Payman apologises to Haines over attack comments, doubles down on staffing demand

Independent senator Fatima Payman has apologised to Helen Haines for her “clumsy wording” on Monday when she suggested the prime minister would only heed her calls for additional staff after a hypothetical attack against her.

Amid a worsening feud between crossbench MPs and the government over how staffing is allocated, Special Minister of State Don Farrell said Anthony Albanese was the right person to have sole discretion over how many staff members his political opponents have, despite calls for the power to be handed to an independent body due to its “potential corruption risk”.

“I have apologised for my clumsy wording on Monday night and I have conveyed those apologies directly to Dr Haines and her staff,” Payman told this masthead, saying she reached out to the independent MP, who is in a serious but stable condition.

“If the special minister of state’s assessment is that my [staffing] allocation is appropriate, I invite him to sit down with the workers in my office to try and understand the toll the job is taking on their mental and physical wellbeing. His cushy position is, after all, backed in by the union movement and I would hate for him to look like an anti-worker hypocrite.”

Appearing before Senate estimates on Monday night, Payman asked whether Albanese had not provided equitable staffing to her office to punish her for her defection from the Labor Party last term, saying her staff were suffering under their workload.

“They can’t take this any longer. And is the prime minister waiting for something like what happened to Dr Helen Haines to occur to my office, to me, for him to take our request seriously?” Payman asked on Monday.

The prime minister has come under increased scrutiny for his complete discretion over how many additional staff members each MP can hire. Each politician is entitled to five electorate officers, but additional “personal staff” are provided on a discretionary basis.

Payman is the only independent in federal parliament without additional staff, while Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie has three adviser-level staff, and ACT senator David Pocock and Victorian senator Lidia Thorpe each have two.

Despite this, Farrell said Albanese was the right person to make staffing determinations, and that Payman received the same resourcing as “every other backbench employee”.

However, this masthead revealed last month that government backbencher Tammy Tyrrell was allowed to keep two adviser level staffers when she left the crossbench and joined Labor earlier this year. In 2023, Tyrell penned an opinion piece for Guardian Australia saying the prime minister’s staffing power posed “a potential corruption risk”.

Asked whether Albanese’s treatment of Payman risked voters thinking the prime minister was acting to punish the senator, Farrell said: “No.”

A swathe of crossbench and independent MPs told this masthead their staff were burning out from the volume of threats and abuse that comes across their desks, as they beg the government for more resources to share the workload.