Fatima Payman: Independent senator is not ruling out forming own political party

Independent senator Fatima Payman is not ruling out forming her own political party as she consults with her new chief of staff, Glenn Druery over the best way to spend the rest of her four-year term in the Senate. The WA senator who quit Labor in July after crossing the floor to take a different public position on Palestinian statehood features in an Australian Story episode on Monday night. Her husband Jacob Stokes also speaks about how he ended up quitting his job as a ministerial adviser in the WA State Government after Senator Payman left the party. He says that once Senator Payman decided to publicly call Israel’s invasion of Gaza a genocide, “we knew there was no turning back”. “She probably wasn’t going to be preselected again, that once you do something like that in the Labor Party, that that is the beginning of the end,” he told the ABC. Mr Druery says the matter of setting up a new political party is “certainly a discussion we need to have”. The political strategist has made a career of advising minor parties and independents across federal and state parliaments. The documentary also covers the issue of caucus solidarity after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese contended that Senator Payman had never raised concerns about the party’s position on Palestine and the Gaza conflict within the Labor decision-making body. But she says she was told by a party veteran that caucus leaked to media and not to raise contentious issues at meetings. Minister Anne Aly says caucus solidarity is the best way to make change and that does not mean there is no debate. Other caucus members have told The West they have never felt too intimidated to speak up in meetings, even in their first term. “Ultimately, this is an intelligent, strong, smart woman who exercised her agency with full knowledge of what the consequences were and what she was doing,” Dr Aly told the ABC of Senator Payman.