The idea that political parties are a broad church is under review.
John Howard famously claimed the label for the Liberals. It was the plaster and paint he regularly applied whenever cracks emerged.
“You sometimes have to get the builders in to put in the extra pew on both sides of the aisle to make sure that everybody is accommodated,” Howard said in a 2005 speech on his party’s philosophical framework.
The Liberals were, he said, trustees of two great traditions – the classic liberalism of John Stuart Mill and the social conservatism of Edmund Burke.
“And if you look at the history of the Liberal party, it is at its best when it balances and blends those two traditions.”
The Labor party is older and less complicated. It was founded in the union movement of the early 1890s on a single principle: solidarity.
The face of Australia’s oldest political party has changed down the generations, especially as it has more actively embraced and promoted diversity. But nothing has shifted that founding belief in people being stronger together nor the consequential rule that Labor’s individual parliamentary caucus members are bound, outwardly, to support every position it collectively adopts.
This is why Western Australian senator Fatima Payman’s spectacular rejection of Labor’s central tradition – and of the party itself – cuts deep among her former colleagues. It goes right to the heart of how Labor chooses to achieve change and why it even exists.
What has shocked them most is the cool and deliberate way the highly articulate 29-year-old first-term senator has praised her former party’s heritage principles and gaslit its modern representatives, all at the same time.
She announced on Thursday that she was splitting from “the august Australian Labor party” she had proudly served – the party that had historically championed the rights of the marginalised – to sit as an independent because the war in Gaza was “a crisis that pierces the heart and soul, calling us to action with a sense of urgency and moral clarity”.
Payman casually accused Labor of being indifferent to what she declared to be a genocide. Unlike the Greens, who have a list of specific demands of the government including further restricting military trade and expelling the Israeli ambassador, Payman’s condemnation was based on it failing to immediately and unilaterally recognise a Palestinian state, instead of recognising it in conjunction with a negotiated Middle East peace process.
But her searing binary equation – that this is the only test of Labor’s compassion and humanity – will resonate strongly with those who believe Anthony Albanese and his government should be more actively opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Many Australians have no truck with nuanced arguments about timing and sustainability, nor with a caucus solidarity rule that is designed to deliver change but can take a very long time to achieve it.
They point to the Labor party’s national platform which supports Palestinian recognition and say, as Payman did on Thursday: “You cannot acknowledge a two-state solution where one of those two states are not recognised.”
So Payman’s decision puts her former party’s leader under yet more pressure on its progressive flank as he contemplates exactly when is a good time in a cost-of-living crisis to ask the people to re-elect him.
But as the breadth of the Labor institution is tested by one young woman of faith and conviction, those who share John Howard’s political denomination are not in the same church they once were, either.
That’s evident in how narrowly the coalition has had to cast its attempts to use Payman’s exit this week to damage Albanese.
Liberals and Nationals have focused on Payman’s allegations that her colleagues were trying to intimidate her into leaving Parliament altogether. There were no triumphal Liberal howls that Payman is evidence of a party divided.
This is because Tasmanian Liberal MP Bridget Archer’s determined decision to repeatedly support government legislation with which she agrees, even if her party doesn’t, has successfully rendered Peter Dutton and his colleagues mute on that subject. It also happens to have left her ostracised, despite floor-crossing officially being a more tolerable transgression on the Liberal side of politics.
But as Labor defends its solidarity principle against Payman’s accusation that it stifles the party’s conscience and silences diverse voices, the Liberals under Dutton seem to have abandoned the principles that kept their own broad church together.
The party of individual choice, privatised assets and free enterprise has a leader who bound his whole parliamentary party last year to a single position on the proposed indigenous voice to parliament, wants to effectively nationalise the energy market through building government-owned nuclear reactors and is advocating breaking up the big grocery retailers and forcing them to divest.
The overwhelming “no” vote at last year’s referendum meant those Liberals concerned at Dutton acting like a Labor caucus enforcer had no platform from which to complain. The nuclear policy, blurted forth without a clear strategy to head off the inevitable scare campaign, started some murmurings.
But with this week’s policy to force the big supermarket companies to divest as a way of increasing competition and supposedly bring prices down – an assumed outcome that is disputed – a kind of tipping point was reached.
Effectively putting the Liberals on a unity ticket with the Greens was too much for some. In the Coalition party room on Tuesday, a string of Liberals stood up and demanded to know where their party’s values had gone.
Thus far, the policies Dutton has unveiled seem to lean more towards populism and political calculation than to the blended traditions of Burke and Mill.
His approach has relied on making so many concessions to his coalition partner – Nationals leader David Littleproud – that there are now open Liberal mutterings about the Coalition tail wagging the dog.
In return, Littleproud has kept his party from abandoning its support for the nation’s emissions reduction target of net zero by 2050 – crucial if Dutton’s Coalition is to have any credibility on climate action with a modern Australian electorate.
A fellow Queenslander, Littleproud has also helped hold the Nationals in behind Dutton himself. With the federal Coalition dominated numerically by Queensland Liberal National Party members, many of whom are conservative but who come from a state party machine that is dominated by moderates, the conservative Dutton needs the support.
This week, the brewing Labor drama around Fatima Payman overshadowed Tuesday’s hour-long Coalition party-room showdown involving full-throated protests that Dutton’s direction was robbing the Liberal Party of its own.
But just as Payman’s challenge to the heart and soul of Labor seems like it may have a way to run yet, there are more than a few discordant noises coming from Dutton’s restless congregation. And they may not have closed their hymn books just yet.
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Karen Middleton is Guardian Australia’s political editor