Labor’s student clubs and Palestine activism

For the Australian Labor Party, university campuses are a vital source of recruits and a training ground for future politicians and leaders. Through their control of the vast majority of the country’s student unions, student Labor members learn to manage budgets and bureaucracies, network and harvest votes, and to face down pressure from rival groups, mostly on their left—all vital skills for the Albaneses and Wongs of tomorrow. But they also have to prove themselves effective advocates, which means at times supporting or engaging in activism against governments, in support of education demands as well as broader social justice.

So two years of campus activism against their party’s support for the genocide in Gaza have put them in an awkward spot. Labor students have had to balance the competing pressures of pro-Palestine sentiments on campus, their own personal views and loyalty to the staunchly pro-Israel line of their party and of university administrations.

Predictably, and in line with the adult party’s stance, Labor-dominated student unions on many campuses have expressed outward hostility toward Palestine campaigning and used their resources to obstruct it. Labor students who run the University of Melbourne Student Union, fearful of spoiling relationships with the university hierarchy and drawing the ire of right-wingers, have rescinded union support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

Last year, the union responded to a request signed by 1,200 students for a special general meeting (SGM) to reinstate a pro-BDS position by hiring lawyers from Labor-aligned law firm Slater and Gordon to find a legal basis to prevent the meeting happening. They then used similar tactics to defeat a campaign by office-bearers to donate $19,000—the remainder of their 2024 budget—to a Palestinian activist group in the West Bank.

The Labor right-dominated Deakin University Student Association has used the precedent created by the disgraceful backdown at Melbourne University to refuse to hear pro-Palestine motions, arguing explicitly that the union should not take “political” stances.

At Swinburne University, Labor students sabotaged last year’s SGM for Palestine, requested by 400 students, by scheduling it at the remote Wantirna campus. At Monash, Labor-left students reluctantly oversaw a requested SGM, but locked the doors before the meeting had reached quorum, rendering the meeting unable to change union policy. So far, so predictable.

At some other places, however, the possibility of cynically harvesting pro-Palestine votes has softened their hearts to the plight of Gazans. At La Trobe University, Labor students registered the ticket “Social Justice—Free Palestine” in the student union elections to confuse students and compete with the left-wing ticket organised by Socialist Alternative and Students for Palestine members. And at Swinburne, the same Labor students who sabotaged the SGM called through attendees claiming to be from Students for Palestine to get votes for their group in elections. While not ideal, this sort of deviation from official pro-Israel talking points can be tolerated by Sussex Street so long as there are some votes in it and no-one important notices.

But then there are the cases where Labor students have outright supported Palestine activism, a position at odds, to say the least, with their party’s policy. At RMIT, the Labor right-controlled union endorsed the campus’s Gaza encampment, even bringing fresh fruit to famished activists. At University of Wollongong, Labor members promoted and attended the SGM organised by Students for Palestine. Through the National Union of Students, leaders of the Labor right have used union resources to promote the People’s Inquiry into Campus Free Speech on Palestine—a counter to Labor’s witch-hunt antisemitism inquiry—and endorsed a national day of protest against the government’s support for Israel.

Even at Melbourne University, where the Labor students have more recently been hostile, their past conduct suggests this may be as much about toeing the line as conviction. In 2022, they supported the very BDS motion that they later rescinded under pressure. During the 2024 encampment, they gave limited behind-the-scenes support, including by booking lawn space for a camp, but avoided any public association with the event. This contradiction raises a question—if support for Israel is the great moral cause that Labor leaders claim it is, why do they tolerate such blatant disloyalty to party policy in their own ranks?

For two years, Labor leaders have maintained the spurious line that Palestine campus activism is part of a detestable upsurge in antisemitic hate. Labor’s federal Education Minister Jason Clare labelled the University of Melbourne’s Gaza solidarity encampment “repugnant”, while Defence Minister Richard Marles asserted last May: “The levels of antisemitism that we have seen in the past few months are more than any that I’ve seen during my lifetime”. Labor supported a motion moved in the Senate by the Liberal opposition that condemned the traditional slogan of Palestinian resistance “from the river to the sea”, describing it as “used by those who seek to intimidate Jewish Australians via acts of antisemitism”. Labor have staked credibility on a bogus campus Senate inquiry led by Jillian Segal, a bigoted pro-genocide activist, that cynically and dishonestly conflated support for Palestine with threats against Jewish students. And anyone who dares speak up for the Palestinians, from former Labor Senator Fatima Payman to Greens Senator Mehreen Farouqi, has had the book thrown at them.

And yet Labor turn a blind eye to their own future leaders when they associate themselves with this same campaign and sentiments on campuses. If Labor leaders really believe all this, you would expect them to extend their condemnations to party members who have associated themselves with these campaigns. The fact that they haven’t makes it hard not to draw the conclusion that there is a lot of cynicism at work here, and a willingness to say whatever is required in service of Australia’s imperial interests and alliances.

It also reflects a lack of confidence in imposing their political line on their own student groups. Labor’s leaders have to give their student clubs a longer leash with the campaigning they tolerate because the clubs have to recruit from campuses that are populated by young people, the vast majority of whom are well to the party’s left, and where contempt for the party and its conduct in government is at record highs. So there’s an appreciation that pragmatic adaption to the prevailing pro-Palestine sentiment has to happen to keep the machine being supplied with raw material.

Notably, it has been students from Labor’s right faction (Unity) in particular that have provided the most support to these campaigns. While the Labor left faction has been in long decline, Unity is overwhelmingly dominant and has the largest base amongst students. It recruits strongly among international students, many of who are from backgrounds where support for Palestine is widespread. Adapting to this sentiment is expedient, and whatever is expedient is acceptable, whatever the bombast about the moral righteousness of Israel.

And there is an understanding that all this has very clear limits. Student politicians who want to climb the ranks accept that “serious politics” is ultimately about trading principles away for influence and power. Penny Wong explained how this “serious politics” works when Payman crossed the floor to vote for a pro-Palestine Greens bill in 2024: “Even when we disagree, we have those arguments internally, as you saw over many years in the marriage equality debate”, Wong told ABC Radio’s AM program. “That’s what I did, and I think that’s the right way to go about it.”

Wong, who married her same-sex partner in 2024, adhered to Labor policy by voting against the Greens’ attempt to legalise same-sex marriage in 2008, and spent years publicly undermining the campaign for marriage equality. Her reward was the foreign ministry.

Payman’s case shows what happens when you don't exhibit this highly nuanced and sophisticated conception of politics that involves shutting up about things that are important with the hope of gaining power and influence at some point in the future, and instead say what you think. Payman was immediately shunned and suspended from the Labor caucus, while anonymous Labor sources backgrounded the press that Payman might be ineligible to sit in parliament due to her Afghan background. Payman was the first to cross the floor and vote against party since 2005.

This is how Labor holds the line. For budding Labor careerists, the stick of discipline and ostracisation goes along with the carrot of career advancement. Some Labor students, as at University of Melbourne and Deakin, prove their mettle by openly defending Labor’s line against the movement, and copping the ensuing student outrage. Some others pretend to care about an issue they have no real interest in to harvest votes in elections. Others who, because of prior political conviction or family background, personally support greater rights for Palestinians, learn eventually to bite their tongues to get ahead.

For the party to function, it counts on the people that matter becoming too cynical to ever want to really change anything.