“I’m a rebel teacher running against Ben Carroll in Niddrie because I think workers should run the world. I think teachers know how to run schools, and we should be empowered to run the education system ... On the issue of education, the ALP is not just out of touch: they’re on the other side of the picket line, with the Liberals and One Nation.”
This is how Brendan Laws announced the Victorian “rebel educator” campaign—a group of teachers and education support staff targeting sitting Labor MPs, including Premier and former Minister for Education Ben Carroll.
The eight candidates, all members of Victorian Socialists and the Socialists in Schools union group, have played a role in leading the rank-and-file rebellion in the Australian Education Union (AEU) Victorian Branch that has organised two massive strike days, stared down the state government and fought tooth and nail against the conservative leadership of their own union. The teachers’ fight is the most significant industrial dispute in Victoria in years, with teachers holding the line for a decent contract in the context of falling real wages and deteriorating working conditions. For many on the left, the obstinacy of Victorian Labor in the face of teachers’ demands for decent pay and tolerable working conditions embodies everything wrong with a government which once boasted of running “the most progressive state in the nation”.
Labor has governed Victoria practically uninterrupted for more than two decades, leaning heavily on the support of union members to win successive elections. AEU members were a central part of the mobilisation of 2,200 unionists who doorknocked and phone-banked to hand Daniel Andrews a surprise victory in 2014.
Twelve years on, Victoria has the lowest-funded public schools in the country. The government has stolen $16 billion from the system through underfunding in the last seven years alone. Surging workloads, wage suppression and increasing class sizes have created a situation in which less than a third of teachers plan to stay in the sector long-term.
Leading teacher unionist and Victorian Socialists candidate for Niddrie Brendan Laws says:
“The school I’m working at right now is relatively well resourced, but the sheer amount of work and stress is overwhelming. You’re writing and rewriting assessments, you’re marking, trying to give individual feedback. There’s this pressure, because the school is competing with over-funded private schools ... I was at a very low-income school in Werribee; you could see all the traps that students get pulled into, not having the resources to read and learn, at the same time as [Labor] were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a nearby youth prison. You would just see the kids that were getting pulled out of school into that constantly. Eight teachers quit from my department during one school year so there weren’t enough staff and everybody else had to pull in just to fill in the gaps.”
The AEU leadership’s close-knit relationship with the Labor government means many educators feel the officials have worked against members’ interests. Workers went backwards after their 2022 contract negotiation, when the AEU leadership rushed through a sell-out deal cutting real wages by 11 percent. Forty percent of AEU members voted against the offer, at the time a historically unprecedented rejection of a leadership decision in the union. While many left the union in disgust, others waited, and pledged that next time around it would be different
Brendan was one of around a dozen Victorian Socialists members who decided to launch Socialists in Schools in mid-2025. “The biggest indicator that there was an audience for it was how many AEU members were already part of Victorian Socialists”, he says. “We took a survey and found we had almost 100 teacher members, so it just showed that there was already a base to work with.”
The campaign started with the modest aim of giving socialist teachers a chance to get together and chat:
“The first part was just meeting up and discussing socialist politics with the people in our campaign. It was the political arguments around militarism, the genocide in Palestine, the Labor government’s austerity and privatisation. Then when we knew that our last agreement was going to expire and the opportunity to have industrial action was going to be there, we really shifted a lot of our propaganda to educate people about striking. It had been 13 years since a strike had happened.”
The 2022 campaign for a new agreement had ended in farce and outrage. This time, it was impossible for the AEU leadership to get away with signing a deal without serious industrial action. A strike called for 24 March was a game changer. That strike closed or disrupted an estimated 500 schools, while 35,000 teachers filled the CBD, the biggest mobilisation in the union’s history.
Then the rug was pulled. After a pay offer was leaked by the government to the press, the AEU leadership hastily cancelled further industrial action and moved toward endorsing an in-principle agreement which met none of their key demands. Instead of the claim for a 35 percent pay increase over three years, they were offered 28 percent over four, with no improvements to conditions or caps on class sizes.
Socialists in Schools sprang into action, arguing far and wide for a “no” vote using every tactic under the sun, from “explainers” online that poked holes in the deal and argued for more strike action online, to calling hundreds of school staff who left their details with the “vote no” network.
After rowdy regional and sub-branch meetings got out of control (with one eastern suburbs gathering described by an official as “feral”), union leaders preferred highly controlled Zoom briefings, where they could promote the virtues of the deal unchallenged. As Socialists in Schools previously reported:
“All participants’ cameras are forcibly turned off ... Our microphones are muted. The chat function is disabled. We are permitted to ask questions, but have to direct them to moderators who no-one can see and who do not answer.”
The spirit of combativity that was built in Socialists in Schools put them in a position to blow past these obstacles. “A big part of how we won the vote was by being in a fighting position”, says Brendan, “poking fun at the lies coming out of the government, poking fun at the low expectations that officials were laying out, and then going to any public forum that we could and using those forums as spaces to wage arguments”. The result: an astonishing 58 percent of school staff voted the agreement down. “The ‘vote no’ success didn’t just come out of polite lobbying, but it came out of a clear, sharp, defiant opposition.”
The vote put teachers back on the streets, and a second strike led to a slightly improved offer: mandatory meeting times for teachers were halved, and base salary for education support staff was increased. This deal was put to members in an online vote, and of 50,677 members voting, 51 percent rejected the offer.
“It was the first time in the history of these statewide agreements, that started in the mid-80s, that when union officials wanted an agreement to go through, rank and file members voted against it—and they did that twice.” Brendan feels the results have sent an important message to workers beyond the AEU that “when you can’t count on the government, and you can’t even count on your union leaders, you and your workmates can still band together and win something”.
In 2026, official politics has shifted sharply to the right. The rise of One Nation has combined with a hysterical campaign from big business and the press to bring down the Allan Labor government. The establishment opposition to Labor is vile. Instead of taking the government to task for privatisation, mass incarceration and falling living standards, they are most outraged that the government would spend money on infrastructure that benefits workers, and that some workers still receive union rates on construction sites.
Right-wing outlets like the Age that were willing to give teachers a hearing so long as it embarrassed Labor are now showing their true colours. Age political editor Chip Le Grand is apoplectic at teachers rejecting the latest offer—accusing them of “industrial Hansonism” and suggesting that the shadowy hidden forces of the radical left lie behind the drive to keep on fighting.
Brendan finds this pretty funny. “We put the word ‘socialist’ on everything that we put out. It’s very clearly on the tin. But people listen because we make sense and we speak honestly to the workers in our industry”.
Labor’s response is to appease the right and big business. Nothing shows this more than their decision to make Ben Carroll, the former education minister who has spent the year low-balling Victorian teachers, the new premier. Carroll’s message to business: the era of supposedly “progressive” Labor government is over. Spending will be cut and workers’ rights rolled back. His message to workers: I’m the only one who can stop Hanson entering government, so you’d better put up with it.
In this right-wing climate, the rebel teachers are hoping they can take the energy and inspiration of their struggle into the state election, as Brendan explains:
“The forces of the far right in a decaying capitalism here and around the world are a pretty scary juggernaut, and a Labor government bent on tacking to the right by boosting up police, attacking construction workers and talking about austerity will just boost them further. We want to put forward a political alternative for workers. Part of it is seeing that it’s not just an industrial question, demanding what we deserve is a political question.”
The rebel teachers are calling for the return of $16 billion in stolen education funding, the end of public funding for private schools, the abolition of NAPLAN and the immediate implementation of the AEU’s 2026 log of claims.
But a socialist approach isn’t just about putting forward radical solutions to the problems of capitalism. It’s about showing you can change the world by fighting. Socialists in parliament will be surrounded on all sides by enemies: Labor, One Nation, Liberals. To really make an impact, we need people who can organise mass resistance, who don’t take “no” for an answer and who know how to take on both our enemies on the right and the moderates who sell us short because they respect the rules of the game. “We don't accept the parameters that these people put on us”, says Craigieburn teacher and Kalkallo Victorian Socialists candidate Courtney Millet. “We’re the people who are constantly seeking to push for more because we believe that working class people deserve more.”
Many of the rebel teacher candidates came into the Socialists in Schools and the teachers’ strikes with a history of political organising. Courtney was involved in helping coordinate a 100-day encampment led by refugees denied permanent settlement by Labor. Cranbourne candidate Reem Yunis is a teacher of 26 years, a Palestinian-Australian and lifelong fighter against Israeli occupation. Sunbury candidate Adam Bremner is leading the fight in his community against the construction of a waste incinerator. Northern Metropolitan candidate Omar Hassan has fronted rallies against Israel and the far right.
“I think socialists provide that guiding light and a bit of a spark”, says Courtney. “I was teaching during the agreement in 2022. The anger and the frustration was there, but there wasn’t a force to lead it somewhere, to tell people that you don’t have to settle. That’s what has been different this time. That’s what we did in the teachers’ union and that’s what we want to do in the state election.”
