The Australian Labor Party, which suspended a senator for breaking with the party to vote for recognition of Palestine, never heard of JFK’s concept of Senate courage, reports Joe Lauria.
The Australian Senate chamber. (Joe Lauria)
By Joe Lauria
in Sydney, Australia
Special to Consortium News
John F. Kennedy’s 1956 bestseller book, Profiles in Courage, propelled the Massachusetts senator to national prominence and helped pave the way to the White House.
Though it was largely written by his ghostwriter Ted Sorensen, the book won Kennedy the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for biography. It was read by generations of American schoolchildren as an important lesson to learn, and it returned to the bestseller list upon Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960 and his assassination in 1963.
The book tells the story of eight U.S. senators — the most famous of which were John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster and Sam Houston — who followed their conscience rather than the dictates of their party or the popularity of their positions.
(Insomnia Cured Here/Flickr)
The book praises these senators for breaking with party discipline to speak their minds, even at the risk of great personal cost.
In the Australian Senate earlier this month, the ruling Labor Party suspended one of its senators for crossing over to the Green Party benches to vote in favor of Australia recognizing the state of Palestine.
Labor maintains the bogus line that Israel has to recognize Palestine first after negotiations. (The Israeli Knesset on Wednesday voted 68-9 against recognizing Palestine).
Senator Fatima Payman, a refugee from Afghanistan, had already upset her party in mid-May when she accused Israel of genocide and uttered the phrase, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” That signifies a single Palestinian state with one man/one woman/one vote and does not at all call for harm against Jewish Israelis. It is a cry for democracy and against apartheid.
The Australian Parliament then voted 80-5 against recognition on May 30 in the same week that Spain, Norway and Ireland had recognized the already existing Palestinian state. Among the five votes in favor was Payman, who breached a more than century-old Labor Party rule that forbids any of its members to vote their conscience — even if an ongoing genocide is trying to wipe out the state in question.
It would be the least that a country could do, to join 145 other nations in recognizing Palestine before Palestine no longer exists.
A correspondent in The Sydney Morning Herald wrote:
“Payman’s decision to cross the floor … and vote with the Greens on a motion recognising Palestine has highlighted Labor’s ancient rules that forbid crossing the floor, under implicit threat of expulsion, and made plain how dated the edict seems in an age in which people respect speaking out more than keeping quiet to work with the collective.
In an increasingly diverse party room, Labor should ease up a little on the iron discipline of enforcing lockstep voting, or it will again be confronted by MPs who, like Payman, choose to defect rather than toe the party line.”
Fatima Payman. (Government of South Australia/Wikimedia)
For her violation of the rules, Payman was suspended from caucusing with the Labor Party. Days later, as Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was in the middle of his final Question Time before the winter break here, Payman held a press conference in a Parliament House corridor, at which she quit the Labor Party to become an independent.
“My family did not flee from a war-torn country to come here as refugees for me to remain silent when I see atrocities inflicted on innocent people,” she said. “Witnessing our government’s indifference to the greatest injustice of our time makes me question the direction the party is taking.”
She left Labor because of a 1902 contract all Labor MPs must agree to. As columnist Tony Wright wrote in the Herald:
“In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party has managed to evolve since it was founded in 1900, and its parliament whips will allow MPs to vote against directives for compelling local or personal reasons.
But in Australia, the pledge has remained essentially unchanged since 1902 and is still signed by all prospective Labor MPs. It means that once the members of caucus – which is to say, the gathered Labor MPs – have agreed on a chosen path, no member can wander from the track. […]
Could her party really expect [Payman] in 2024 – a woman who says pointedly she was ‘not elected as a token representative of diversity’ – to ignore her own beliefs and the concerns of a significant part of the constituency she represents as rivers of blood flow in Gaza? Yes, she must, declare the party’s elders, all the way up to the prime minister … “
Penny Wong, the Labor foreign minister, complained that as a gay woman she had to vote against same-sex marriage “because I believed in the power of the collective.”
She wants credit for having voted against her own interests and her own conscience, while punishing a politician for following hers.
In the face of a live-streamed genocide, the Australian Labor Party is unable to break with the United States and other Western governments in supporting Israel with arms and diplomatic cover in what can only be called a profile in cowardice.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
No party should be able to punish a member for representing his/her constituents. It is inherently undemocratic, as is the idea and practice of political parties.
If elected representatives can’t represent their electorates, then we don’t have a functioning democracy – it is that simple.
The voters should have the right to opt for dysfunctional democracy in which deputies of larger parties can be robots, discarded when they malfunction and minorities have a purely decorative role. On one hand, there are dangers of bribery, e.g. if you vote in a certain way, you will be set for life of well paid no-work jobs in think tanks and corporate boards, and there are issues critical to the program promised to the voters. On the other, I am more familiar with parties in Europe making a distinction between votes under discipline and vote with free choice.
Perhaps one may check if Labor manifesto (or whatever they have in Australia) there was a promise to leave the fate of Palestinians 100% in the hands of Israeli government, regardless of any atrocities that may emerge in the future. If so, Fatima Payman deserves chiding for choosing a wrong party. If not so, Labor is guilty of bait and switch, customary but dirty tool in “modern Western democracies”.
When elected to parliament all ALP parliamentarians are subject to section 14 (d) of the ALP Constitution. It reads:
“The Federal Parliamentary Labor Party shall have authority in properly constituted Caucus meetings to make decisions directed towards establishing the collective attitude of the Parliamentary Party to any question or matter in the Federal Parliament, subject to: at all times taking such action which may be possible to implement the Party’s Platform and Conference decisions; on questions or matters which are not subject to National Platform or Conference or Executive decisions, the majority decision of Caucus being binding upon all members in the parliament.”
My understanding, as an Australian, is that MPs sign an agreement/contract binding them to such terms.
It is not just the ALP that has this clause they subject MPs to, but all the major parties in the Australian political landscape do likewise. Even the Greens(?)
According to Prof Anne Twomey (constitutional law, Uni of Sydney)
“Any contract that requires a politician to vote in parliament in a particular way is treated as void as it is against public policy. Parties, therefore, cannot legally control the vote of their members, although in practice they can impose strong political and moral pressure.”
Every Australian government is “unable to break with the United States and other Western governments in supporting Israel with arms and diplomatic cover in what can only be called a profile in cowardice.” When the Crown, acting for the USA, dismissed our (twice-elected) democratic Whitlam government we all learned our lesson. Never again for the ALP, and they are never again for me.
Jillian Segal has been appointed an “AntiSemitism envoy” by the Albanese government, a licence to punish critics of the current Israeli government and its genocide in Gaza. She says: “Describing the [Gaza and West Bank] territories as ‘Palestinian’ not only pre-empts the outcome of negotiations but is counterproductive.” This is based on a claim that the land had been gifted to the Jews 3,000 years ago by a deity called Yahweh, a promise whose historical and factual validity are allegedly confirmed by accounts in Jewish scriptures, a view shared by all leading Jewish politicians. Since when are Australians, on the say so of our government, obliged to bend the knee and subscribe to this foreign religion? Senator Fatima Payman voted to recognize the Palestinian state as her legal entitlement as an elected Senator. Attempts by the Albanese government and Parliament to sanction her over this imposes a religious requirement on her Senate membership, a clearly unconstitutional act and serious human rights abuse of a sitting member of Parliament. Yet it is couched in a high moral language that masks its baseless, blatant thuggery. The Australian government has not a fig leaf of credibility on this issue.
Fred for more on this appointment:
You don’t end racism with envoys, by Jordy Silverstein
hxxps://overland.org.au/2024/07/you-dont-end-racism-with-envoys/
Labor’s ‘special envoy’ to promote racism and genocide, by Josh Lees
hxxps://redflag.org.au/article/labors-special-envoy-to-promote-racism-and-genocide
The US is leading the nations of the Western alliance into a state of abject mediocrity. No wonder the East is rising and the West is being left behind. And they’re all going willingly. It’s not necessarily the general public of these states but their utterly vacuous leaders. Pity.
Yes! they are ‘utter vacuous ‘ because they don’t want the powerful Israel lobby to turn against them as governments and destroy them as they can either by helping to destroy their economies or destabilize these governments
Remove your brain at the door, we’ll do the thinking for you – western democracy.
As interesting as the cowardice of the Australian Labor Patty is, it doesn’t match that of the US Senate and House of Representatives where a solid majority of the members place the principles of the Constitution of the United State far below the value of the Benjamins available to them for doing the bidding of corporate and foreign government lobbyists.
If you are looking for profiles in cowardice, just look at the resume’s of all of our recent presidents and 90% of our members of Congress who cheerfully support our forever war and send other people’s children out to be cannon fodder – but would never put themselves or their loved ones in harm’s way.
Notice how all our “leaders” lead from the rear.
Don’t fight evil because you will win, fight it because it’s evil.
Sublime madness!
Long live Fatima Payman!
If everyone in the congress and senate voted their conscience, instead of with the interests of their corporate patrons, we wouldn’t be in the state we are.
Unless they don’t have a conscience in the first place. I think the tell is nictitating membranes instead of eyelids.
Well, the Aussies have one, Fatima Payman, and the US one, Thomas Massie. I doubt any presidential/prime minister candidates will be writing a profile in courage for either one any time soon.
Very good point, Joe.