Pathways, not personalities

In the weeks after the 2025 federal election I sat with a friend in Bankstown who had spent six months on the ground for one of the independent campaigns. He had knocked on doors in 40-degree heat. He had run street stalls outside mosques. He had spent his savings on petrol. His candidate had pulled fourteen per cent of the primary vote. Tony Burke was still the Minister for Home Affairs. My friend asked me, almost more to himself than to me, what it had all been for.

I have been thinking about that question ever since. Because my friend is rare.

There is no shortage of talent or energy in this community. Gaza and Palestine have activated a generation. In Cumberland, Auburn, Bankstown and Lakemba, there are people in their twenties and thirties who can write, can organise, can speak in public, who care deeply about what is happening to their people, and who want their effort to count. That energy is real and it is not in short supply.

What is in short supply is energy directed somewhere it can compound. The same talent and time, spent on a minor-party run that finishes 0.75 per cent of the national vote, does not become a school funding decision, a planning law, an aged-care funding model or a vote on the floor of Parliament. The same talent and time, channelled through a major-party pathway over a decade, does. The scarcity is not of people. It is of strategy. And where this generation puts its energy is going to decide what the next twenty years look like.

The honest answer to my friend’s question is that he was running a real campaign on a pathway that does not lead where he thought it did. Winning the seat, even if it had been possible, would not have changed Labor’s policy, would not have shifted Australian foreign policy in any structural way. It would have produced one independent voice in a 150-seat chamber and a harder fight for the same community at the next election.

If the underlying motivation was anger at Labor, and for plenty of people that anger is real and earned, then have that conversation honestly, with eyes open about what alternative pathways can and cannot deliver. Sending Labor a message is not the same thing as building power.

I am a Labor councillor. This essay asks you to consider joining a major party, and one of the two is mine. Read it knowing that, and judge the argument on the numbers.

The people who set my friend on that path have a pattern. They build movements around themselves. They collect young, capable Muslims like signatures. And when the votes come in and the seats do not, they tell those young people that the system is rigged, that they fought the good fight, that next time will be different. Next time is never different.

This essay is about why, and about where the next decade of Muslim political energy should go instead.

The 2025 ledger

Before the numbers, the assumption underneath them. Australia is a two-party system. Not because voters are in love with it - the majors’ combined primary vote is at a historic low and a third of the country now votes for someone else - but because governments are formed through it anyway. Every government since Federation has been built around one of the two major groupings, and even the 2010 hung parliament ended with a major party governing. So the question is not whether you like the major parties. It is whether you accept where government gets formed. Government is where policy is made, and the only road to government runs through Labor or the Coalition. Either a community organises inside that structure, or it spends a generation pretending the structure is something it is not.

The numbers matter, so I want to lay them out plainly.

Muslim Votes Matter, the most organised of the recent campaigns, said it was contesting across thirty-two federal seats. It campaigned hardest in the Sydney seats where the Muslim community is largest, Watson and Blaxland above all. In Watson, the endorsed independent secured 14.74 per cent of the primary vote. In Blaxland, 18.76 per cent. Both seats stayed Labor. Tony Burke kept his portfolio. Jason Clare kept his.

Australia’s Voice ran Senate candidates in five states. Its national Senate vote was 0.75 per cent. One hundred and nineteen thousand seven hundred and seventeen votes nationally. Zero new seats. The party still holds Senator Fatima Payman’s pre-existing Western Australian seat, which she won in 2022 as a Labor candidate.

Now look at the same parliament from another angle. It has three Muslims in the Labor caucus. Anne Aly is in Cabinet. Basem Abdo is the first federal MP of Palestinian heritage. Ed Husic was dumped from the ministry in May 2025 in circumstances he linked publicly to his Gaza stance. The demotion was a real price, paid on the issue this generation cares most about. It was also possible because the community only has three votes in caucus. One Husic can be moved aside quietly. Ten could not be. And he is still in caucus, still holding one of the three votes that need to become ten. Mehreen Faruqi and Fatima Payman sit in the Senate outside the major parties, with real platforms and real voices. But no Muslim has ever reached a federal ministry through any pathway outside the majors. The independent who polled fourteen per cent in Watson was never going to reach one either, no matter how right he was on the issues. That is not a verdict on what Labor has or has not delivered for the community. It is a description of where the structure puts people.

The recognition of Palestine in September 2025 is the cleanest illustration of the structural point. Whatever combination of forces produced it - community anger, demonstrations, international shifts, internal Labor advocacy and, as plenty of commentators argued at the time, the hard electoral maths of western Sydney - the people who marched can fairly claim a share of it. But the recognition itself was signed in a room that protest could not enter.

One pathway produced real votes in real numbers and no new representation in the chamber. The other produced three Muslims in the Labor caucus. Three in a 150-seat House is the start of representation, not its achievement, and it took fifteen years of slow internal work to get even that far. The outside pathway asked its people for everything - energy, sacrifice, years of their lives - and could not give them back a seat. That is a fault in the pathway, not in the people who walked it.

Pressure is not power

A fair objection here is that protest pressure and institutional work are not opposites. They are, in theory, complementary. The outside campaign creates heat. People inside convert the heat into a vote, a platform line, a budget item, a ministerial submission. When both halves are strong, that division of labour is real.

I accept that. The recognition of Palestine in 2025 was shaped by the demonstrations as well as by Penny Wong’s diplomatic groundwork and the arguments made inside the Labor caucus. Pressure mattered. So did people in the room.

The problem is what happens when a community puts almost all its talent into the pressure half of that equation and almost none into the inside half. Then there is no one to convert. The heat rises. The signal goes out. And the moment passes without legislative consequence, because the levers were not where the people were.

The harder part of the argument is this. Even if every independent candidate the movement backed had won, in every seat it contested, the structure of Australian politics would not have moved. Because independents in this country do not form governments. At their best they hold the balance of power in a hung parliament, shift debates and force concessions, and that is not nothing. What they cannot do is govern. They cannot set foreign policy, sign cabinet submissions, write a budget or recognise a state. Those decisions are made in one room, and the room has two doors, and both of them are major-party doors.

And here is the further wrinkle. Even within the small power that independents do hold, a candidate elected on a single-community ticket sits well below the existing crossbench. David Pocock has bargaining power in Canberra because he built a broad-platform campaign in the ACT and was recruited from professional networks the major parties already recognise. The Teals occupy similar ground: economically liberal, socially progressive, environmentally focused, drawing voters across community and party lines. The major parties do not have to like them to do business with them.

A candidate elected on a Muslim community ticket would not be in that room at all. In a hung parliament, Labor would treat them as a one-issue spoiler. The Liberals would treat them as untouchable. Neither major party would court their vote the way both have to court Pocock’s. That marginality is not a slur on the candidate’s personal qualities. It is how the system treats candidates who arrive without a broad cross-community platform.

You can spend twenty years standing outside that room with the best megaphone in the country, and you will have less effect on a single cabinet submission than a thirty-five-year-old backbencher with five months of experience.

The Greens deserve a separate note. They are not a personality vehicle. They have done decades of serious policy work, and they have been the most consistent parliamentary voice on Palestine. They hold the balance of power in the Senate, which is real influence. But the Greens do not form government, and they are not on a credible trajectory to do so. A Muslim activist who spends a decade inside the Greens will end up with a platform and a Senate vote, but no hand on the levers where foreign policy, intelligence, immigration and the budget are decided. The Greens can amplify and amend. They cannot direct. For a community that needs to convert pressure into policy, they are a useful pressure partner. They are a limited destination.

The character problem

When a movement organises around a single person, that person becomes the destination. Every conversation runs through them. Every photograph is of them. Every interview asks them what they think. Talented people in the orbit become the supporting cast in someone else’s story, not the principals of their own.

This is bad for everyone except the figure at the centre. It is especially bad for the young.

A capable twenty-five-year-old who joins a major party can, in a fair branch, run her own preselection campaign by twenty-eight, sit on a state policy committee by thirty, contest a council ward by thirty-two, and a state seat by thirty-five. The pathway is contested, factionalised and slow. It is also real. The same twenty-five-year-old who pours that decade into someone else’s independent vehicle ends it where she started, older and more cynical.

The deeper damage is harder to see in any one election cycle. It compounds over a generation. The young engineering graduate who spent his nights running someone else’s social media. The lawyer who gave up four years of weekends for a campaign in a seat that was always going to stay Labor by twenty points. The medical resident who burnt out as a candidate’s coordinator.

The pathway that actually works

The migrant communities that came before us answered this question decades ago.

Irish Catholics arrived in Australia, faced explicit sectarian discrimination, and made a strategic decision to build inside the Labor Party rather than alongside it. They did not form an Irish-Catholic Party. They built unions, schools, parish networks, mutual aid societies, and over decades they turned the Australian Labor Party into a vehicle capable of carrying Irish-Catholic political ambition to government. There were splits, factional wars and the Democratic Labor Party rupture of the 1950s. There were also Ben Chifley, Joe Lyons, Paul Keating and many other Catholic prime ministers, treasurers and ministers across both major parties. The communal pathway produced front benches. A communal party would have produced none of them.

Closer to home, much of the work I am describing has already been done, quietly, by part of our own community. The Lebanese Muslim community in Western Sydney has been building into the major parties for thirty years. Walk through Bankstown, Lakemba, Auburn and Punchbowl and you will find Lebanese Muslims who have served as councillors, deputy mayors, mayors, state MPs and ministers. They did not form a Lebanese Vote. They did not stand independents on a community ticket. They joined Labor branches, learned the system, took on the unglamorous internal roles and put their names forward when the moment was right. Jihad Dib sits in the NSW Labor cabinet today. Whole council chambers in Canterbury-Bankstown have been built by Lebanese-Australian names anyone in those suburbs would recognise. The work is not finished, and Lebanese-Muslim political representation remains well below where it should be. But the pathway exists because the generation before us chose to build it. That precedent belongs to all of us. It is one of the under-told success stories of Muslim political engagement in this country, and it sits right on our own doorstep.

What the work actually looks like

I want to be honest about what the major-party pathway involves, because it is not photogenic and it does not deliver the rush of an election-night rally.

It is a branch meeting on a Tuesday night where six people argue about the wording of a resolution. It is sitting through the treasurer’s report on the chairs-and-tables budget. It is council. It is unions. It is volunteering for a candidate you do not entirely agree with.

Not every branch is clean. Some are stitched up. Some preselections get settled over the heads of local members, and western Sydney knows what it looks like when a community is used for its numbers and then passed over.

This is not always glamorous. But it is what produced Ed Husic taking his oath of office on the Qur’an in 2013. It is what produced Anne Aly’s first speech in 2016. It is what produced Basem Abdo in 2025. None of them got there by founding their own vehicle and asking the community to follow them. All of them got there by doing the slow work, and by being the kind of person other people in the party trusted to do it well.

What I would say to a young Muslim with political fire

You are exactly the kind of person the next decade needs. There is no shortage of activation around you, especially since 2023. But the community has proven it can fill the streets. It has not yet filled the branch rooms. That second job is the one going begging, and it asks for a rarer kind of stamina, the kind that shows up to a Tuesday-night branch meeting in the rain for ten years. That is the role I am asking you to consider taking on.

Pick a major party. I am Labor, so discount my advice however you need to, but the argument holds for either door. Most of you will land in Labor for reasons of culture and policy alignment that I do not need to argue here. A community with credible voices in both major parties cannot be taken for granted by one or written off by the other.

Join. Pay the fee. Show up to a branch meeting. Refuse the idea that you have to choose between your faith and the major parties. There is no shortage of Muslims at the top of Labor and a growing presence in the Liberal Party. They are not less Muslim for being there. They are more effective for it.

The next decade

In ten years, the Muslim community in Australia will either have ten times the institutional representation it has now, or it will have the same and a longer list of unanswered demands. Which one happens depends almost entirely on where you, and the people like you, choose to spend your twenties.

If you spend those years inside branches, in council chambers, on union delegations, in policy working groups, in the unglamorous places where the actual decisions get made, the 2030s will look different. There will be twenty Muslim MPs across the major parties instead of three. There will be Muslim ministers and treasurers, and a bench of councillors, staffers and conference delegates. There will be policy on Palestine that survives. There will be policy on Islamophobia, on housing, on schools, on the things that matter to the community day to day, written by people who live in the community and have the institutional power to deliver it.

If you spend those years building somebody else’s profile, the 2030s will look like the 2020s, with the same script and a new generation asked to pay for it. The demands will be sharper. The capable will have burnt out. The next generation will be told that the system is rigged, by the same voices that taught their parents it was rigged, and the next round of mobilisation will produce the same result.

The pathway through the major parties is slow. It can be annoying. It can be unfair in the way all institutional politics is unfair, and it requires more patience than any of us would prefer to spend. For communities that want lasting power in this country, no pathway has worked more reliably than organised work inside the major parties, backed by strong institutions outside them.

My friend in Bankstown asked what it had all been for. This essay is the long answer. The short one is that he was never the problem. The doors he knocked, the stalls he ran, the savings he spent - that is exactly the talent the branch rooms are starving for.

Given how much energy this generation already has, and how much depends on where it gets directed, we cannot afford to relearn this the hard way. Start this month. If you do not know where to begin, write to me.