The November Victorian election is shaping up as a decisive battle, the outcome of which will have ramifications well beyond the state. The surge of support for One Nation has created the real possibility that Victoria will be governed by a far-right coalition come December. The only real alternative—a fourth term for the current right-wing Labor government—is about as enticing as a reheated Big Mac.
In this dangerous situation, Victorian Socialists are planning the most serious election campaign attempted by a left party in decades. The party aims to disrupt the false binary that tells people there is no alternative but to choose between the status quo and the far right. Instead, Victorian Socialists want to offer working-class people across the state the chance to vote for a party that doesn’t advocate more of the same, and that equally doesn’t blame migrants or climate science for society’s problems. Victorian Socialists are offering a vision of society in which the interests of working-class people—the great majority—are prioritised over corporate greed and the market.
One Nation’s performance in the election will be decisive to the outcome and to the party’s wider momentum. Support for Hanson nationally has surged from just 6.5 percent in the last federal election to over 30 percent today—a startling development in a country where the two major parties have managed to dominate the electoral sphere even while many of their counterparts internationally have collapsed.
There has always been an organised far right in Australia, but, until recently, most of their would-be constituents have been prepared to stick with the Liberal and National parties. Those days are over. This constituency is radicalising, whipped into a frenzy by the Murdoch press and algorithms designed by social media executives. Hanson’s rise—funded and sponsored by a number of billionaire backers—has emboldened far-right freaks and intensified every pre-existing reactionary sentiment: Islam is a cancer; abortion is murder; left-wing protesters should be banned; climate change is rubbish; workers are overpaid, lazy and should be easier to sack.
These sorts of fascistic positions are now being sanitised if not openly promoted by Australia’s media establishment. Case in point: Hanson’s speech at the National Press Club, a prestigious forum that the media establishment like to think of as intellectually rigorous. There, she repeated all her far right talking points in a stumbling, blundering rant, and was praised to the rooftops for it.
“Hanson’s formidable Press Club performance proved her enemies wrong”, declared the Sydney Morning Herald. News.com.au described the tirade as evidence of “a politician ready to rule”. “Hanson is sharp in every sense, from her political antenna to her rhetoric”, gushed the associate editor of the Australian. Evidently, the media establishment, and the capitalist class it takes its lead from, are warming up to the prospect of a fascist government.
The establishment parties are not offering any real resistance either. Opposition leader Angus Taylor just puts Hanson’s speeches through Chat GPT with a filter for private school pomposity. Victorian Liberal leader Jess Wilson presents a more modern image in Victoria, but will likely preference and govern with Hanson if necessary.
Labor is rhetorically more oppositional but utterly cynical, championing multiculturalism while taking every opportunity to punch down, most recently by launching an Islamophobic trial by media of Muslim women and children fleeing prison camps in Syria. Meanwhile, Labor oversees a society in which banks, mining companies and bosses are getting rich at workers’ expense. Even when they do something vaguely progressive, like some of the measures in the budget, they can’t defend them when attacked from the right, instead abandoning some in the hope they will be left alone. This weak, hypocritical stance is exactly what creates the conditions that help the far right grow. The Greens try to challenge Hanson, but the party’s technocratic, pro-capitalist politics means it cannot lead the fight that’s needed.
Socialists have a totally different strategy to fight the far right. Unlike every other political party, which support and want to govern the same system One Nation does, we want to challenge capitalism and the ideology that underlies it. The mainstream parties can’t consistently oppose One Nation, because they too rely on bigotry and backwardness to deflect attention from the inequality, brutality and destructiveness of capitalism. and none of them are committed to building a fighting working-class movement that could win serious gain for workers, let alone smash the system. Such a movement, in their eyes, represents an intolerable threat to the status quo and the mainstream politicians’ privileged position within it.
The Victorian state election represents an important opportunity to mobilise and build the sort of socialist forces needed to challenge both the far right and Labor’s status quo. To resist the rise of Hansonism in our neighbourhoods and fight for a working-class politics based on solidarity and class struggle, Victorian Socialists will be organising thousands of volunteers to knock on hundreds of thousands of doors, with the goal of convincing working-class people that voting socialist is the best response to the shitshow that is Australian politics today.
We’re not the only ones preparing for this kind of mass campaign. Barnaby Joyce recently spoke at an anti-abortion rally in Sydney, explaining that the thing he needed most to defeat abortion rights was to build an army of people prepared to hand out how-to-vote cards. One Nation now has between 60,000 and 70,000 members nationwide, with more joining every week. They are setting themselves for an historic push to take power in Australia’s traditionally most left-wing state.
That some on the left continue to be squeamish about openly recruiting to socialism and organising people is a huge problem when the far right is rapidly signing up tens of thousands to its cause. We need to be thinking and acting on the same scale—it will take a socialist party of tens of thousands of working-class people to defeat this far right and the establishment that bred them. A party that is not a glorified email list, but a network of educators, agitators and organisers with serious roots in society.
This election campaign is a moment to take a big step towards building that kind of organisation. It is a chance to convince more workers than ever before to vote socialist and to join a movement to abolish capitalism and all the horrors it breeds. There is a real possibility that this movement could finally get a socialist elected to parliament, a voice for our class and for every movement against injustice.
It’s clear now that Hanson and her far right minions will win a significant and unprecedented share of the vote. While it would be a disaster if they were able to form some sort of coalition government, the re-election of Labor will only further fuel the far right’s growth. To change the equation in the long run, a stronger socialist movement is needed.
This means the key question coming out of this election will be not who wins, but how many people the socialist movement can win to our side in the face of Hanson’s fascistic tsunami. A strong result would offer a counter-narrative about the direction of society, indicating that there is a working-class left that wants transformative change. And a substantial growth and spread of the Socialist Party would put the left in a better position to fight, regardless of the outcome in November.
