Last November, Labor Foreign Minister Penny Wong issued more than 800 temporary visas to Gazans following Hamas’s 7 October Israeli invasion and massacre. By March, that number had risen to more than 2,200 but the government had started cancelling some of those visas ‘to maintain our national security’.

The government now has another reason to regret its hasty decision following the announcement by Senator Fatima Payman that she was crossing the floor to vote with the Greens in support of Palestinian statehood and then quit Labor and sit as an independent.