Rebel with a cause: inside the moment Fatima Payman quit the Labor party

At 1.57pm – just three minutes before the Australian parliament’s final question time before the winter recess – journalists’ phones pinged with a hotly anticipated media alert.

“Please be advised that at 2:05pm today I will be making a statement at Mural Hall. See you there,” said the text message.

It was signed: “Senator Fatima Payman.”

The first-term senator from Western Australia had been widely tipped to quit the Labor party after a massive rupture with her own government over the Israeli assault on Gaza and the government’s refusal to immediately recognise Palestine as a state.

Still, the sudden press alert sent the media into a frenzy. Photographers who had been waiting in the red chamber for Senate question time rushed to join the media scrum on the second floor in the heart of Parliament House.

For days, calls to Payman’s electorate office in WA and her parliamentary office in Canberra were going straight to voicemail, after the 29-year-old was indefinitely suspended from the Labor caucus for threatening to cross the floor again. On Monday, she complained that she had felt the party had forced her into “exile”.

On Thursday, after weighing her future, Payman had found her voice. Australia’s first-ever hijab-wearing senator – whose family fled the Taliban in Afghanistan when she was a young child – informed the waiting press that she had made her decision with a heavy heart but a clear conscience.

“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,” the former WA Young Labor president said, resolute as the glare of the TV lights shone on her.

“Witnessing our government’s indifference to the greatest injustice of our times makes me question the direction the party is taking.”

‘I see no middle ground’

The senator confessed that recent weeks had been “very difficult” on a personal level.

That has included “receiving death threats and emails that were quite confronting, especially when it involves my family and saying all sorts of awful things”. She had posted an example of that on social media back on 11 June. Someone had sent her a photo of her from the newspaper, with a target drawn on her face. The words scrawled on the page said “we are after you/family” and used the slur “you Muslim bitch”.

Payman became emotional when she described how she felt “deeply torn”. She was torn, she said, between Labor’s grassroots members calling on her to “hang in there” and the party leadership in Canberra that didn’t tolerate dissent from caucus unity. “I see no middle ground and my conscience leaves me no choice.”

Most of the questions to Payman at Thursday’s media conference were respectful.

What might she say to WA voters who thought they were electing a Labor senator? (She vowed to continue to represent their voices authentically.)

What of her involvement with the controversial political strategist Glenn Druery? (She confirmed she met with him a few days before deciding the cross the floor, but said she made up her mind to dissent on the day of the vote.)

Did she feel betrayed by the Labor party? (It had been the most difficult decision of her life, she said, but she felt she was reflecting the Labor party platform position of recognising Palestine as an important priority.)

But she was also asked about her religion. “Can you elaborate, senator, on the suggestion that you are being guided by God in your decision making and will you campaign on, sort of, other Islamic, Muslim-type of issues?”

Payman remained extremely composed. She paused for a second, smiled ever so slightly and rolled forward on the balls of her feet. “I don’t know how to respond to that question without feeling offended or insulted that just because I am a visibly Muslim woman that I would only care about Muslim issues,” she countered.

“This topic of Palestinian recognition, Palestinian liberation is a matter that has impacted everyone with a conscience. It is a matter that’s not just a Jewish versus Muslim issue. This is a matter about humanity, about freedom, about equality and I know there are decent people out there who want to see a free Palestine, but also these are the universal principles that we as Australians stand for.”

Albanese left ‘embarrassed and scrambling’

Payman’s press conference could not have been better timed if she wished to throw the government’s political message off course. The 2.05pm time slot drew attention away from question time in both parliamentary chambers, the final such event of this parliamentary session. It left Anthony Albanese embarrassed and scrambling to respond in real time.

The manager of opposition business in the lower house, Paul Fletcher, asked Albanese whether Payman was “spoken to in an aggressive or intimidatory manner” during their meeting at the Lodge the previous Sunday – shortly after the Insiders interview when Payman threatened to cross the floor again. For the record, Payman characterised this meeting with Albanese as “stern but fair”.

“The answer is no,” Albanese told the lower house. He held up his mobile phone to read from it.

“A short while ago, I received a message from senator Payman addressed to me. ‘Dear prime minister, thank you for your leadership. It has been an honour and privilege to serve in the Australian Labor party’. And it went on to indicate her resignation as a member of the ALP.”

Payman entered the upper house midway through question time with little fanfare and barely a glance from her former colleagues.

Even before the 29-year-old senator had fronted the flurry of journalists, photographers and camera operators, the decision appeared to have been cemented.

Payman’s usual seat on the Labor benches next to fresh Victorian senator, Lisa Darmanin, was occupied. Her Western Australian Senate colleague, Louise Pratt, instead was in her place.

Pratt, a gay senator who campaigned within the party for years on marriage equality, had to vote against same-sex marriage in the years before Labor formally supported it. Payman’s decision to break caucus rules, telling ABC’s Insiders the Palestinian people in Gaza could not afford to wait 10 years, was a direct reference to those in the party who patiently agitated on the issue within the Labor tent in the late 2000s and early 2010s.

Many of the senators on the Labor and opposition benches would have seen Payman enter from the back, choosing to sit on a block of empty crossbench seats. Few beyond the nearby Greens senators looked over.

Despite the upper house’s question time being seemingly untroubled by the new independent senator’s arrival, the realisation must have kicked in as the minutes ticked by.

Payman’s defiant, emotionless stare was only briefly interrupted after being offered a glass of water by Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson and a friendly exchange with Tasmanian senator Tammy Tyrrell.

But within 25 minutes of her arrival in the upper chamber, which some politicians have described as the “red morgue”, the opposition turned its sights on Payman and the prime minister’s leadership.

The Nationals senator, Bridget McKenzie, had asked how Albanese could be expected to be taken seriously after being “comprehensively outplayed” by the young senator.

Payman, as the parliamentary broadcasting camera zoomed in on her face just past 3pm, shook her head slightly at the question.

Both the major parties, as is typical whenever a prickly question comes up, began to heckle the other.

However, it was the Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s voice that rose above the rest. “So much for sisterhood,” the South Australian senator exclaimed, directing her comments at McKenzie. But it could have easily been targeted at Payman’s former Labor colleagues as well.

As Harry Quick, a former Labor MP who had a history of dissenting from caucus, told Guardian Australia earlier this week, being “suddenly totally excluded” from a family of people on a similar mission is “not the most pleasant thing”.

Payman’s former Senate leader, Penny Wong, reiterated Labor’s line when it comes to discipline. “We believe on this side of the chamber that collective decision-making is about the group being more powerful, more wise, than any one individual,” Wong said.

Whether it was to avoid being spoken about without having the opportunity to respond, or whether it was to make it to the series of media appearances she had lined up for Thursday afternoon, Payman left the chamber after Wong’s response.

The episode has triggered a round of recriminations within the Labor party, with many in caucus seething at the implication that they are indifferent to the bloodshed in Gaza or that Payman’s voice would not be taken seriously within internal forums.

The government has shifted its policy incrementally since the conflict began, including by calling for a ceasefire in December and by voting in favour of Palestinian membership of the UN in May.

Wong has also indicated that Australia is open to recognising Palestine during a peace process, “not necessarily only at the end of the peace process”, although there is no sign this is imminent and one of the conditions is reform to the Palestinian Authority.

Government insiders insist the difference between Payman and the government on recognising Palestinian statehood is largely one of timing.

Still, Payman’s message is likely to resonate with a segment of the electorate that believes tying recognition to a peace process merely kicks the can down the road, especially when the Israeli government has declared its outright opposition to a Palestinian state.

In the meantime, for both the government and Payman herself, the ramifications of the high-profile resignation are still sinking in.

“You can say I’m grieving a little,” she said in an interview with Sky News Australia hours after the bombshell news.

“This is going to have a huge impact on me and the way I conduct myself in this place.”