The idea that political parties are a broad church is under review.

John Howard famously claimed the label for the Liberals. It was the plaster and paint he regularly applied whenever cracks emerged.

“You sometimes have to get the builders in to put in the extra pew on both sides of the aisle to make sure that everybody is accommodated,” Howard said in a 2005 speech on his party’s philosophical framework.

The Liberals were, he said, trustees of two great traditions – the classic liberalism of John Stuart Mill and the social conservatism of Edmund Burke.

“And if you look at the history of the Liberal party, it is at its best when it balances and blends those two traditions.”

The Labor party is older and less complicated. It was founded in the union movement of the early 1890s on a single principle: solidarity.

The face of Australia’s oldest political party has changed down the generations, especially as it has more actively embraced and promoted diversity. But nothing has shifted that founding belief in people being stronger together nor the consequential rule that Labor’s individual parliamentary caucus members are bound, outwardly, to support every position it collectively adopts.

This is why Western Australian senator Fatima Payman’s spectacular rejection of Labor’s central tradition – and of the party itself – cuts deep among her former colleagues. It goes right to the heart of how Labor chooses to achieve change and why it even exists.

What has shocked them most is the cool and deliberate way the highly articulate 29-year-old first-term senator has praised her former party’s heritage principles and gaslit its modern representatives, all at the same time.

She announced on Thursday that she was splitting from “the august Australian........

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