Profiles in Cowardice

July 19, 2024

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 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. 

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