Do we like them?

Do we like Fatima Payman?

Our score: 7 out of 10. Her record backs workers, climate action and trans young people, but the Press TV comments on Iran are a real stain, even after she walked them back.

Payman is a West Australian senator who was elected for Labor in 2022 as the first hijab-wearing Muslim woman in federal parliament. She came up through Perth and the union movement. Her story since then is one of a rising star who quit her own team and went solo.

The break came over Gaza. In June 2024 she crossed the floor to back a Greens motion on recognising a Palestinian state, the first time a Labor MP had done that in nearly two decades. Albanese banned her from caucus, and she quit on 4 July, saying her conscience left her no real choice. She later launched her own party, Australia's Voice.

In November 2024 she was in a stoush with Pauline Hanson, who pushed to table documents questioning whether Payman's Afghan citizenship made her ineligible to sit. Labor voted to let the documents be tabled, and Payman and her supporters condemned the move. She told Hanson she brought “disgrace to the human race”, then withdrew it when asked. It's a messy episode, but nothing in it counts against her.

The bigger stain is February 2025. In an interview with Iran's state broadcaster Press TV she called Iran an “incredible place” for women. Academic Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who spent two years in an Iranian prison, called the comments “nonsense”, and an Iranian-Australian community group asked Tony Burke to look at whether foreign influence was involved. Payman said the comments reflected what women had told her, “not my personal opinion”, and that she had no knowledge of Press TV's affiliations.

On the harm check, the votes are mostly good. She is recorded as consistently voting for trans young people's access to gender-affirming healthcare, and generally for trans rights and LGBTI legal protections. She backs Paris, 1.5 degrees and net zero by 2050, though she voted against ending new fossil fuel projects and for coal industry investment. In January 2026 she voted against the government's hate laws but tried to widen their protections to include LGBTIQ+ people. We didn't see her reasons for voting no.

Lately she has teamed up with Lidia Thorpe and Mehreen Faruqi, writing in March 2026 to press the Senate president and Labor to change the chamber's rules over conduct in the Senate. That's the only other recent item we could read. The late-October outburst turned up only as a headline.