> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://redflag.org.au/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # On the campaign trail with Victorian Socialists - URL: https://redflag.org.au/article/on-the-campaign-trail-with-victorian-socialists/ - Published: 2026-10-04T01:50:24.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-04T01:50:24.000Z - Author: Anneke Demanuele - Tags: Victoria, Elections “We need Jasmine in parliament!”, called out Abdul. He runs Konjo, an Ethiopian cafe in Footscray. He’d just let us use the cafe as a backdrop for a promotional video we were making for the Victorian Socialists’ state election campaign. I’m running as the party’s candidate for the Western Metropolitan upper house region, and the cafe is adorned with a huge picture of Jasmine Duff, our candidate for Footscray. It is one of hundreds of campaign signs on front fences and on stakes in people’s front yards across the electorate. Since the last federal election, it feels like support for Victorian Socialists has grown. Back then, Jasmine was the candidate for the federal seat of Fraser—encompassing Footscray and suburbs to the west and south, including Yarraville, Sunshine and St Albans. At the booth I staffed, and have done for the last few election cycles, she received more than 20 percent of the vote. In Seddon, the booth at the scout hall recorded 18 percent for Jasmine. Near that scout hall, I recently met a woman who had always voted Green. She told me she had volunteered with Sea Shepherd in her youth and cared deeply about the environment, as well as sexism in our society. We talked about how society is getting worse. We talked about the fear of heading into an El Niño at the same time as the government has just fast-tracked the development of the NextDC hyperscale data centre up the road, which stores millions of litres of fuel and can act as a heat pump, warming the surrounding area by several degrees. I ended the conversation with an iced tea to quell the coughing fit I’d gotten from the surrounding plane trees. She was excited to talk to me, and ready to vote socialist for the first time. Conversations like this are happening not just in Footscray but across Melbourne’s west. In Braybrook, I knocked on Helena’s door. Her front yard was an oasis compared to the dry and hot suburban street. I spied orchids, ferns and other luscious plants. When I said that politics was rigged for the rich, Helena replied: “It always has been. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer”. Helena is a Maltese woman in her 70s. She arrived in Australia in the 1970s, and spoke about the trials of being a working-class migrant. She asked how she could help us. Later that week Van, the VS candidate for Laverton, went back and put a campaign sign on her front fence. In Sunshine West, I met a young Bangladeshi student, Julfiqar. He can’t vote because he isn’t a citizen. This is a common interaction and always feels unjust. People live and work here but are denied a basic democratic right. We chatted anyway, because he has a keen interest in politics and wanted to know what we stand for. He’s a student at Swinburne University and has interacted with the socialist club there. We talked about the campaign my comrades were involved in there to stop the university from interfering in who would be the imam for Friday prayers. The university had intervened because the imam spoke about Palestine—a step too far, apparently. Julfiqar was also passionate about the student protests in Bangladesh in 2024 that ended the sixteen-year rule of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. At the end of the conversation, despite not being able to vote for us, Julfiqar wanted to help. He agreed to put up Van’s sign on his front fence. In Altona, part of the Williamstown electorate, I spoke to a woman who works at Victoria University. She expressed horror at the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation. When I explained that our candidate, Oskar Martin, also worked at VU in the Aboriginal Archives with Gary Foley, her face lit up. It isn’t often that you get an opportunity to vote for a young Aboriginal man who wouldn’t be afraid to stand up to Hanson, and he’s also your workmate. We talked about racism, but also the way that people are just struggling to get by. The cost of everything has gone up, as have billionaires’ profits. The only thing that seems to be going backwards is our wages. A sense of struggling just to get by is the common denominator in most of our campaigners’ conversations. Even those who feel a bit more secure or better off are worried about those around them. In Seddon, I spoke to a couple, Jasmine and Tom, who said they had been discussing the Victorian Socialists’ campaign with their friends the night before. We’re impossible to ignore, as we have hundreds of signs up in the area. Among many topics, one we kept coming back to was the narrative of the inner west being pushed by the government, the opposition and the media—that Footscray is a crime hotspot and the solution is more police. Jasmine and Tom were appalled by the mainstream political conversation around this issue and wanted to know what we had to say. I argued that an approach of sending in more cops won’t solve any issues for people facing homelessness in Footscray. More likely it will inflame the situation. What we need instead is more housing. The Victorian Socialists’ policy is to build 150,000 new, high-quality public housing units across the state over the next ten years. We also need an injection of money into social services, like drug counselling and mental health. We don’t think we can solve these issues on an individual basis. Long-term solutions require changing how we organise society and its priorities. We think we need a society that puts people first, before business profits and the profit motive in general. Jasmine and Tom agreed and were happy to have had a chance to talk to me. They said they hoped Jasmine and I would be elected. Like Abdul, they thought we should be in parliament because socialist politics offers answers to our society’s problems. People have been looking to other parties, like Labor, to do something for them. But Labor has discredited itself time and time again. Many people who have been Labor supporters for decades are jumping ship to Victorian Socialists. One wonderful example is Catherine, a teacher, who had been a Labor member since the 1980s. Catherine is a fighter. She has spent the last few months in a poster war with a right-winger in Seddon who keeps ripping down and defacing the posters she puts up advertising VS events. Catherine left Labor after sitting on countless committees, drafting policies that were roundly ignored by those higher up in the party, and seeing Labor’s support for Israel in its ongoing genocide in Gaza. Catherine is the backbone of one of the local Victorian Socialists’ groups in Footscray—dubbed “south”, taking in Yarraville and Seddon. These local groups meet every Tuesday at our campaign office in central Footscray, where we plan doorknocking, letterboxing, yard sign delivery and phone banking. Across the state, hundreds of people are giving their time to our campaign. We want to use this state election to do a few things. We want to raise people’s expectations about what is possible, and what we should expect from the government. Right now, people don’t expect much because every part of life feels difficult. It has come to seem normal that most of the time, working-class people struggle to get by. We want to convince people that we can and should demand more. We want to build opposition to the political “centre” of Labor and the Liberals—representatives of the status quo of neoliberal capitalism that has ravaged working-class communities for decades—as well as to the far right of Pauline Hanson and One Nation. We know the far right can’t be beaten by the “politics as usual” of a Labor government that has betrayed Victorian workers in so many ways. We need an alternative that wants to smash the status quo, fight for working-class people, and directly combat the racism of the far right. That’s what the Victorian Socialists aim to provide. We want, finally, to get socialists elected to parliament. This would be a significant step towards rebuilding the socialist movement in Australian political life. Beyond potentially getting socialists elected to the Victorian parliament, a big vote for the Victorian Socialists would signal that the current slide to the right isn’t inevitable. Lately, it has seemed as if the only side in politics having any successes is the pro-capitalist and racist one. Instead, we can show that there are many people who want an anti-establishment politics that resists the bosses and fights for solidarity and against racism. We want to show that the left can grow too. Already, more than 2,000 people have participated in the Victorian Socialists’ election campaign. That means 2,000 people doorknocking, letterboxing, putting up yard signs, making phone calls, coming along to events and more. And of course, none of this will end with the election on 28 November. Whatever the result, Victorian Socialists members will continue to fight for change, as we have for years through the Palestine solidarity movement, rank-and-file organising in our unions, and many other areas of work. For us, campaigning in elections is just one part of the effort to win the kind of system change we need.