PARTISAN!

Max J scathingly reviews what Senator Payman’s new project means.

In October 2024, former ALP senator Fatima Payman announced the formation of a new party called “Australia’s Voice”. For months since she left the ALP, Payman has burrowed into the Australian soft-left, organising around the issue of the genocide in Palestine (amongst other causes). Launching the party website with no listed policies, program or platform does little to inspire confidence in this newest seemingly progressive-left electoral project. With all social media links directing people to Fatima Payman directly, is Australia’s Voice nothing more than a personalist vanity project?

From Fatima Payman’s statements, it’s unclear what kind of direction this new party will take. In a discussion with 7.30, Payman said that Australia’s Voice is “going to be about coming together for all Australians”. Her glowing praise of Labor’s sacred triumvirate (Whitlam, Hawke, and Keating), along with her denunciation of the Greens, presents us with a politically confused left-liberal deciding to form yet another soft-left electoral project that will, in no short order, crash and burn after a single failed election.

Her initial election to the Senate in 2022 was a fluke; she was put forward by Labor as an ‘expendable candidate’, expected to lose, but struck a shocking victory. It’s unclear what Fatima Payman’s politics are, and her voting record indicates little in the way of her personal views. However, with Payman enthusiastically quoting the arch-white supremacist Robert Menzies (a recent article in The Guardian has her saying “We reject the status quo that serves the powerful and ignores the rest the forgotten people, as Robert Menzies put it.”), it may be safe to assume she is not of the socialist movement, which is not surprising.

A deeply economist worldview paired with hollow slogans and a lack of any real policies, platforms or programs paints a grim image of a badly thought out political project centred around a party-hopping glory-hound. It is clear that when Fatima Payman speaks of her party being for ‘the disenfranchised’, she does not mean the working class: she means disaffected suburban parasites defecting from Labor and the LNP. Once Mrs. Payman remembers that she’s running a political party and not a merch store, we may find out what she actually believes in.