I’ve just watched Senator Fatima Payman’s performative ‘I quit but not really, I’m moving to the crossbenches’ media conference. It seems that whether you’re a hard man Wilson ‘Iron Bar’ Tuckey trying to deliver some old-school hotel law and order, or lefty enforcer Penny Wong grudgingly following party rules back when opposing same-sex marriage, or even a Sarah Hanson-Young confusing Sea Patrol with Border Control and wondering why your colleagues laugh at you, what they really all need is an emotional support politician, a kind of political anti-bastard to tell them they’re doing OK while extracting the knives from their back.

Forget Palestine and the strange moral nirvana you get from directly or indirectly supporting Hamas (I’ve never inhaled but presume that like cigarettes the choices are mentholated or spiced – and either way they will eventually kill you), this is my out-take from the senator’s stand-up where she resigned from the Labor party because she wants to support Palestine but apparently also because she had no support-person during her disciplinary chat in the Prime Minister’s office and ultimatums and hurt feelings were involved. I mean, haven’t we all had ‘those chats’ with that boss at some point?

This is the Millennial politician preselected to attract a particular voting bloc, armed and dangerous. No longer just demanding the right to have pronouns acknowledged and their recreational drugs tested at dance events so it’s not their fault, they’re calling you just like that old 1970’s thriller, from ‘inside the house’ (or Senate) and telling everyone how to run the country.

Watch Senator Payman and you can see what Future Pollie is like, and we should be very afraid if this is what the future holds. Is there anything more self-entitled than getting elected to the Senate via the long-established rules and processes of the Labor party only to leave at the first moment you disagree with them? John Howard once said you should ‘dance with the one that brought you’, but as Victorian Premier and club raver Jacinta Allan says, mixing ideologies which haven’t been tested by a first-year medical student on a trestle table at a music festival is always dangerous and nobody dances with partners at Socialist Left rave parties these days anyway. Rather than adult-up and concede the disloyalty the trick is to unleash the full encyclopedia of political jargon and say it’s a matter of principle, that you need to be on the right side of history and have moral clarity.  The main point is that you are ‘special’ and the only non-bastard amongst all these parliamentary bastards who possesses any principles at all. But having come from the usual union movement political production line, Payman must know how Labor operates. She must know that not everyone in the party shares her views on Palestine and that politics is the art of compromise and usually involves incremental change. It sometimes even involves having to represent and appeal to voters from the other side of the political divide.

As she puts it, as politicians (and more importantly a Labor politician, where the ideological fraternisation rules are strict) ‘we know what we sign up for,’ but she then acts surprised when her Labor Prime Minister demands she follows caucus solidarity, and her party colleagues don’t want to hang out with her anymore.

But if not banging on about the lack of principles of the party you voluntarily decided to join Future Pollie can always complain about how they’ve been treated. After all, the language of Millennial is the language of love, or at least the language of self-love. Payman complained of having to do the walk of shame to the Prime Minister’s office through public areas where she could be seen. She’s upset she didn’t have a support person for her tough-talk conversation with the PM. What she means is the party didn’t support her, but that would be the ALP, the party she was in the middle of shafting. She also complains about Labor operatives who were clearly privy to conversations she thinks should have stayed private even though gossip is the currency of politics and the trade union movement she comes from. This suggests a tunnel-visioned naivety about how politics operates not seen since Julia Banks last whinged on TV about a political coup removing her fan-girl hero Malcolm Turnbull despite Turnbull himself having shafted Tony Abbott, or Bridget Archer feeling bullied because fellow Liberals tried to talk her out of crossing the floor on an important vote.

Despite this faux cluelessness Future Pollie Payman does seem to have some idea of how the gossipy machinations of power work – calling her media conference during Question Time for maximum impact, having a ‘non’ meeting with preference-whisperer Glenn Druery, and coyly suggesting media ‘watch this space’, as she considers her political options including supporting a new Muslim political movement. It’s Public Relations 101: keep the media hanging and wanting to know more.

Future Pollie would be nothing without some identity politics. Payman was selected for her Senate spot for the various boxes she ticked for Labor strategists – young, female, appealing to Muslim voters. Questioned at her press conference about how her religious beliefs influence her, she got offended that she was being singled out for her religious views even though this would have been central at her preselection. And clearly Future Pollie memory span isn’t great if she forgets the constant media God-botherer attacks aimed at Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott, whom from memory never complained.

And it’s that short memory that sticks. Payman and her family have a truly, compelling back story as they escaped to Australia from Afghanistan as the Taleban took over and religion poisoned every aspect of life including the political. One can only wonder at her interest in a potential Muslim voting bloc and support for a group like Hamas with their own Taleban vibe.

All this grandiose moralising and breathless, partisan media wanting to jump on board makes me nostalgic for an original and infamous Labor rat, Mal Colston. He may have been old, overweight, unattractive and dumped on his party, but you never heard him claiming to be the voice of the people as he sidled his way to the parliamentary bain-marie.