NOTHING

The year 2022 has had many tricks up its sleeves and the election win of Western Australian Labor Senator Fatima Payman, Australia’s first hijabi wearing woman in Parliament, was one of them.

Payman herself however has ever-so-bravely declared that ‘before I am an Afghan or a Muslim, I am Labor.’

Despite this comment, Payman’s entire election campaign and her win has been filled with rhetorical pride over her heritage, her headscarf and her goal to help hijabi women be who they are. This woman took identity politics, put it in a headlock and has refused to let it go.

Identity politics will harm any liberation movement as it stunts the momentum to bring genuine changes that will transform society from a restricvtive one into a liberated one. Identity politics is a tool used to deceive communities into thinking their interests are now at one with the rich and powerful. In reality, their ‘representative’ is an individual who has divorced themselves from the struggles imposed on that very community. Payman and many others have taken the tokenistic seat at the table, the very table at which systems of oppression are designed and she has extended her allegiance to the mission.

Hijabi presence in Parliament House is not a win for hijabi women and it in no way represents what being a hijabi means. The Labor Party is a party that operates on stolen land, over which sovereignty was never ceded. Like true climate criminals, Labor’s climate bill prioritises corporate reliance on cheap gas and coal to overproduce commodities so as to satisfy not human need but the competition of the free market.

A party that told the Liberals they will support a violent religious discrimination bill without amendments.

A party that staunchly expressed support for the racist and inhumane operation sovereign borders.

A party that continuously favours the big bosses and the corporations over workers, whether it be through giving tax cuts to the rich, keeping the poverty-inducing welfare payments below the poverty line, supporting the axing of the pandemic leave disaster payments (even though 43,000 Australians test positive daily and are required to stay isolate), or being responsible for raising the pension age for the first time and the stagnation and decline of wages over the last decade.

A party that devotes $80 million to ‘beef up’ security at police stations alone while black deaths in custody and incarceration rates for Indigenous minors continue to rise.

A party that brags about imperialism, building weapons of war and promoting fanatic nationalism.

Labor Senator Fatima Payman represents

Words by Habibah Jaghoori nothing.

These are all small and recent examples, representing the tip of the iceberg, of Labor’s expansive bummock of criminal behaviour and continuous betrayal of the international proletariat.

Australia’s foreign policies have disseminated war, devastation and poverty onto Muslim countries. It has spread Islamophobia which has made hijabi women subject to physical and verbal abuse on the street. To make up the state in Australia, to become the political elite in Australia, you must fit into a specific mould and the ALP have fit themselves into it snugly.

Fatima Payman made a choice. Fatima Payman chose a side. She chose to stand with a worker bashing, warmongering, climate destroying, community poisoning party. She joined these people and claimed their values as her own. No one in Labor can refuse responsibility for the party’s actions.

Fatima Payman’s own father, a refugee, would have been locked up on Manus Island at the hands of her party. Fatima Payman’s late ancestors would have been abused and harassed in Afghanistan by the Australian Defence Force, an industrial complex, religiously funded by Labor. Fatima Payman is now a solid part of a tyrannical state.

She does not represent the masses living under the state. She does not represent hijabi women, feminism, Muslims or working women. Fatima Payman will declare that 10 years ago someone who looks like her would not have a seat in Parliament, but she fails to mention that 10 years ago to now, Indigenous people, refugees, migrants, Muslims and the working class are copping it worse than ever with pandemics, climate disasters and an economy that butchered and cooked the working class head served by Labor on a silver platter to the greedy capitalist. Her position in parliament is not progress in any meaningful way. It does not alleviate the state violence sanctioned on hijabi women. She is no ally to the feminist movement. Instead, her position is a slap on the face and an obstacle on the road to a world free of Islamophobia. Just as Kamala Harris, the first black woman to be America’s Vice President, supplied billions of dollars to the police force while the public were crying for Black Lives Matter, Fatima Payman is just an insulting candy given to a child so they can stop crying.

True liberation, equity and equality will be achieved from the bottom up. It will be gained by collective organising, community, mutual aid and attaining the power of revolt. It will come through educating ourselves, arming ourselves and taking back our rights.

We shouldn’t aim to have a seat at the table. Our goal is to flip the table over and set it ablaze.