Muslim Vote and antisemitism envoy are both artefacts of identity politics

The defection of Senator Fatima Payman from the Labor party has been painted as an issue of identity politics. It is not.

Senator Payman is seen by many as a young Muslim woman tortured by what is happening in Gaza and unable to remain in a party that refuses to call out Israel’s Gaza genocide. In fact, Senator Payman is a Labor rat — tortured and conscience stricken though she clearly is by the war in Gaza. 

This is so because she will continue to sit in the senate, though the voters of Western Australia who voted for her did so because she was on the Labor senate ticket and they were voting Labor.

Rather than remain in the senate for the next five years as an independent, Senator Payman should have resigned from the Labor Party and from the senate. That would be truly honouring the wishes of the people who voted for her. And truly living with the consequences of following your conscience in politics.

This is not about identity politics, despite the furious efforts by some politicians and journalists to portray Payman — a young, hijab wearing Muslim woman — as a victim of islamophobia.

But identity politics is playing out in the rise of the Muslim Vote movement, and indeed in the recent appointment of a special envoy to combat antisemitism.

I had hoped that there would be a consensus across the moderate left and right, that any ethnic or religious based political party in which priests or rabbis or imams have a significant influence, is not a great development for Australian democracy or multiculturalism.