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 produced a ceasefire, 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 that is the conversation to have honestly, with eyes open about what alternative pathways can and cannot deliver. Scratching a grievance is not the same thing as building power. 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. The system is doing exactly what it was built to do. The pathway was wrong from the start.

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. Compulsory voting, single-member electorates and preferential ballots - every load-bearing piece of the electoral structure pushes power into two major coalitions and keeps it there. That is not an accident, and it is not changing in our lifetime. So the question is not whether you like the major parties. It is whether you accept the country’s electoral architecture. If you do, then 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 suburbs where the Muslim community is largest: Watson, Blaxland, Werriwa, Parramatta. 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 and zero from the independent or minor-party pathway. 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 - and he is still in caucus, still with a vote on the floor, still inside the room. 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 independent who polled fourteen per cent in Watson has none of that, no matter how right he was on the issues. That is the structural difference, and it survives whatever you think of Labor’s record.

The recognition of Palestine in September 2025 is the cleanest illustration of the structural point. Whatever combination of forces produced it - community anger, demonstrations, electoral risk in seats like Watson, international shifts, internal Labor advocacy - the recognition itself was signed in a room that protest could not enter. That is not an argument that Labor delivered for Palestinians. It is an argument that signings happen where signings happen. Pressure can put the case. Only power can sign it.

One pathway produced symbolic votes and no new representation in the chamber. The other produced three Muslims in the Labor caucus. The gap is not a verdict on Labor. Three Muslims 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 point is structural, not credit-allocating. Only one of these two pathways ever ends inside the room where decisions are made. The outside model - for all its energy, sacrifice and absorbed talent - did not. The two trajectories are not comparable, not because one party is good and the other bad, but because only one of them ever lands anyone in the room.

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. The inside actor converts the heat into a vote, a platform line, a budget item, a ministerial submission. In a healthy ecosystem 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 caucus arguments inside Labor’s expenditure review committee. 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 is generated. The signal is sent. And the moment passes without legislative consequence, because the levers were not where the people were.

Here is the part of this argument that the protest model never says out loud. Even if every independent candidate it backed had won, on every primary vote, in every seat, it would not have changed the structure of Australian politics. Because independents in this country do not form governments. They can hold the balance of power in a hung parliament. They can write op-eds. They can shame ministers. They cannot direct ASIO. They cannot draft foreign policy. They cannot sign cabinet submissions. They cannot allocate $50 billion in a budget. They cannot recognise a state. They cannot deploy troops or refuse to. Those decisions are made inside one room in Australian politics. There is exactly one such room, and it 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 negotiating leverage 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 processes candidates who arrive without a broad cross-community platform.

So the protest pathway is doubly weak. It is weak because independents do not form governments. It is weak even within the crossbench, because single-community independents do not get courted, and so do not even get the smaller power of being negotiated with.

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. That is not a moral statement. It is a description of how the constitutional system actually works.

The Greens deserve a separate note. They are not a personality vehicle. They have built durable policy infrastructure over decades, 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.

So the question for any community with limited political talent is not whether to be loud. It is whether the loudness translates into hands on the levers. If it does, the loudness is power. If it does not, the loudness is theatre, and the people who provided the loudness are spending their twenties on someone else’s career.

The character problem

When a movement organises around a single person, that person becomes the destination. Every conversation routes 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, more cynical, and with no institutional ladder to step onto. She has done a master class in someone else’s career and got nothing in her own hands.

You can see the pattern in the formal architecture of these vehicles. One of the recent registered minor parties built around the Muslim and Palestinian cause writes into its own constitution that its Registered Officer holds absolute veto power over the National Executive Committee, overrideable by no one. A vehicle founded in protest at major-party discipline has chosen a structure with tighter central control than the party it left. That is one example of a wider problem. Any movement that runs on one figure’s name will eventually be limited by that figure’s appetite for power, ability to lead, willingness to share credit, and capacity not to combust under pressure. Most figures fall short on at least one of those. The ones who do not are the ones who join, and lead, the major parties.

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. Every one of them was, somewhere down the line, going to be a councillor, a state MP, a chief of staff, a minister, a senator. Some of them still will be. Many of them will not, because the vehicle they joined was a sink, not a ladder, and by the time the campaign ended they had no relationships left with any institution that could carry them onward.

It is not melodramatic to call this heartbreaking. It is the most expensive thing happening in our politics right now, and almost nobody is naming the cost.

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. The lesson is not “join Labor”. The lesson is build community institutions strong enough to negotiate with major parties, discipline your own talent, and reproduce leadership across generations.

Italian Australians are 4.4 per cent of the population. In the forty-seventh parliament they held 4.8 per cent of seats, slightly over-represented, distributed across both major parties. No Italian party has ever been viable here, and no one in the Italian community is seriously arguing one should be. Italian-Australian political power exists because Italian activists joined Labor branches in Carlton and Liberal branches in Norton Street, and the elected representatives followed.

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.

The pattern is playing out internationally too. At the 2024 UK election, Labour lost ground in the most heavily Muslim constituencies, in some seats by up to twenty-nine points. The protest was real and substantial. And Labour still represented fifty-seven of the sixty-four constituencies with the largest Muslim communities. A handful of independents elected on Gaza grounds carried the banner. Outside their own seats, their institutional weight is close to zero, while the major party still held the keys to the front bench.

What you notice across all of these examples is that none of these communities won their representation by being told the major parties were irredeemable. They won it by being inside them, arguing, building, doing the slow work, and eventually presenting candidates the party trusted to carry the community. They also did one other thing. They built civic institutions outside the parties that were strong enough to apply pressure and to discipline their own talent. The alternative to a personality vehicle is not passive party membership. It is institutional pluralism: people inside the parties and people outside them, working in deliberate coordination.

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 dopamine hit 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 reading the agenda for a state conference and working out which factional grouping will support the policy you care about. It is taking a coffee with the local member’s electorate officer and listening more than you talk. It is preselection paperwork that runs to fifty pages. It is council. It is unions. It is volunteering for a candidate you do not entirely agree with, because they are the one running this cycle and the next person up the chain after them might be you.

It is also losing. You will lose policy fights inside the party. You will lose votes at conferences. You will see motions you support voted down by the same colleagues who, three years later, will vote for them. You will go home angry about how slow it all is, and then come back. The work is real even when the win is not.

This is not glamorous. 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.

From where I sit

I want to be specific about local government, because it is where I am.

Cumberland Council is not where Australia recognises Palestine, sets refugee intake or signs a trade agreement. It is where decisions are made about a budget in the hundreds of millions, about which streets get resurfaced, which parks get upgraded, where libraries open and what hours they keep, what multicultural programming gets funded, how planning decisions shape the suburbs the community actually lives in. Of the fifteen motions I have put up in this term, fifteen have passed. They have been on Carnarvon and Coleman Park, on Islamophobia, on services for older residents, on multicultural events that mean something in Auburn, Berala, Regents Park and Lidcombe. They are small in the federal scheme. They are not small in the lives of the people who live the consequences.

Council is not just a stepping stone, although it can be one. It is institutional power in its own right, and it sits inside the major-party ecosystem that connects to state and federal levels through preselections, conferences and ministerial relationships. The councillor who shows up, does the work and builds a record can move into a state seat. They can also stay at council and shape a city for twenty years. Both are honourable. Both are pathways. Neither is available through a personality vehicle, because personality vehicles do not contest council elections in any organised way.

If you are reading this and your fire is already lit, council is closer to you than you think. Branches preselect for council. Branches are where you start.

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 there is a difference between people who can show up to a protest and people who can show up to a Tuesday-night branch meeting in the rain for ten years. The first kind we have in abundance, and that energy is welcome and necessary. The second kind, the long-haul institutional grinders, the community simply does not have enough of yet. That is the role I am asking you to consider taking on.

Pick a major party. I am not going to tell you which. Most of you will land in Labor for reasons of culture and policy alignment that I do not need to argue here. Some of you will land in the Liberals. Both are the work, because both are the rooms where decisions are made. I am not going to pretend the Liberal side is symmetrical right now - the federal Liberals are in a hard place with the community, and recent preselection rows have not helped. That makes the work harder for any Muslim joining the Liberals today. It does not make it less important. A community with credible voices in both major parties cannot be taken for granted by one or written off by the other. If that is the work you are called to, it is some of the most valuable work the next decade can do. So pick the one that fits - and then settle in.

Join. Pay the fee. Show up to a branch meeting. Listen for the first three.

Find out who runs the branch. Find out which faction they sit in. Read about the factions. Yes, they are real. Yes, they matter. Anyone telling you they do not is either uninformed or selling you something.

Take coffees. Lots of them. With your local member’s office, with the state member, with the federal member, with your union if you have one, with the branch president, with the secretary, with the youth wing if you are under thirty. Listen more than you talk. Form opinions. Keep the loud ones in your head for the first year.

After that year, start putting your hand up. Run for the branch executive. Stand for a delegate position to your state conference. Take on the unglamorous internal jobs nobody else wants. Build a record people can vouch for. By the time a preselection that fits you comes up, the people deciding it will already know who you are.

Find your cohort. You do not have to do this alone, and you should not try to. A handful of you organising deliberately inside a branch, sharing reading, comparing notes, supporting each other through preselections, will be twice as effective as ten of you scattered. The Irish Catholics did this. The Italians did this. The Jewish community has been doing it for a century. Cohorts compound.

If a personality vehicle, somebody’s brand, somebody’s foundation, somebody’s WhatsApp group, tries to recruit you, ask one question. What is the structure under this? If the answer is that everything routes through one person, walk away. You are not joining a movement. You are joining someone’s career.

And refuse the framing that says 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 grievances. Which one happens depends almost entirely on where the next wave of capable young Muslim activists chooses to spend their twenties.

If they spend those years inside branches, on preselection committees, 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 premiers, ministers, treasurers and high court justices. There will be policy on Palestine that survives a change of government because there are Muslim hands on the levers on both sides. 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. There will also be community institutions outside the parties that are strong enough to keep those people honest.

If they spend those years building somebody else’s profile, the 2030s will look like the 2020s with a different cast of bitter people. The grievances 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 is annoying. It is unfair in the way all institutional politics is unfair, and it requires more patience than any of us would prefer to spend. For communities seeking sustained federal executive power in this country, no pathway has worked more reliably than organised participation inside the major parties, backed by strong institutions outside them.

That is the choice. 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.