Scott Morrison has dragged out this term of his inept, reactionary mess of a government until the last possible moment. But next month we finally have the chance to boot him and his band of billionaire-loving, climate-change-denying Neanderthals out of office.
It should be a moment of great excitement. An opportunity for a fundamental shift in politics, a turning of the page that ends all the policies that have led to climate catastrophe, out of control inequality and a vile politics of racism and victim-blaming that has so poisoned Australian politics for the last two decades.
But the official opposition—Anthony Albanese’s ALP—is hardly an alternative at all. Labor’s essential promise is to govern with more administrative competence and a bit of progressive rhetoric, but other than that be pretty much the same as the Liberals. In a time that calls out for fundamental change to our whole society, Labor is promising that it can be trusted not to rock the boat.
The boat needs to be rocked, and Victorian Socialists are here to rock it. We are running in this election on a transformative platform that is about taking the money and the power from the rich and the corporations, and using that money and power to build a society that works for all of us, not just the billionaires.
You can read our policies and platform at victoriansocialists.org.au. We think they are a great framework for the kind of change our society needs. But if we are going to get a socialist vision out to hundreds of thousands of people, we need your help.
We need readers of Red Flag to put a campaign sign in their front yard or on their fence. To have the impact we want, we need thousands of homes across the northern and western suburbs of Melbourne to put these signs up.
You don’t have to live in one of our target areas in Melbourne. Aran Mylvaganam’s Senate campaign is state-wide, and we would love to have signs in every regional town in Victoria promoting the idea of putting a victim of Australia’s refugee detention system into the parliament to fight for today’s refugees, and to fight for all of us.
We need donations. We are in the final stages of working out how much social media advertising we can afford, how many campaign signs we can print and how many posters we can have plastered across Melbourne. Every dollar counts. If you have been thinking about donating, today is the day to do it.
We need letterboxing volunteers. Last week, half a million campaign leaflets were delivered to our office at Trades Hall. We need hundreds of people to stick them in letterboxes across the northern and western suburbs of Melbourne in the coming weeks.
If you don’t live in Melbourne, you can still help. We want leaflets for Aran’s Senate campaign distributed wherever they can be. If you live in Bendigo or Shepparton, or anywhere else in regional Victoria, and want to letterbox for a socialist Senate candidate, we will send you the materials you need.
The same goes for election day and pre-poll voting. Victorian Socialists are targeting eleven electorates that are home to more than 1 million voters across the north and west of Melbourne—from the CBD to Wallan in the north and Hoppers Crossing in the west. We need volunteers to staff more than 350 booths on election day, plus all the early voting booths that more than half of all Victorians are predicted to vote at in the two weeks before election day.
But wherever you live, you can help on election day. We can send How To Vote material for Aran’s Senate campaign anywhere in Victoria.
We are realistic. We know we have an uphill battle getting one of our lower house candidates elected in this campaign. Even in the case of Aran Mylvaganam, possibly the most righteous candidate ever to stand for election as a Victorian senator, it would be remarkable if he was elected.
But even if we can’t get anyone over the line, this election is still crucially important, to both Victorian Socialists and to the broader society. This is an election that counts for everything, but where none of the major parties stand for anything.
In any sane society, it would be a turning point. But all the major parties have to offer is more of the same. We may not win this time, but we will plant a flag. A flag for what should happen, for what politics should be about.
Please, support our campaign, in whatever way you can.
Hundreds of refugees rallied outside Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil’s office in Oakleigh, in south-east Melbourne, on Monday, demanding permanent visas for those who have still not gained protection more than a year after the election of the federal Labor government.
The murder of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police last September sparked the largest revolt in Iran since the 1979 revolution. What began as a protest in Gina Mahsa Amini’s home town of Saqqez soon developed into a nationwide revolt against the Iranian state. Over the course of six months, hundreds of thousands of students, workers, the young and the old, took to the streets with the battle cry “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi!” (Women, life, freedom).
Australia’s goods and services tax is the one tax that the rich in this country love.
Large demonstrations have been taking place across Syria in recent weeks. While their scale has yet to reach the peaks seen in 2011, many are hopeful that the government will be brought down. To get a more detailed assessment of the movement and the situation it faces in Syria, Red Flag spoke to long-time Syrian leftist Jamal Chamma. Jamal is based in Melbourne and has been involved for years in organising demonstrations in solidarity with the Syrian revolution.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers claimed last week that the average Australian worker is $3,700 “better off” than a year ago, citing this as proof that Labor in government has delivered on its promise to “get wages moving again”. The West Australian newspaper called it “Labor’s wages growth win”. Other media headlines could almost have tricked you into thinking that workers are getting richer right now.
As the referendum approaches, the key dynamic in the debate is clear. The conservative right views a defeat for the Voice as a chance to strike a devastating blow against support for Indigenous rights among the Australian population. In the process, it is reviving every racist myth in the play book: Indigenous people shouldn’t get “special privileges”; opposing anti-Aboriginal racism is actually “dividing the nation”; and the colonisation of Australia had only a “positive impact”, in the words of Jacinta Price.