Expanding the Victorian Socialists project
In light of the positive results for Victorian Socialists (VS) in the federal election and the significant momentum the party has gained, the VS executive on 11 May decided to expand the project across the rest of Australia.
Year after year and decade after decade, the wealth of the richest few has soared while millions struggle daily just to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. The trend of increasing inequality has continued whether Labor or the Coalition has been in power.
Last year, the collective wealth of Australia’s 47 billionaires—people like Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer—increased by $28 billion. That works out to $67,000 per billionaire, per hour. A 2023 report by the Australia Institute, Inequality on Steroids: The Distribution of Economic Growth in Australia, found that in the decade from 2009 to 2019, the top 10 percent of income earners received 93 percent of the benefits of economic growth.
The evidence of this growing inequality is everywhere. We see it in the decades-long housing boom in which those with money to spend have enjoyed massive wealth gains from buying and selling property, while increasing numbers are consigned to a lifetime of housing insecurity and many to homelessness.
We see it the mega-profits of big banks, fossil fuel companies and other big corporations that often pay no or very little tax, at the same time as politicians claim there’s not enough money to properly fund public housing, health care, welfare and other essential public services.
The Labor Party has shown no interest in changing this. Labor politicians have spent much of the time since the election attacking the Greens—the one mainstream party that did offer something in the way of a left alternative to aspects of the status quo.
There’s a class war going on, but Labor is waging it against workers and the poor on behalf of the capitalist class and the rich. And part of the thing that has made them so effective at that is the sense, consciously fostered by politicians, the media, the education system and all the other instruments of ruling-class ideology, that there is no alternative.
The Victorian Socialists was established in 2018 as an attempt to push back against that, and to force open a space for the politics of rage, hope and resistance (as Jerome Small aptly puts it on page 8 of this issue)—the politics of socialism—in an otherwise barren political landscape.
Every election we’ve contested since then has seen us take another step forward. In this federal election we gained a vote share of 15 to 20 percent on individual booths in both inner urban areas like Footscray and Thornbury and more working-class areas in outer suburbs like Epping and Campbellfield.
Where socialists can run a decent campaign, we can gain a hearing and often even win people away from voting for the faux anti-establishment parties of the far right. And there’s no reason, given the shared political context, that this would be any different in other parts of Australia.
Join the Socialists in your state today and help us rebuild socialism as a living, breathing, organising and fighting movement in Australian political life—one that can shake up the rotten status quo of capitalism and finally start to win real change.
If you’ve been following VS’s growth as a small but serious force on the left of politics in Victoria, and would like to be part of replicating that in your state or territory, then sign up as a member today by following the QR code link below.
James Plested is the Victorian Socialists’ communications manager.
