I knew I would be punished for crossing the floor. I didn’t expect my staff to be

I certainly raised a few eyebrows last week when I walked into the press pack with my biggest adversary, Queensland Senator Pauline Hanson, to stand on a unity ticket asking the Prime Minister to properly resource our parliamentary offices.

I wish I didn’t have to resort to such a tactic, but I was out of options, and I knew this was a surefire way to get his attention.

For those who don’t know, I am the only independent parliamentarian without any personal staff. Some of my colleagues have one personal staff member, most have two, and one lucky Senator boasts of having three.

Instead of an independent body, like the Remuneration Tribunal which determines wages, personal staffing allocations are determined by the Prime Minister.

I have written to the Prime Minister four times on the issue. I have had countless meetings with Labor MPs and the Special Minister of State, Senator Don Farrell. I have moved for the Order of Production of Documents in the Senate, I have put in Freedom of Information requests, the list goes on.

And in response: crickets.

I knew when I crossed the floor in 2024, I would be punished. What I didn’t expect was for my constituents and my staff to be punished too.

Having been a Government backbencher I know what the workload is like in their offices.

I am not saying backbenchers don’t work hard, or are bad community representatives but the party tells you how to vote, it provides you with templated responses to constituent requests, it allocates your speaking spots, it tells you which events to attend and which ones to avoid.

Scrutinising hundreds of pages of legislation? Don’t worry about it.

The bells ring in parliament, you go down to the chamber and the Labor whip points to where you’ll be sitting. What’s the vote on? Don’t worry about it.

Even if I were a low-profile independent Senator, my workload would have doubled when I moved to the crossbench, in losing the supports that the party takes care of.

But I’m not low-profile, though. Being a hijabi woman who defied her party means I get a lot more attention. More attention means more work.

Some of the attention is good, in that people from across Western Australia and elsewhere reach out to my office to help advocate for them because they see me as a beacon of hope.

But a lot of the attention is tiresome. The relentless comments from bots mixed with some of Australia’s least-adjusted folks on social media. The death threats in the inbox. The abusive phone calls. Sexism, racism, islamophobia, and sometimes all three combined, are a part of my daily reality.

I’m a big girl and my skin is thicker than ever. But it’s taken a huge toll on my staff. I am very grateful to have such dedicated, hard-working staff members. We are a really great team. They’re burning out, though.

The Prime Minister began his career in an electorate office, before bot farms and deepfakes were a thing. So you’d think he could empathise.

The Prime Minister claims to understand the working class struggle, but is quite happy to subject my staff to additional psychosocial hazards.

I wake up every day wondering which one of my small team will be throwing in the towel because with their skills and talents, they could easily find better paying work elsewhere without having to deal with the barrage of abuse, without having to sacrifice 19 Sundays a year flying to Canberra, without having to comb through pages and pages of returned Questions on Notice, and so forth.

I know it would please the Prime Minister if I had a bunch of lazy incompetents in my office, but would that be fair on my constituents?

Ultimately it comes down to equity. Remember when the Labor Government were spruiking their industrial relations reforms? ‘Same job, same pay!’

But for the staff in my office it’s harder job, less pay.

It wouldn’t be tolerated in other workplaces and it shouldn’t be tolerated in Parliament House.

So on behalf of my staff, I’ll ask again: Prime Minister, please stop weaponising your power against my dedicated workers and grant me the same resourcing you have afforded the other independents.

Senator Fatima Payman is an independent senator representing WA.