Renegade Labor senator Fatima Payman is on the brink of leaving the party, taking advice on next steps from controversial election strategist Glenn Druery, a political operative known as “the preference whisperer” for his success in securing seats for upper house independents and minor party candidates.
Druery is also in talks with an alliance of Muslim groups who have thrown their support behind Payman following her decision last Tuesday to cross the floor to vote with the Greens on recognition of Palestinian statehood. The alliance plans to run candidates against half a dozen Labor MPs in the lower house and in the Senate.
Fatima Payman and (inset) “preference whisperer” Glenn Druery. Druery has been advising the Labor senator.Credit: James Brickwood, Andrew Meares
Payman’s decision to work with Druery, who masterminded the Senate campaign for Motoring Enthusiasts’ little-known Ricky Muir in 2013, is the strongest signal yet that she intends to leave the Labor Party after being indefinitely suspended from the caucus on Sunday.
Druery later told ABC’s Lateline in 2017 he has been directing micro-party preferences away from One Nation since 1999.
“I like to think of what I do in working against One Nation as a community service ... My hand on their electoral throat squeezing the preferential life out of them,” he said.
But he conceded his did give the party advice about Hanson’s NSW campaign in 2013.
Senior minister Bill Shorten extended an olive branch to Payman on Tuesday morning, telling ABC radio she could still contribute to Labor if her dispute with the party was settled, and she just needed time “on the bench”.
Labor MPs unanimously endorsed a motion to suspend Payman from the caucus until she decided she could “respect” party rules, after Anthony Albanese said he showed “strength in compassion” by staring down Coalition demands to sack her.
Labor rules bind caucus members to the party’s collective decisions, and MPs who vote against those risk being thrown out.
This masthead revealed on Monday that when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese summoned Payman to The Lodge, he told her to consider her position as an MP and remember she was in the Senate because of Labor.
Druery has risen to prominence over the last decade for successfully stitching together complex preference deals at state and federal levels to elect minor-party and independent candidates to upper houses.
He confirmed to this masthead that he is informally advising both Payman and the coalition of Muslim groups, but declined to comment. Sources who were unauthorised to speak publicly said Payman had informal discussions with members of the alliance.
Payman has been contacted for comment. She was not seen in the Senate on Tuesday.
On Monday evening, Payman said she would abstain from voting in the Senate for the rest of the week “unless a matter of conscience arises, where I’ll uphold the true values and principles of the Labor Party”.
One Labor MP, who asked not to be named so they could speak freely, said: “The fact that she [Payman] is working with Druery shows this has been planned for weeks”.
A second Labor MP was shocked that Payman was working with Druery because he “is all about money and that is why he would be doing this, he will work with anyone”.
In their party room meeting on Tuesday morning, the Greens discussed whether to bring another motion calling for recognition of Palestine to the Senate on Wednesday or Thursday.
The coalition of Muslim groups talking to Druery plan to use the high-profile dispute over war in Gaza to harness support for a “teal-style” strategy to eject Labor MPs from seats with large Muslim populations.
Mahmud Hawila, a barrister and adviser to the collective, said former Labor and Liberal operatives had already been recruited to advise on campaigns and door-knocking had begun. Seats in the alliance’s sights include Wills in Melbourne, and NSW’s Blaxland, Watson and Werriwa.
Druery’s advice to the group is understood to have focused on how to establish a political party that could harvest anger and disaffection in the Muslim community.
In 2016, the federal Coalition and the Greens teamed up to change the rules on how voters allocate their preferences in a move that reduced Druery’s ability to elect minor party candidates to the federal Senate. He then switched his focus to state parliaments, brokering a deal between Labor and Derryn Hinch in the Victorian state parliament’s upper house in 2019 and with other minor parties in 2022.
West Australians have a history of electing colourful members to the Senate. That includes independent Syd Negus who campaigned against inheritance taxes in the early 1970s, the country’s first Nuclear Disarmament Party representative Jo Vallentine, Dio Wang who was a member of Clive Palmer’s first federal party and One Nation’s Rod Culleton, who lost his position after being declared a bankrupt.
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