floor to back a Greens motion on Palestinian statehood was that she did so without first raising concerns through Labor’s internal processes such as caucus meetings. Mr Albanese said that was what disappointed him about her ultimate decision to leave. “At no stage – no stage – did Senator Payman stand in the caucus and make any comments about the Middle East, or about anything else, about Western Australians or about anything else,” he said. “No comments in the time in which Senator Payman has had the privilege of serving in the Senate as a Labor senator.” Questions have been raised around Senator Payman’s eligibility to be in Parliament at all given she had held dual Afghan citizenship and had been unable to complete renouncing it because the Taliban took over the country as she was in the process. But WA Labor sources said the party had firm legal advice at the time of her selection as a candidate that she had taken the necessary steps to renounce her Afghan citizenship and it was confident she was eligible to nominate. Mr Albanese said the issue of her constitutional eligibility to be in Parliament was one for Senator Payman.