Senior Labor cabinet minister Penny Wong has delivered a warning to Senator Fatima Payman to toe the line on the government’s position.

It comes days after the first-term Western Australian senator crossed the floor to against her party on a pro-Palestine motion.

Payman shocked colleagues when she defied Labor’s position and sided with the Greens on Tuesday night.

ALP members are expected to vote with the party, and crossing the floor can result in expulsion.

Deputy PM Richard Marles has confirmed Payman won’t be expelled, though Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has barred her from next week’s Labor caucus meeting. Some Labor MPs have privately expressed anger that there has not been stronger action against the Afghanistan-born Senator.

On Thursday, Wong said Albanese “dealt with this matter with great restraint on this occasion”.

“We understand the difficulty that the Senator has felt,” Wong told Nine’s Today show.

“[But] caucus solidarity matters to us. I can understand why caucus members feel upset because we are a party of the collective.

“Our expectation is that Senator Payman will abide by caucus decisions.”

Wong was Australia’s first openly gay cabinet minister. Despite that, she stuck with Labor’s opposition to same-sex marriage for years, voting against bills to legalise it in 2008 and 2010.

Wong said it was important the Labor caucus stood together as a “collective”.

“There’s a lot of personal commitments that we bring as members of the Labor Party and as members and senators elected on the Labor ticket, a personal commitment to the collective,” she told the ABC.

“We stand together, and that is why it’s not just a matter of rules. It’s a matter of what we believe, even when we disagree.”

Wong and her long-time partner, Sophie Allouache, finally wed in March this year, in a ceremony attended by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other senior Labor figures.

Penny Wong and her Senate colleagues celebrate the passing of the same-sex marriage bill in 2017. Photo: Getty

Payman said she believed voting in support of the motion, which urged the issue of recognising Palestine as a state be taken as an urgent matter, was in line with Labor’s principles.

The party’s policy platform is to recognise Palestine but with caveats and no definite timeline.

Wong defended voting against the Greens motion, chastising their opposition to her amendment to tack on recognising Palestine “as part of a peace process in support of a two-state solution”.

“The fact that the Greens voted against that demonstrates everything about their intention. It was all about politics, not about change,” she said in Canberra.

“You don’t change policy through Senate motions.”

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham also defended voting against the motion, saying his amendments – which also failed – outlining the peace process made it clear it was a final status issue.

Birmingham pushed for the inclusion of caveats before recognition, including Palestinian officials recognising Israel’s right to exist, security guarantee, right of return and negotiations around borders.

“We were unwilling to support a type of motion and that didn’t make clear those preconditions,” he said.

Payman said she joined the Greens push for stronger action against Israel as a matter of conscience, as the death toll in Gaza nears 38,000, according to the Hamas-run local health ministry.

Save the Children estimates some 21,000 kids are missing, with many trapped under rubble or buried in unmarked graves.

The United Nations has found Israel is using starvation as a method of war, which constitutes a war crime, and almost half a million Palestinians in the besieged enclave face “catastrophic levels” of hunger.

Israel has rejected claims it has conducted war crimes, accusing the UN inquiry of bias.

Tel Aviv launched a campaign in Gaza after designated terrorist organisation Hamas killed 1200 Israelis and took some 250 more hostage – according to its tallies – in an attack on October 7.

-with AAP