The following is the text, edited for clarity, of a speech by Victorian Socialists secretary Corey Oakley at the party’s state election campaign launch on Saturday, 1 August. The launch, held at the Aborigines Advancement League in the Melbourne suburb of Thornbury, was attended by around 800 party members and supporters from across the state. The party’s state election platform, A socialist manifesto for real change, was released at the launch—with the initial print run of 500 selling out on the night.
In the last year the Australian political map—as people here will know—has been turned upside down by the rise of One Nation in the polls. First, we saw them smashing the Liberal Party vote. And if you believe the polls that have been coming out over the past few months, they're now starting to smash into the Labor Party vote as well.
The election in Victoria in November is the first major statewide test of how far this development is going to go. And the outcome, I think, will define the terrain of politics across this country for years to come.
It’s going to have huge ramifications for the election that’s happening in New South Wales in March next year, and the next federal election [due by May 2028]. All of those will happen in the context of what happens here in Victoria this year.
Now, we know that every step forward for One Nation is a victory for hatred, a victory for racism and for vicious right-wing politics. And we know that every step forward they take pushes the Liberal Party further to the right, further to attack migrants, and pushes the lunatic right wing in the media to demand even more extreme reactionary measures.
But we also know that the Labor Party offer no alternative that can galvanise people against the far right. They are incapable of advancing a vision of how society can be changed for the better.
How could the Labor Party do that? Labor is the party of genocide. It is the party of neoliberalism and privatisation, the party of attacks on the poor and the vulnerable. And the new Labor leadership in Victoria, whose education minister refused to give teachers the deal that they deserve and desperately need, is only going to take Labor further to the right.
So we cannot accept that those are the only options. What is desperately needed, and what we plan to provide, is a radical alternative that stands against the right, but also throws to the curb any idea that Labor’s corporate centrism can deal with the crisis our society is currently in.
We need bold socialist politics that identify and combat the key problem: that our society is ruled by and for the super-rich. And we need politics that stand against the racism and scapegoating that are at the core of the One Nation threat. We need a party that provides a vision of hope and solidarity, and stands for a radical redistribution of wealth and power in this state and in this country.
So that is why we are embarking today on the biggest socialist campaign this country has ever seen.
When we first set up Victorian Socialists in 2018, we stood just in the northern suburbs of Melbourne. For the last election in 2022, we ran across the west as well as the north—22 [lower house] seats altogether. This time we are running in every single seat statewide.
We have already preselected candidates in 72 lower house seats. That includes every seat in metropolitan Melbourne and more from across the state. We already have candidates in seats in Geelong, Bendigo, Ballarat and elsewhere. By the end of this month, we will have finalised candidates in every one of the 88 seats across the state.
Every voter in Victoria will have a socialist option to vote for, in both the lower house and the upper house. That is something that has never happened before, either in this state or anywhere else in Australia.
Now, running a statewide campaign is going to be an enormous undertaking. Since 2022, we’ve put extensive effort into building up our infrastructure and building up local organisation everywhere that we can, and we plan to expand that rapidly in the coming months. There are approximately 6,000 polling booths across Victoria that we will need to staff on election day. To do that, we’ll need at least 4,000 volunteers.
The people in this room are a crucial part of how we’re going to make that happen, which I’ll come back to.
But while we are extremely excited to be running across the state, I want to make it clear that we have no intention of neglecting our heartland in the north and west of Melbourne, where we’ve run in the past.
In 2022, we knocked on 188,000 doors over the course of the 12-14 week campaign. We thought that was pretty good at the time. Now, for this campaign, based on the number of volunteers we have compared to last time and what our expectations are, we’re aiming for half a million doors across Northern Metro and Western Metro combined.
Last time we got around 8 percent of the vote in seats like Thomastown, Brunswick and Broadmeadows, and we averaged 5.6 percent across all the seats we stood in.
I think those decent results really vindicate one of the ideas we had when we started this, which is that it was possible for socialists, if they campaigned well, to win votes in the inner-city areas—where for years the Greens have been able to win progressive votes from Labor—but also to win votes in the core working-class migrant areas in the middle and outer suburbs, where Labor has never been challenged from the left before.
We think we can do that, and we think we can substantially increase our vote in all of those places. If we do that, we will have a serious chance of getting our Northern Metro and Western Metro candidates into parliament.
We will also be throwing serious effort into running massive campaigns in particular seats where we know we have a lot of support. Our best result in 2022 was in Footscray, where we got 9.4 percent. We have a much bigger team of members and volunteers there this time, and I think there is significant room for growth in our vote. So watch out on election night for when the results from Footscray start coming in.
But in Footscray, and across the whole state, the success of that campaign is going to rely overwhelmingly on the hard work of our members and volunteers. We do not have the millions of dollars that Labor, the Liberals and One Nation will use to absolutely saturate our screens with ads promoting all of their vile politics. Over the coming months we’re going to see an absolute deluge of it, as all the parties pour millions and millions of dollars into this campaign.
We will not be doing that. We’ll do what advertising we can, but that is not our strategy for how to grow. What we have instead of that money is you—the people here in this room—and the many more around Victoria who already support our party. We know that when we can get to people, when we can get them to hear our message, it resonates and we can win votes.
So what we need is for people here to be on polling booths, to be doorknocking, to be letterboxing over the next few months. And we need you doing that yourselves, but also drawing friends, family and co-workers into our campaign.
The moment that we are in, in politics in Australia and in Victoria, is dire and dark. Whatever happens in this election, it will be remembered, I think, for a long time to come.
But the power is here, with all of us working together to help make sure that 2026 is not remembered just for the rise of the far right, but that 2026 is the year when a new socialist movement burst onto the political scene and became the challenger—not just to One Nation, but to all of the parties and institutions that keep the wealthy few on the top and the rest on the bottom.
That is the challenge in front of us in this campaign.
