“If you don’t want anything you say here to leak, then don’t say it,” a Labor MP told Fatima Payman before her first caucus meeting. The words stunned her.
Surrounded by a mixture of fresh faces and political idols, Payman thought: “You can’t even trust your own comrades. You can’t even trust the same people who came to be in the same party as you … this is bizarre.”
The loss of trust would soon go both ways. Within three years, Payman would abandon the party she had built her life around for a seat on the crossbench, a move that would leave her politically and personally friendless.
Now at home as an independent with less than two years until she faces re-election, Payman is embracing a new and “aggressive” energy, fuelled by a desperation to be granted more staff to take pressure off her team, which is receiving a deluge of threats and abuse. Facing an uphill battle to define her floundering political movement, Payman is waging an increasingly frustrated war against a “petty” prime minister who brought her into the parliament.
Her journey from model candidate to political pariah was quicker than most. In the lead-up to the 2022 election, the then-27-year-old was given the unwinnable third spot on Labor’s West Australian Senate ticket – more a lesson in campaigning than a legitimate job offer.
However, an unusually Labor-friendly Western Australia, which almost entirely escaped the COVID pandemic on premier Mark McGowan’s watch, emphatically backed Anthony Albanese over Scott Morrison, and handed Payman a ticket to Canberra.
The senator sees her early days as a period of benign tokenism. Nothing represented Labor’s winds of change better than a young woman, an Afghan refugee, a hijab wearer. She was sent on international delegations to Muslim-majority countries, a poster child for Australian progressivism.
“I felt like I was being paraded out without a doubt … all my life I felt like any organisation I’ve been to, if there’s only one person that looks like me, I am used for photos,” she said.
But after the October 7 attack reignited war in the Middle East and began dominating the national conversation in 2023, Payman felt stuck. On one hand, she represented a party whose members had already demanded a Palestinian state be recognised, and her leader was a long-term advocate for the cause.
On the other, antisemitism was rising fast and rapidly posing a political challenge for Labor. There was reticence around the cabinet table to move too quickly, and caucus solidarity was sacred.
But Payman experienced one too many pained conversations at the mosque and the grocery store, too many nights with a nagging feeling that she needed to do more. In June 2024, she would take a short walk across the Senate floor to support a Greens motion recognising Palestine. Within days, she was out of the party and on her own.
“I had no life outside the Labor Party, so you can imagine when I left my political family, I would be lying if I didn’t admit that you know I probably went through this really steep, depressive phase where it was tough,” Payman said.
“Weekends were quiet. The people I had invited to my wedding … now that I look back at those wedding photos and videos, I’m like, wow, all these people that once I thought we were inseparable were just able to completely erase me from their lives.”
While she doesn’t regret any decision she has taken in parliament, her run on the crossbench has not been without its hurdles. Payman’s cut-through has also largely centred around moments rather than policy wins. In 2024, she went viral for separate speeches in which she accused One Nation leader Pauline Hanson of racism, and spoke almost entirely in Gen Z “brainrot” memes.
Her new political party – currently named Australia’s Voice, but facing a likely rebranding – won just 0.75 per cent of the national Senate vote at the 2025 election. In her home state, the party received 11,139 votes, just 4 per cent of the necessary threshold to win a spot in the Senate.
More recently, Payman had to apologise to independent MP Helen Haines for “clumsily” questioning whether the prime minister would provide her additional staffing only after she faced a similar attack to the beloved politician.
Payman is the only independent federal politician who does not have “adviser” level staff, a factor she blames entirely on a vendetta she believes Albanese has against her for leaving Labor. Her pleas have grown increasingly personal. Earlier in the year, following the birth of her first child, Aaliyah, Payman wrote to Albanese imploring him to demonstrate his public support of working mothers and provide her more staff, to no avail.
Most recently, the senator told this masthead that the prime minister had sought to win her vote in the Senate in 2024 through the provision of staff, an offer she refused in objection to migration amendments the government was proposing.
Speaking after she went public, Environment Minister Murray Watt said it was up to Payman to “explain what her motivations are” in revealing the detail of private conversations with Albanese.
Both Albanese, Watt and factional heavyweight Don Farrell have said Payman’s staffing level is in line with what she received as a backbench Labor senator, though their statements ignore the fact that all other defectors to the crossbench have received additional staff on the prime minister’s watch.
“I’ve amped the temperature up lately on staffing because the threats and the psychosocial hazards and the vile abuse has phenomenally just increased, like exponentially increased in my office, and it’s taken a toll on us,” Payman says of her staff.
“I’m not going to just play nice because I’ve played nice for the last year and a bit, and I can’t keep going like this.”
While Payman says she has played nice, one does not need to dig deep to find frustration from her former Labor colleagues. Some think she should have gritted her teeth and waited for the party to recognise Palestine in 2025. Others think she should resign and give her seat back to the party.
While she’s never considered rejoining Labor, Payman did offer an olive branch the day the government announced their recognition of a Palestinian state.
“Thank you, prime minister, for your leadership and courage,” a text message to Albanese reads. It received no reply.
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Nick Newlingis a federal politics reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect viaXoremail.
