Jacinta Price: Payman’s attempt to falsely equate Indigenous disadvantage with Palestinian cause is offensive

The last thing Australia needs is more politicians trying to make it all about themselves. But that’s what we got this week with Senator Fatima Payman’s latest stunt to draw attention to herself and her divisive political ambitions. Her announcement that her new political party will be called Australia’s Voice is yet another divisive brick thrown through the window of our national project. It’s not a mistake that she announced this around the one year anniversary of the barbaric October 7 terrorist attack on Israel and the anniversary of the defeat of the Voice in the 2023 referendum. Payman’s refusal to stand up for Jewish Australians and back our allies in Israel already put her outside the Labor party, the party that preselected her and got her into the Senate. It’s true, Labor speaks out of both sides of its mouth on the conflict in the Middle East. But for Payman, only fully blown, pro-Palestinian social division is good enough. She wants a government that, like her, is deathly silent on the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas, but which accuses Israel of “genocide” for responding. She wants to turn a blind eye to Australians flying the flag for Hezbollah while turning up her nose at the Jewish Australians facing a rising tide of anti-Semitism. But her persistent attempts to falsely equate the issue of Indigenous disadvantage with her pro-Palestinian cause is just too much. Is she serious? First, she wears a flag pin that combines the Indigenous flag and the Palestinian flag. That’s just grossly offensive. And while my views on the Voice are well known, and I don’t agree with the leaders of the Yes campaign on how we address Indigenous disadvantage, they’re right to be outraged about Senator Payman’s thoughtless co-opting of their cause. Imagine naming your pro-Palestinan political party after the Voice, while signalling to the world that you’re jumping on board their issues with an Indigenous-Palestinian flag pin on your lapel. It’s as ignorant and naive as Payman’s false claim in her first speech that Labor abolished the White Australia policy, when in fact the Menzies government started dismantling it in the 1950s. Former Senator Nova Peris said it well in the pages of The Australian. “It is breathtakingly disrespectful, and a complete misappropriation of yet another aspect of my people’s story and emblems,” she said. “The Australian Labor Party gave Ms Payman a voice. This rogue Senator has misappropriated that privilege in a self-entitled manner.” And you can tell it’s self-centred because when pushed on what her party will actually stand for, Senator Payman has no answers. Because there is no policy, only division. The division is based on disrespecting Indigenous Australians and failing to defend Jewish Australians. And what was the Indigenous Voice, but division? Its proponents said it would be the solution to all our woes, but the Australian people rightly saw it for what it was: a constitutional change that would create a different set of political rights for one group of Australians, based on the colour of their skin. Australians do not want our country divided like this. The same goes for Payman and the division her politics of hate is causing in the Australian community. We don’t want a country where it’s acceptable for pro-Hamas rioters to burn Israeli flags on the steps of the Sydney Opera House. Australians want a peaceful, unified country. That was the message of the referendum. It is astonishing that Payman is trying to create a political movement out of her views on a conflict on the other side of the world where she’s taking the side of our ally’s enemy. The only voice being promoted is her own. The interests of Australians are nowhere to be found. It’s a joke, and Senator Payman shouldn’t be shocked if Australians treat her as a joke from now on. Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is a Country Liberal Party Senator for the NT and shadow minister for Indigenous Australians