The Victorian election will be a significant moment in Australian politics.
The ALP, which has ruled the state for most of the last three decades, looks set to take a significant hit to its primary vote. A DemosAU poll has Labor’s primary vote at 18 percent, just one point ahead of the Greens. Resolve’s reporting had them at 22 percent, which is nevertheless a record low and well down on the 37 percent primary vote they received in the 2022 state election.
Meanwhile, far-right One Nation has entered the political field as a serious challenger to the major parties, if polling is accurate. The once-pariah party is now firmly part of the mainstream, as are its fascist-adjacent politics. And the Liberals, who last election were declared too “weak and divided” and facing too serious an “identity crisis” to govern by the Age, now enjoy the backing of almost all the corporate media.
The much more dispersed nature of the vote makes the outcome difficult to predict.
Labor’s leaders have essentially given up on winning; every MP is now in a desperate fight to save their own seat and career. The union movement has largely abandoned the field, with a number belatedly refusing to campaign for Labor.
Even the premier is looking likely to lose his seat. Good riddance.
Carroll’s strategy of shifting the party hard to the right by attacking the CFMEU and the spectre of youth crime is backfiring, alienating what little support the ALP had left. His short time in office will be quickly forgotten, but his legacy—of demoralising working-class Labor voters and legitimising the various attacks the incoming Liberal government has planned—will remain.
In his place will step Jess Wilson as the head of a resurgent Liberal Party. Her plan is there for all to see. Savage cuts to the public service. A ban on protests without police permission. Censorship of the pro-Palestine movement. Ripping up the Treaty.
Wilson has promised to recall parliament before Christmas, not to address housing affordability or the crisis in our hospitals, but to introduce harsher bail laws and put more kids in jail. All of this she’s hoping to do in a Trump-style 100-day blitz, during which she will serve as both premier and treasurer.
Wilson has been sold to the public as a moderate, a relatable millennial and a fresh face. The capitalist press, including the Age and the Guardian, have done their bit to popularise this image.
Her history suggests something quite different. She has been a Liberal apparatchik since her university days at Monash, after which she worked at disgraced consultancy firm KPMG, before jumping ship to be a policy executive at the Business Council of Australia.
Her Institute of Public Affairs-aligned husband stood down as a Liberal candidate in 2014 after it was revealed he referred to gay men as “faggots”. They remain happily married.
The truth is that Wilson is a trained class warrior for the billionaires and the bosses. Aside from the culture wars and the UFC fight nights, the key goal of her campaign is to balance the state’s budget and cut taxes on the corporate elite.
The blatant contradiction between these two goals can only be resolved through swingeing cuts to health care, education and other vital public services, mass sackings and the privatisation of state assets. She has already flagged her desire to do both, though the financial press are demanding that she cut much harder and deeper.
In addition to the prospect of a slash-and-burn, Kennett-style Liberal government, workers will face a One Nation party that is set to win an unprecedented vote. These far-right nutters will exercise a constant rightward pressure on the Liberals, particularly when the latter seek to pass legislation through the upper house, where One Nation may well hold the balance of power. They will also use their platform to attack the rights of workers and women while demonising migrants and other oppressed groups.
But while official politics is shifting sharply to the right, there are plenty of people looking for an alternative. Despite the tidal wave of establishment hostility directed at the Greens because of the party’s strong stance on Gaza, they look set for a meaningful increase in their primary vote.
More importantly for the radical left, the Victorian Socialists campaign has been easily the biggest yet. More than 2,000 people have participated in public meetings, door knocks, phone banks and rallies across the state.
Fielding a candidate in every seat has been an immense achievement, radically expanding the presence of socialist politics. All of this means that Victorian Socialists have a very real chance of electing a socialist to parliament for the first time in many decades. Both Anneke Demanuele, running in the Western Metropolitan district, and Omar Hassan, running in the Northern Metropolitan district, are serious contenders to be elected to the upper house.
But while it would be great to get a socialist into parliament, one of the most important aspects of the campaign is how it has helped cohere more socialists and built the sorts of organisation we will need for the battles that are to come.
Coming out of this election campaign, Victorian Socialists will have 30 functioning branches, from the outer suburbs of Melbourne to regional cities like Geelong, Ballarat, Shepparton and Bendigo. These growing networks of working-class militants, many still very new to organising, mean we will not have to start from scratch when the next government starts attacking schools, hospitals and other services in the name of reducing the debt.
Branches of Victorian Socialists can and should become a focal point for not only organising action but also political discussion and education. They provide a space where people can learn and compare notes about organising in their workplaces, universities or schools. They can become hubs which can attract disaffected Labor and Greens members keen to see a more radical approach to politics, as well as workers and young people engaging with the socialist left for the first time.
Throughout history, it has been socialists who have been central to building the infrastructure of working-class resistance to the system—from trade unions to explosive student and political struggles. The co-option and absorption of many of the twentieth century radicals into a rightward-moving ALP has left workers defenceless in the face of neoliberal attacks from Labor and Liberal alike.
And while it will still be some time and take some serious effort before we can lead workers in epic battles like the 1986 Victorian nurses’ strike, or organise unions as political as the NSW Builders Labourers Federation in the 1970s—let alone abolish capitalism—building a serious socialist organisation takes us an important step closer to this goal. Every person who joins can make an important contribution, and together we can better carry forward the radical traditions that have won so much of what we value today.
The task of building a mass socialist party is more pressing than ever. There is no compromise possible with a ruling class that allows climate breakdown and social decay, unleashes fascist mobs and perpetual wars, backs trillionaires and their data centres, and forces us into an endless grind to pay the bills.
Only socialism offers answers radical enough to meet the scale of these crises, to smash the out of touch elites who are driving so many to despair about the future. Only socialism offers the vision of a better world democratically run by the mass of working-class people, where the immense resources of society are used to improve the lives of the mass of humanity.
All across Europe we have seen important stirrings of revolt. In France, for week after week, high school student have sustained school blockades and occupations in defiance of brutal police repression and have drawn in behind them university students, their teachers and other workers.
The heroism and determination of these young working-class students has inspired waves of protests and strikes across the continent by workers and students fed up with the ongoing attacks on their living standards, the growing far-right threat and any hope of a decent future in twenty-first century capitalism. Now in Spain, 5 million workers have stopped work and taken to the streets in a massive general strike.
The urgent task now is to build a serious socialist fighting force in every country that can lead these inspiring struggles to victory. Here in Australia, the Victorian Socialists election campaign is one small but important step in that direction. We need everyone who aspires to see a better world of genuine human freedom to make a stand and join us.
