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Meanwhile in Australia: Islam, Gaza, and Party Loyalty
Let's take a break from our regularly scheduled Trump-related programming to consider some drama in another country...
This is Fatima Payman. She's a Labor senator for Western Australia who's recently found herself in a spot of bother, which I found interesting enough to be worth comment. Let me set the stage with a bit of background first.
Australia has a Westminster system of government with a bicameral legislature. The lower house of parliament has MPs who are elected representing particular districts, but the upper house, or senate, has a different and convoluted method of electing its members. Each Australian state (there are six) gets twelve senators and each territory (there are two) gets two, for a total of seventy-six. Most of the time the way senators are elected is by political party. A senate ballot paper looks like this, and rather than number specific individual preferences, most voters merely vote for a single party, and then their votes are allocated according to that party's pre-selected preferences.
This is relevant because Fatima Payman, who's only 28, was third on the Labor list of preferences for the senate in Western Australia. She was not particularly expected to win - only six seats were up and Labor didn't expect to win three. So it's worth noting that neither the party nor Payman herself thought she'd get into the senate in 2022, and perhaps more importantly, almost nobody at the ballot box even knew who she was, much less expected her to win. How this affects her democracy legitimacy is for you to determine.
Labor, or in full the Australian Labor Party (ALP; note that the party is Labor even though the word 'labour' has a U in it in Australian English, it's because there was significant American influence on its foundation in the 19th century), is the centre-left party in Australia and is currently in government. Its traditional rival is the centre-right Liberal Party (in coalition with the National Party, hence Liberal/National Coalition, LNP, or just 'the Coalition'). Labor is traditionally a working-class, blue-collar party with a heavy base in the Australian union movement. In the 90s, like many labour parties in the West, it rebranded a bit to try to appeal more to the middle class and progressives, but the union heritage is still very much present.
Meanwhile, coming up on Labor's left flank is the Australian Greens. Australia has preferential, ranked-choice voting, so there's no spoiler effect, and this has allowed the Greens to rise without ruining the left's chances overall. The Greens were originally a one-issue environmentalist party in the 80s, but have since become a general progressive or far-left party. The Greens tend to take more idealistic, some might say extreme positions than Labor, and have been nibbling away at Labor's left flank for decades. The Greens tend to do best with middle-class or wealthy progressives and especially the young and students - stereotypically, they're the hipster, yuppie party.
One last thing is worth noting. Internally, Labor have traditionally had a strong emphasis on party discipline and solidarity. The norm for Labor has generally been that MPs and senators may voice disagreements in private, but once the party has come to a collective decision, everybody is expected to maintain discipline and stand by that decision, even if they disagree. Despite a few exceptions, Labor have generally stood by this in the past - one famous example was when the Labor party room agreed to oppose gay marriage, Penny Wong, a Labor MP and lesbian in a committed relationship (and obvious private supporter of same-sex marriage) voted against it and even argued against it in public, not changing her public view until the party as a whole came around.
So, time for the drama.
The Greens recently put forth a bill to recognise Palestinian statehood. This is a long-standing part of the Green platform. (The Labor platform includes something waffley about supporting a two-state solution in principle, but without committing to anything. They have been fending off criticism for this over the last few months.) Naturally it failed, with both Labor and the Coalition voting against. At the time, in May, Fatima Payman made some defiant pro-Palestinian speeches and was quietly censured.
Then last week, in the end of June, a motion in the senate to recognise Palestinian statehood came along. Again, Labor and the Coalition voted against it, but Payman crossed the floor to support the Greens.
Crossing the floor - voting against your own party - is a big deal in Australian politics.
Since then, Payman has been temporarily suspended from the Labor caucus, but not removed from the party; she may yet return to the caucus in good standing if she promises to follow the Labor party's rules. She has been criticised by some of her fellows, but supported by some authors, and the Labor prime minister, Anthony Albanese, seems to be struggling to find a middle path. The Greens are naturally praising Payman for her display of conscience, while the Coalition are mostly just pointing and laughing.
What's even more interesting is that local Islamic groups in Australia, which in the past have mostly been Labor voters (they don't like the Coalition for usual right-wing-party-related reasons, and they're not nearly socially progressive enough for the Greens) are strongly siding with Payman, and are flagging the possibility of an electoral revolt against Labor.
(The teals were a group of traditionally Coalition seats who cared a lot about environmental issues and climate change and revolted, electing independent MPs - so blue (the Coalition colour, conservatism) plus green (environment) equals teal. The possibility of a similar revolt against Labor would be terrifying for them.)
This rebellion may not come to anything and may not be very influential in the long run - there just aren't enough Australian Muslims, and most of them are in heavy Labor seats anyway - but with the next election rapidly approaching, Labor would really want to avoid any appearance of strife or disunity, especially with inflation, rising cost-of-living, energy policy, and the failed Voice referendum all making this government look a bit more ramshackle than they'd like - the Coalition are rapidly closing in on them in the polls.
As for Payman herself, it's not clear what she will do. She claims to have been bullied or intimidated, but at least from what's been seen in public so far, she appears to have been treated relatively gently. She could commit to abide by the Labor party's rules again and return to the caucus, or she could quit Labor entirely and become an independent senator, though this would make it extremely unlikely that she would ever get re-elected. Still, she's not up for re-election until 2028 anyway, so that might be worth it.
I don't have a conclusion to draw from this mess yet - but I think it's an interesting example of how Palestine and the Muslim vote are influencing centre-left politics in Western countries. Muslims aren't even a particularly large proportion of Australians (per the last census, 3.2% of Australians; compare 2.7% Hindus and 2.4% Buddhists), and yet they've got some influence here.
Of course, it's also possible that this is just a one-off - Labor screwed up the ticket in 2022 and by bad luck, a millennial who never should have been a senator in the first place got in there, and now she's grandstanding in a way that hurts her own party. Perhaps the only moral to draw from this is just "don't be stupid when selecting senate candidates". (A lesson the Greens might need to learn as well; this invites comparison to the saga of ex-Green independent senator Lidia Thorpe. But more on that some other time.)
Anyway, I offer the situation up for your reactions.
As I understand it, voting against your party basically never happens in British politics, because the party leaders can just replace you instantly with someone who toes the line. Is that also the case in Australia? or how hard is it to replace a "faithless parliamentarian?"
I understand that crossing the aisle is fairly common in American politics, because American political parties have very little way to punish it. A lot of factional politics in America therefore occurs within parties, rather than between them, as in Commonwealth countries.
It's pretty dangerous, but not necessarily suicidal - it depends on the particular party and your position in it. In Labor's case, it is usually suicidal, because Labor is unusually strict about party discipline. (They occasionally try to make hay of this by accusing the Coalition of being a disorganised rabble; the Coalition reply is usually that they have more respect for the consciences of individual members. This plays well with the perception of Labor as being more collectivist and focused on solidarity, with the Coalition as more individualist and focused on liberty.) There are a few statistics here - notice that every Coalition leader has faced MPs crossing the floor, while it is much more rare for Labor. Anthony Albanese is now only the second Labor PM since 1950 to have had a defection. As noted, your position in the party also matters - Barnaby Joyce did it a lot, but Joyce was popular in his own state, and he was a National. The Liberals have limited ability to punish a National member they don't like, due to the terms of the coalition agreement, which gave him more protection.
The Coalition also tends to be more vulnerable to it because the Coalition is more ideologically diverse than Labor - the Coalition has a moderate and a conservative wing, and both wings need the other in order to hold on to power. Sometimes MPs from one wing will defy the other, usually over a social issue, and remain within the party. (For example.) Labor in theory has factions as well - there's a Labor Left and Labor Right - but Labor's factions are less well-defined and tend to fight each other less as well. Same-sex marriage is a good example of the dynamic. As I mentioned in the top-level, Labor exercised very strong discipline on it, to the extent that even gay Labor MPs opposed it as long as the party opposed it, and then when the party supported it, everybody got on board. On the Coalition side, the moderates supported it and the conservatives opposed it, and there was much more outrage about whether or not the Coalition would allow a 'conscience vote' (i.e. every MP votes for what they think is right, party line be damned) on the issue. (There was a Labor discussion of a conscience vote - the pro-SSM side criticised the idea of a conscience vote there, because apaprently moral consistency is for suckers.) But I think that hit more strongly because the Coalition is known to be more divided than Labor on a range of issues.
At any rate, the answer is probably just "it depends". I think it is significantly more dangerous than in America, though, because in Australia the parties themselves have more direct control over their membership.
This is kind of the opposite of the truth. Labor's factions are much more defined and organised. For example, they have a longstanding rule that the deputy leader has to come from the opposite faction to the leader (e.g. Albanese is from the Left, Marles is from the Right). Cabinet positions are allocated by quota among the factions. Specific seats and senate ticket positions are allocated to specific factions. Their infighting has often been extremely bitter.
Conversely, while the Liberals have had some nasty factional warfare over the last few decades (though mostly calmed down at the moment), their factions are more ephemeral and fluid. E.g. it used to be just the wets and the dries, but then Scott Morrison effectively created a three faction system, with his own centre-right group operating distinctly from the Turnbull moderates and the Abbott conservatives.
It's a little out of date but this article provides a great explainer of the Labor factions.
You think? Where I'm coming from is the sense that it's very easy to tell at a glance the difference between a moderate Liberal and a conservative Liberal - most famously, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott were practically from different parties. By contrast, I find it hard to name the specific wedge issues that might separate the Labor Left and Labor Right? For instance, Bill Shorten was from the Right faction, and Albanese is from the Left, but I would struggle to clearly define the policy differences between them.
There's a couple of factors here. One is that Labor is much more disciplined about hashing out their policy differences behind closed doors and everyone singing from the same songsheet in public while the Liberals are more free about having their policy arguments in full view. E.g. the infamous interview where Bill Shorten supported Julia Gillard's position without knowing what it was. I assure you that policy differences are just as stark in the Labor caucus as in the Liberal partyroom, you just don't hear about it on the news as much. For example there's hardcore anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage social conservatives on the Labor benches - but you'd never know that from the media coverage.
Another is that factional divisions are often more about building personal fiefdoms and less about actual policy. You still have to sign up to a specific faction, and you vote in lockstep with your faction in internal deliberations, and you have to be loyal to that faction... but there's a certain amount of flexibility about what you can actually think.
And a final consideration is that Labor tends to give their leaders more license to take public positions for strategic reasons (currently at least). For example while Albanese is to the left of Shorten, he's also more ruthless about publicly moderating for electoral advantage. Whereas a Liberal who tries that tends to run into serious and usually public pressure from the backbench.
That's a fair point - Albanese ran a relatively centrist, small-target campaign for election, and then in government he hasn't been particularly radical either.
Still, I am prepared to accept your correction here as completely reasonable, and would offer only that, as you say, the perception of division may be different. Labor minimise the appearance of disunity more effectively than the Coalition, so, fair enough.
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