Just Where Do Her Loyalties Really Lie?

The fallout from the Fatima Payman affair continues to rock the Albanese Labor government. The growing political crisis is raising a raft of issues and covering few of the participants in glory.

For all her whining about being “intimidated”, the truth is that Payman was treated with kid gloves by a Labor government desperate to not run afoul of glass-jawed Islamic grievance mongering. But now that she’s so comprehensively dumped on the party, which is the only reason she is even in Parliament, the kid gloves are coming off, and she’s about to find out just how Labor really treats a rat.

Senior Labor figures are raising Fatima Payman’s Afghan citizenship as a risk to her remaining in the Senate because of a potential breach of section 44 of the Constitution, after she quit the ALP and left the door open to forming her own political party […]

Senior ALP figures say Senator Payman could have questions to answer if someone referred her to the High Court, despite the party backing her as a Senate candidate ahead of the 2022 election.

Which naturally raises, as opposition leader Peter Dutton was quick to point out, the question of just why Labor ran her as a candidate in the first place. After all, it’s only a few years since a roster of MPs faced the end of their careers, for running afoul of Section 44 of the Constitution, which forbids foreign citizens or dual citizens from sitting in Parliament.

“It’s pretty red hot if there is a constitutional issue and the Labor Party knew about it,” the Opposition Leader told Channel Nine on [5 July].

“They’ve supported a member of parliament knowing that she wasn’t constitutionally able to sit in the parliament, which I think is an outrage.”

Dutton is also throwing the words of Labor hero Bob Hawke back at them: “if you can’t govern yourself, you can’t govern the country”.

Payman is not exactly covering herself in glory, either.

In the wake of the disgusting incident where anti-Israel protesters flew pro-Hamas and anti-Semitic banners from the roof of Parliament House, it has emerged that the group met with Payman quite recently.

The group would not confirm whether the senator’s intention to break from the ALP or its plans to stage the protest were raised in the meeting.

It’s also alleged that Payman has not exactly been straightforward as she claims.

Payman now states that she only decided to resign on Thursday morning. Yet, Anthony Albanese told Parliament during Question Time earlier in the week that Payman had been pursuing a “strategy” to quit Labor’s ranks for more than a month.

Anthony Albanese has reiterated that Fatima Payman’s decision to quit the Labor Party was in train for more than a month, placing him at odds with Senator Payman’s own comments.

“I heard a month ago where this was going to go and if you look at some of the meticulous timing of events, including Senator Payman choosing question time yesterday to make the statements that she did,” the Prime Minister told reporters […]

“People should be upfront about their actions and should be accountable and responsible for them,” he added.

Well, one of them is telling porkies. If Payman insists Albanese is, then she’s saying that he’s potentially misled Parliament, which is a very serious accusation.

Then there is the question of just why Payman even sought a political career in the first place.

Senator Payman on Thursday declared she would join the crossbench as an independent senator due to her concerns about Labor’s policy on Palestine, but refused to rule out establishing a political party to contest ALP-held seats with large Muslim populations.
Peter Dutton says […] elected officials must first represent the people of Australia and the state they belong to.

“I don’t think we need sectarianism in this country. We saw it with the Catholics and Protestants many decades ago, and if you look at the Muslim Vote website, they talk about their principal aim, their first objective, to support Palestinian territory,” Mr Dutton said […] when you say that your task is to, as a first order of priority, to support a Palestinian cause or a cause outside of Australia, that is a very different scenario,” he said.

The Australian

Is Payman serving Australia, or Palestine – which in effect means Hamas? Both her and her allies the Muslim Vote’s actions also beg the question of where, exactly, their first loyalties lie. Is it to Australia, or to Islam?