The Victorian state election will take place in just over two months, on Saturday 28 November. The Victorian Socialists’ campaign is now in full swing, with local campaign activity taking place daily across Melbourne and regional Victoria.
The scale of the campaign—with VS candidates set to run in all 88 lower house seats and all eight upper house regions across Victoria—is beyond anything the socialist left in Australia has attempted for generations (if ever). Even just a few years ago, a statewide campaign like this would have been unthinkable. That it’s happening at all is something of a breakthrough.
Between 1 June and 19 September, VS volunteers knocked on more than 80,000 doors, already well on track to reach the 2022 campaign total of around 190,000. The party received around 2,000 requests for campaign signs to be put on front fences and in yards, eclipsing the 2022 total of 1,000, with hundreds of orders a week still coming in. More than 2,400 people donated to the campaign, and almost 1,800 registered for a party event.
New branches are springing up everywhere. Wherever they do, we’re finding people who want to get involved. VS events in places like Pakenham, a suburb on the far south-eastern fringe of Melbourne—more than 50 kilometres from the CBD—are attracting many new faces. And we now have active branches in regional centres including Geelong, Warrnambool, Ballarat and Bendigo, and the beginnings of branches in Shepparton, Wodonga and Warragul.
We’re accustomed to being almost completely overlooked by the mainstream media, but the sheer size of our campaign this time means we’re increasingly difficult to ignore. ABC News reported on the VS campaign launch on 1 August, and Channel 9 reported on our “all-in” Footscray doorknock on Sunday 16 August, which was attended by more than 350 volunteers. VS candidate for the Northern Metro upper house region Omar Hassan has become something of a regular fixture on talkback radio 3AW’s morning show with Tom Elliot—most recently on the topic “what is socialism?”
VS candidates in the regions are attracting particular attention. Hera Sheppard, in the seat of South-West Coast (comprising Warrnambool, Port Fairy, Portland and surrounds), has been featured in several articles in the Warrnambool Standard, including the front cover. An article at ABC News and an appearance on ABC Radio followed—the latter drawing the ire of Australia’s richest billionaire Gina Rinehart, who objected to Hera’s claim that she was pushing for Australians to work for $2 a day (in the 2012 quote Hera referenced, Rinehart worried about Australia’s competitiveness when “Africans want to work, and its workers are willing to work for less than $2 per day”). It certainly helps that, at 18, Hera is one of the youngest candidates ever to run for parliament in Australia, but regional media in general have shown a keen interest in VS candidates everywhere.
Signs also suggest the campaign is resonating. In Footscray, where VS volunteers have already knocked on around 17,000 doors, and the campaign has put up more than 200 yard signs, a steady trickle of people have turned up to volunteer at the campaign office after receiving VS material.
There’s no escaping the fact that politics in Victoria has shifted decisively to the right, and it’s likely either a Liberal or a Liberal-One Nation Coalition government will be elected on 28 November. But there’s no shortage of people who are horrified by the rise of One Nation and who are relieved to find, when visited by a VS volunteer, that there’s a party offering a genuinely anti-establishment alternative on the left.
Hassan tells the story of Mary, an 82-year-old he met while doorknocking in the outer northern suburb of Thomastown. A long-time Labor voter, Mary told Omar that she wouldn’t vote for the ALP this time because “they’ve completely lost their way”. He later recounted:
“Unsure where things might go, I raised Pauline Hanson and her racist attempt to blame migrants for all our problems. She shook her head. ‘It’s very sad, very wrong’, she said, before explaining that she grew up in Reefton, where her father worked building the Upper Yarra Dam alongside thousands of migrants from around the world. She described playing with all the Italian and Yugoslav kids, going to each other’s houses and having great fun. ‘It made life richer, having all the different cultures, growing up together’.
“I raised Richard Flanagan’s classic book, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, which centres on the construction of hydroelectric schemes in Tasmania. She smiled. ‘I love that book’, she said. ‘I experienced the same thing. Different place but same story. “We chatted some more, and she insisted that we had her vote. I left feeling somehow renewed, and I suspect she felt the same. The right might be on the march, but there are still so many good people like Mary out there.”
A big vote for Victorian Socialists will send a message to the rest of Australia that a socialist vision of hope, solidarity and collective struggle for a better world can win widespread support (and, we hope, result in socialists being elected), even in a period when the hatred, division and anti-worker politics of the right is ascendant. To do that, though, the campaign will need to keep building from here.
When pre-polling opens on 18 November, millions of Victorians will head to more than 100 early voting centres set up across the state. On election day, millions more will attend the almost 1,800 polling booths. Between now and then, a big part of local VS campaign work will be training a layer of active volunteers to hand out how-to-vote cards and talk to voters at these booths. It’s a massive task, but one that, given what we’ve achieved so far, we’re confident we’re up to.
James Plested is the Victorian Socialists Communications Director.
