‘The biggest socialist election campaign in generations’
Red Flag’s Louise O’Shea spoke to Victorian Socialists Secretary (and former Red Flag editor) Corey Oakley about the socialist campaign in the Victorian state election.
What’s this campaign aiming to do?
We want to get one or more socialists elected to the state parliament of Victoria. We are too small to have a realistic chance in any lower house seats yet, but the Legislative Council—the upper house—elects five members on a proportional basis in each of eight electorates across Victoria. This gives us a real shot in places where we have some support and a base of campaigners. This election we are targeting the electorates of Western Metropolitan and Northern Metropolitan, which encompass the whole of the western and northern suburbs of Melbourne respectively. We are standing candidates in every upper house electorate across the state, but these are the two where we think we have a chance of getting someone up. We are also running candidates in all 22 of the lower house electorates in these areas, to help support the upper house campaigns.
How is it going?
This is the biggest socialist election campaign in generations. In 2018, when we started Victorian Socialists, we focused almost entirely on Northern Metropolitan. This time the campaign is on basically double that scale. We are planning to put leaflets into the letterboxes of every one of the 650,000-odd homes across the north and the west. More than 400 volunteers have already knocked more than 100,000 doors, which is a fair bit more than we managed across the whole campaign in 2018. We will be knocking on tens of thousands more over the next four weeks.
It’s a huge logistical operation, but even though we have been around for only four years, this is our fifth major campaign if you include council elections, so we are getting the hang of how to do it.
Politically, large-scale socialist election campaigning is still very new in Australia. We don’t have anything like the recognition that a political current like the Greens, or even now the so called teals have. But what we do have is a pretty clear argument to make: politics in this country is rigged for the rich, the current politicians are in the pocket of big business, and we need radical change if we are going to address the multitude of crises facing society. That’s the message our army of campaigners are taking to the doorsteps of tens of thousands of people right now.
What can Red Flag readers do to help?
Get involved! No matter what your situation, there’s something you can do. We are aiming to have 2,000 volunteers help hand out how to vote cards on polling day—that’s how many we need to staff the more than 360 polling booths in the north and the west of Melbourne. For the two weeks before that there is early voting at more than 40 booths—we need help there too. And if you can take a sign to put up on your front fence, please do that! We already have signs on more than 1,500 homes across Melbourne, and we want to get many hundreds more up in the next two weeks before early voting starts.
What about money?
We need it! Obviously, we don’t take corporate donations, and we rely on regular people who support what we are doing to chip in. But what also makes things difficult is the new political funding laws. They are meant to stop big corporate donations, and to a certain extent they do that, but they also really entrench the status quo by channelling millions of dollars in public money into the established parties, based on their votes in past elections. This makes it very difficult for new parties to get established.
Our strategy is based on grassroots campaigning, not media advertising, but that still costs a lot of money. Printing hundreds of thousands of leaflets and how to vote cards for our campaigners to hand out, thousands of campaign signs for front yards and election day, costs a lot. We are right at the crunch point now, so any contribution supporters can make will be hugely valuable.
What if you win?
In a little piece in the Herald Sun on minor parties during the federal election, we were quoted as saying, “Give us 100 days in office, and we will give you 100 ways we will fight to take power from the elite and return it to those who created the wealth in the first place”. They pulled that from our website I think, and for once the Herald Sun actually did a good job of representing what we are about.
Having one or more representatives in parliament will be a new and exciting challenge for the socialist movement in this country. I don’t know exactly how it will play out, but what’s for sure is that having people in parliament determined to raise a socialist banner and stand up to the powerful has the potential to shake the hell out of our rotten to the core political system.
You can sign up to help Victorian Socialists on polling day, get a sign installed on your house, find out about upcoming events or donate to the campaign at victoriansocialists.org.au. Alternatively, you can get involved by simply turning up at the socialist campaign offices in Brunswick or Footscray [Shop 6/16 Tripovich St, Brunswick and 553b Barkly St, West Footscray.]
