You may have seen one of the hundreds of videos on social media (or more recently also <a href="https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=DTWEB_WRE170_a_GGL&amp;dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailytelegraph.com.au%2Fnews%2Fnational%2Fprotesters-rally-troops-ahead-of-march-for-australia-rallies-on-august-31-heres-what-you-need-to-know%2Fnews-story%2F0c64229d1fca403dfcdc96a625feb637&amp;memtype=anonymous&amp;mode=premium&amp;v21=GROUPA-Segment-2-NOSCORE">stories in the Murdoch press</a>) promoting the “March for Australia” protests against <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DN1vRmA3p8l/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=dXF5eGM5ZHpjeTdn">“mass migration”</a> that are set to take place in cities around the country this Sunday 31 August. 
The talking points in these videos and other promotional materials for the rallies track closely with those on the event <a href="https://marchforaustralia.org/">website</a>. There, next to the claim that “80 percent of Australians want immigration reduced”, is the question, posed under the heading of “weakened identity”: “who are we as a nation, when one in three people were born overseas?” 
This, to anyone familiar with theories and narratives popular on the far right, could be taken as a pretty unsubtle reference to the “<a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1600910X.2025.2499827#abstract">great replacement theory</a>”, according to which mass migration is a conspiracy being carried out by Western elites to replace the white population with immigrants from the global south. 
In its contemporary iteration, this theory arose from the work of French far-right novelist and conspiracy theorist Renaud Camus, but its origins trace back to late 19th century European antisemitism and it has been passed down to contemporary far-right and neo-Nazi movements via the writings of Adolf Hitler and other 20th century fascists. When neo-Nazis held a mass march in the US city of Charlottesville in 2017, for instance, one of their favoured chants was <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/charlottesville-neo-nazis-vice-news-hbo">“Jews will not replace us!”</a>
The fact that an association with these kinds of theories is barely concealed beneath the veneer of respectability that March for Australia organisers have fostered is cause enough for concern. Perhaps though it’s all a coincidence? The more mainstream forces involved in the rallies certainly would like us to believe so. To get to the bottom of it, let’s dive a little deeper.
On 3 August this year, a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DM4gT4HBSHy/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link">video</a> by Sam Bamford calling for a rally against mass migration was posted to TikTok and Instagram. The post quickly gained traction, reaching hundreds of thousands of views in a few days. According to a subsequent public <a href="https://x.com/i/spaces/1djxXVWlqNNGZ/peek">X Spaces stream</a> with one of the nationwide organisers of the rally who goes by the name of “Bec Freedom”, the video’s virality prompted certain unnamed individuals to reach out to Sam and to put him in touch with her. Since then, Sam has relinquished any involvement in the rallies, and responsibility for organising them has passed to people described in the stream as “trusted individuals” within the far-right movement.
There have been several developments that point to the involvement of neo-Nazis from the National Socialist Network (NSN). The “March for Australia” website was created on 8 August, the day before the NSN’s national conference, which took place in the Victorian town of Bacchus Marsh on the weekend of 9-10 August. Notably, the website uses the same content management system and fonts as the NSN’s “White Australia” website. 
Perhaps most damning though is the fact that among the revolving cast of <a href="https://x.com/tassiekaz/status/1958911146297368891">state organisers</a> named on the march’s Facebook events, those who have been identified (most are using aliases) have either been NSN members, or have worked closely and directly with the NSN in the past. This includes Matt Trihey (one of the on-again, off-again Victorian organisers), who is a founder of white supremacist organisation the <a href="https://voxpol.eu/nazis-at-the-salad-bar-the-national-workers-alliance-and-mixed-unclear-and-unstable-ideology/">National Workers Alliance</a> and former <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/nov/12/australian-white-nationalists-reveal-plans-to-recruit-disgruntled-white-male-population">Lads Society</a>member who was most recently in the news for getting <a href="https://www.news.com.au/national/federal-election/white-supremacist-crashes-friends-of-abc-candidates-meeting-in-seat-of-kooyong/news-story/be9520dc5a6a55df4c4c411d98d9bb82">punched in the face</a> by an elderly woman at an election event in Kooyong earlier this year.
Once the march began to gain traction online, <a href="https://x.com/purplepingers/status/1956547447750070659">notable Zionist organisers</a> and far-right content creators from different cultural backgrounds expressed interest in attending and helping to promote the rallies. This prompted an angry tirade from none other than NSN leader Tom Sewell, who complained in an 11 August post on his telegram channel that “after only just arriving home from our summit today [the NSN’s 9-10 August national conference], I have been informed that foreign fifth columns are attempting to hijack our August 31st public rally for Australia. Australians must say NO to Israeli, Palestinian, Chinese and Indian foreign interference trying to hijack our common-sense patriotic spirit. White Australians must assemble on August 31st against the traitors and foreigners who are trying to destroy our great nation!”
Even on the more outwardly “respectable”, public-facing level the veneer has sometimes slipped. In the X Spaces stream mentioned earlier, “Bec Freedom”—the main public face of the rallies on a national level—<a href="https://x.com/tassiekaz/status/1955069467681231141">stated that</a> the march is to “protect white culture, heritage and way of life”. In a previous X Spaces stream she also said that “we need to see violence” like what happened in the <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/cronulla-race-riots">2005 Cronulla Riots</a>. This argument wasn’t met with disgust or apprehension, but by her co-hosts saying it didn’t go far enough.
On available evidence then we can only come to one conclusion. The March for Australia isn’t some wishy washy far-right populist event patched together by suburban “mums and dads” with legitimate concerns. It has been initiated and built with direct neo-Nazi involvement every step of the way. And at its core isn’t limited to the demand for a reduction in rates of immigration, but the plan to build a movement that will violently target anyone deemed not to fit with the NSN’s vision of a racially “pure”, Nazi-led, white Australia.
Wherever possible, these rallies should be actively countered by socialists, pro-Palestine activists, and all those concerned with standing in solidarity with migrants and against the far right and fascism (in Melbourne a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DNka6mTRLIW/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=Zng5OHI5N2c1NHp4">counter rally</a> has been organised meeting at 11am Sunday at the State Library). Against their hatred and division, we must advance a vision centred on anti-racist solidarity, collective action and democracy to advance working-class interests against the dog-eat-dog ideologies of capitalism that Nazis aim to take to their most barbaric extremes.

Jordan van den Lamb

The neo-Nazis behind the ‘March for Australia’

Today was a brilliant day of protests against Israeli atrocities in Palestine and our government’s complicity in them. 
I’ve been asked how it compares to the national rallies on the weekend of 14-16 February 2003, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets around the country in opposition to the US government’s imminent invasion of Iraq. 
Today was similar in that it was a series of nationwide protests from the biggest cities to the smallest towns (600 in Tathra!), all coming out against the government of the day. The energy was the same—the experience of turning what would otherwise have been a sleepy Sunday into mass political action that has become the key political issue around the country.
But the differences are equally striking. Today was angrier, more hostile to the government, more oppositional.
Consider the two situations. A whole section of international ruling class opinion was opposed to the US invasion of Iraq. The German and French governments came out against it. The ALP was against it because the UN did not sanction it. In 2003, Labor opposition leader Simon Crean spoke at the Brisbane rally, and the Labor lord mayor also spoke at rallies. The Age
newspaper in Melbourne editorialised against the war. 
To be against the Iraq War didn’t require people to stand on principle against Western imperialism. The stance was in tune with widespread liberal opinion. To my knowledge, no-one lost their job for speaking out against it, no-one was suspended or expelled from university for doing so, and no-one was condemned as a racist for opposing war. The only accusation the right could dredge up—that you were an apologist for Saddam Hussein or for radical Islam—was regarded as laughable. 
The very premise of the war—Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction—was thoroughly debunked even before it started. Things had well and truly moved on from the US’s 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, when standing against war put you in a small minority.
Today, we’ve got no friends in any lodge, chancellery, palace or ministry. Every Western government backs Israel. Government rhetoric in much of the West may have shifted a bit in the last couple of months, but this doesn’t disguise the fact that Israel can massacre the Palestinians without a single government doing anything to stop it. This is true of social democratic governments as much as conservative ones. 
It's not just that they’re not standing up to Israel. They are attacking opponents of the genocide. Standing up to Israel’s war takes guts. It requires a much stronger sense of purpose, because opposing Israel means opposing the entire establishment—the politicians, newspaper editors, managers and university vice chancellors who have disgracefully used the antisemitism slur to destroy careers, sack workers, withdraw funding and expel students. 
Our rulers have subjected opponents of the war to public ridicule and hatred. The “antisemitism” slur has been much more chilling than the ridiculous slurs of being a “Saddam stooge” in 2003. The Israeli genocide, by highlighting the lines of division in our society, therefore exposes the workings of our system much more clearly than the Iraq war did.
With the Iraq war, we knew what horrors it might (and did) unleash, but everyone attending rallies today has seen the barbarism that has been meted out to the civilians of Gaza, the emaciated bodies wracked by starvation, the bags of body parts being collected by grieving parents or children, the sheer horror of Israel bombing people queuing for food. The morning news bulletins tell us how many dozen civilians have been blown to pieces while we slept. 
This experience has burned itself into the minds of everyone who marched today. At least in the early stages of the Iraq war, the US was fighting a conventional army. Who is Israel fighting? It’s just massacring unarmed people. 
The Iraq war demonstrations were unprecedented in that hundreds of thousands came out before a shot was fired (although US sanctions had killed hundreds of thousands in the years preceding). That was incredible, and we hoped the antiwar movement would build as the war dragged on. But they were a rocket that lit up the night sky only to quickly fall to the earth. The US smashed Hussein’s army and quickly established control. The protests of hundreds of thousands quickly subsided. 
Today, we have been marching on the streets virtually every week for two years. And yet today was the biggest day of action yet. We’ve learned some lessons over these two years. None of us marching today has any illusions that any government will help us. All of us despise the complicity of our governments in this genocide. At the Brisbane rally against the Iraq war, a minority of us booed Simon Crean, but most gave him the benefit of the doubt. Today, we all despise the Labor politicians. Their hypocrisy, their token measures that do nothing to stop the killing are worse than Australian PM John Howard’s fawning over US President George Bush. 
And it’s been more than two decades since 2003. Australia has escaped some of the worst economic crises since that time and our political system is still less polarised than elsewhere in the world. But our government’s complicity in Israel’s genocide is another reminder that we are part of a world system of barbarism—a world in which the far right is growing, the climate crisis is getting worse, social welfare is being further gutted and inequality is becoming more extreme. 
As well, the threat of a major war in our region looms as governments throw hundreds of billions of dollars at new weapons systems. Israel’s genocide is of a piece with this: a world in which the powerful can simply destroy the common people with impunity.
The comparison between 2003 and 2025 reinforces in my mind the need for a socialist alternative to this rotten system. George Bush went. John Howard went. But things have gotten worse. They’re not going to get better. 
Today was a beautiful demonstration of the power of ordinary people when they decide “enough is enough”. We need many more of them. 
But we also need a clear vision of what we’re fighting against and what we’re fighting for. I think the movement today is angrier than in 2003, more determined, in it for the long haul. But that doesn’t mean it’s particularly politically sophisticated. Debates over how to defeat Israel are virtually non-existent; people in their desperation tend to grasp at straws.
The Israeli genocide is like a distillation of the evils of capitalism. The Israeli government has been planning this offensive for years. Its backers in the West support it. Our side, that of the working class, needs to be conscious of our tasks if we are to defeat them. That’s why, 22 years on from Iraq, and 40 plus years since I first got involved, I’m still as dedicated as ever to building a socialist alternative to this rotten system.

Tom Bramble

Fighting imperialism then and now

Sunday was the biggest nationally coordinated demonstration for Palestine in Australian history. From the centres of the major cities to the smallest of country towns, more than 300,000 people took to the streets to demand an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza—and to denounce the Australian government’s complicity.
In Sydney and Melbourne, crowds nearly 100,000 strong surged through the streets in what can only be described as a national howl of opposition to Israel’s brutality. In Brisbane, 50,000 rallied. In Perth, 20,000. Adelaide, 15,000. A remarkable 4,000 marched in Hobart—one of the largest protests in the city in years.
But just as striking was the response in regional Australia: 3,000 in Newcastle; 1,200 in Coffs Harbour; 600 in Tathra and Katoomba; 450 on the Central Coast; hundreds in Denmark, Devonport, Margaret River, Albany, Mackay, Geraldton and other towns across Western Australia. Even in Broome, Bridgetown, Mount Gambier and Karratha—dozens gathered to say: not in our name.
In Devonport, Tasmania, the organisers—Patrick, Sally, Bill and Jennie—were thrilled by the turnout of more than 300 people. The event began with a “Honk for Palestine”, followed by speeches and a haunting lament on the Great Highland pipes, played by Dave.
In Broome, organisers described a gathering led by both First Nations and non-Indigenous organisers as “the biggest Broome gathering in solidarity with Palestine” since November 2023. “Elders attended alongside newborn babies and families, with people from all faiths, including Muslim and Jewish, in attendance”.
More than 300,000 people demonstrated nationwide—a defiant mobilisation by a movement that refuses to be silenced.
And it could not come at a more critical time.
Just this week, the United Nations confirmed that famine is now a reality in parts of Gaza. The Israeli government is starving children to death. Meanwhile, the military has commenced its military assault on Gaza City—again. This, after nine months of relentless bombing, blockade, displacement and massacres.
The Australian government’s response? Lip service. Weak statements. Continued arms exports. Continued security cooperation. Continued diplomatic cover. Amal Nasser, a leading Palestinian organiser in Sydney, spoke about this in a news interview in the lead-up to the national day of action:
“Declarations by the Australian government for Palestinian recognition have achieved nothing. The week after the government said they would recognise Palestine, the Netanyahu government announced it would invade Gaza City.”
People across the country have had enough.
While people are gunned down at “aid” distribution sites, Labor refuses to impose sanctions, refuses to end the two-way arms trade and refuses to expel the Israeli ambassador. 
The Albanese government has been utterly hostile to the Palestinian struggle and the solidarity movement; it has worked with state Labor governments to repress the movement. We’ve had to weather attempts to criminalise us, to smear us as antisemites, to paint our grief and rage as a threat.
But the movement will not go quietly. Voices of resistance, clarity and defiance came from today’s rallies. As veteran Aboriginal activist Gary Foley told the Melbourne crowd: “They may kill the resistance fighters, but they will never kill the resistance”.
Palestinian organisers in Perth wept as they saw thousands pour into the streets. One said they felt like “the tide was turning”. 
Omar Hassan, chairing the Melbourne rally, captured the mood:
“They have never seen a movement as persistent and sustained and determined as this one in Australia … When you read the news of the starving children, when you see the press conferences of the chattering classes that do nothing … you will know that you stand on the right side of history.”
In towns and suburbs across the country, people organised demonstrations for the very first time. They printed flyers, booked halls, made placards, called friends. German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg once said you don’t notice your chains if you don’t move. Today, in many places, there was movement for the first time. And with it, the possibility of real, collective strength.
Importantly, this was the first time that trade unions across Australia coordinated national support for Palestine on this scale. Motions were passed, email blasts were sent to members, social media tiles were shared—sometimes for the first time. But there needs to be more. The muscle of the labour movement must be flexed. It is one of the most serious ways governments can be held accountable. A movement that can stop arms shipments, freeze exports and put political pressure on the streets and in the workplaces is the kind of movement we urgently need.
Members of Socialist Alternative and the Socialist Party played an important role in these protests across the country, continuing a long tradition of involvement in the Palestinian solidarity movement well before 2023. Our contribution remains rooted in the belief that building working-class resistance here is essential to confronting imperialism abroad.
This movement is a light in the darkness. Ordinary people—many of them young, migrant, Muslim, and working class—are standing against the genocidal project of one of the most heavily armed regimes on earth, and against the cowardly governments that enable it.
Today was not the end. It was a turning point. A national cry, from the streets of Melbourne to the sands of Broome: End the genocide. Free Palestine.

Vashti Fox

Australia rises for Palestine

“When bombs fall on Gaza it’s not just Netanyahu who is responsible. It’s also the companies who make the drones, the governments who fund them and the universities that silence dissent”: this was how Palestinian activist and La Trobe alumni Hajar Riad opened a pro-Palestine meeting on 20 August at Melbourne’s La Trobe University. 
The event was organised as a counter-panel to the Bendigo Writers Festival, which was supposed to take place the previous week at La Trobe’s Bendigo campus but which was effectively cancelled after more than 30 speakers pulled out citing concern over a code of conduct that prohibited discussion of the genocide in Gaza. 
The Bendigo Writers Festival was promoted as an event that “brings together diverse voices … sparking ideas, conversation and inspiration”. Instead, it’s highlighted the draconian attack on free speech by universities looking to stifle activism against and opposition to the genocide in Gaza.
Two days before the festival, writers and presenters in the “La Trobe Presents” sessions were sent a code of conduct that required them to “avoid language or topics that could be considered inflammatory, divisive, or disrespectful”. They were also told they had to abide by La Trobe University’s “Anti-Racism Action Plan”, which defines criticism of Israel as antisemitism.
The plan was implemented in May 2025 as a response to the 2024 Gaza solidarity encampment and the mass Student General Meeting for Palestine, where more than 250 students voted for La Trobe to cut ties with companies involved with the genocide. The purpose of the plan is to make it harder for students and staff to criticise Israel’s genocide, and the university’s complicity in it. 
Randa Abdel-Fattah, a Palestinian author and academic, wrote in her withdrawal letter: “At a time when journalists are being permanently silenced by Israel’s genocidal forces, it is incomprehensible that a writers’ festival should seek to silence Palestinian voices”. More than 240 journalists have been killed by Israeli military forces since October 2023. This makes Israel’s war the deadliest for journalists in modern history. While those seeking to get the truth out about what’s happening in Palestine are being killed, those trying to talk about it in the West are being silenced, by institutions that supposedly stand for “free thought” no less. 
The counter-panel was a demonstration of opposition to university management and a show of solidarity with those standing up against oppression and injustice. It attracted more than 30 students and staff and involved discussions about how best to oppose genocide and censorship in our work and studies.
La Trobe Student Union Education Officer Maeve Russack was the final speaker on the panel. She argued, “I think that there’s a key lesson to be learnt from the Bendigo Writers Festival and it’s that the university and their policy book are not an omnipotent being, but are something that can be resisted and something our side must continue to resist”.

Alicia Griffiths

La Trobe staff and students speak out against university censorship

A rank-and-file meeting of freelance journalists, perhaps the largest ever in the history of the Media Entertainment &amp; Arts Alliance, has voted overwhelmingly (without dissent) to stand up for Palestine.
MEAA members from the Victorian Socialists drafted a series of motions to support journalists being slandered by Israel’s supporters in Australia and to honour more than 270 news workers killed by the Israeli military in Gaza. The meeting, held on Wednesday, also endorsed the nationwide March for Palestine on Sunday, 24 August.
The meeting had been called to discuss an important MEAA campaign to raise freelancer rates and job conditions. Some good work has been done here. The union is trying to get individual employers to agree to a <a href="https://freelancers.org.au/charter/">Freelance Charter of Rights</a> with minimum pay rates for writers and photographers and clauses about intellectual copyright. A couple of media companies have signed on, but many more, including so-called progressive outlets, have not.
It was an important step in the MEAA campaign to have a members’ meeting endorse the freelance campaign. However, the meeting was notable for two other reasons.
First, its size. More than 300 people RSVP’d (the most ever for a freelancers’ meeting), and at least 162 people participated. Second, the timing of the meeting coincided with the historic collapse in Israel’s legitimacy in the eyes of millions of people and as public opinion has shifted firmly in favour of the Palestinians, as illustrated by the history-making March for Humanity on 3 August.
Wednesday’s meeting was an opportunity too good to miss. But it wasn’t easy. There was a significant conservative “do nothing” pushback from the freelancers’ de facto delegate committee. Despite every member of the committee saying that they supported the Palestinians and were regular attendees of Palestine solidarity rallies, they argued that union members weren’t ready to take action, that the union’s “official channels” were working on their own campaign plan and that putting up motions for Palestine would be divisive.
On the day of the meeting, I argued with the committee all day in our WhatsApp chat group. They didn’t like it. But we were confident that MEAA members were ready to take action. We were right.
The MEAA leadership has already taken a public position on Gaza. Federal officials endorsed the March for Humanity on 3 August and the 24 August nationwide March for Palestine. And they had already <a href="https://www.meaa.org/mediaroom/stop-killing-journalists-australian-media-figures-take-a-stand-as-death-toll-continues-to-rise/">issued a media release condemning the murder of journalists by Israel</a> and calling on the killing to stop. That should have given committee members the confidence to support us, but it wasn’t enough.
I argued to the committee that if they supported some formal motions—in line with their private opinions—the meeting could be handled simply with a couple of speakers for and against and then a vote. This is exactly what happened in the end. There was no fuss, no drama, no blowup. It was just a simple exercise in union democracy and letting the membership voice an opinion.
We had three motions prepared for the meeting.
First, we made a public statement that freelance members of the MEAA support our colleague Mary Kostakidis, who is fighting the Zionist Federation of Australia in the federal court after the pro-Israel group accused her of breaching the Racial Discrimination Act. The federation’s attack on Mary was made at a time when Israel’s supporters felt emboldened and were attacking journalists, artists and academics daily with false accusations of antisemitism.
The MEAA head office has been sitting on Mary’s case and has refused to make any public statements for months. Mary told after the meeting that union officials were basically trawling through her social media feed to make their own determination about antisemitism. This is an appalling and stupid thing for MEAA officials to be doing. Now the union and the public know that Mary has the overwhelming support of her freelance colleagues.
Second, we added our voices to the union’s public position of opposing the genocide and the murder of news workers in Gaza. By doing so, we want to signal that there is a ground swell of pro-Palestinian sentiment inside the union.
Third, we endorsed the 24 August national Palestine solidarity demonstrations. By doing so, we’ve signalled that we don’t want to only talk about Palestine, but act.
This was a great outcome. And, like everything related to Palestine solidarity, it required a fight to get the right result.

Marty Hirst

Freelance journalists in Australia vote for Palestine solidarity

On the back of strong grassroots campaigns that included many hours of doorknocking and letterboxing and thousands of conversations with voters, Victorian Socialists candidates achieved a solid result in recent by-elections in Darebin and Whittlesea councils in Melbourne’s north. 
The by-election for the North West Ward of Darebin City Council was called following <a href="https://www.darebin.vic.gov.au/About-council/News-and-Media/News/Darebin-City-Council-mourns-the-loss-of-Cr-Gaetano-Greco">the death in April</a> of left-wing independent councillor Gaetano Greco. Greco was first elected to council in 2008 and served as Darebin mayor in 2013-14. He was a strong progressive voice who was a leader of the campaign to save Preston Market from its billionaire owner’s <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/speaking-billionaire-preston-market">profit-seeking redevelopment plan</a>.
Greco was a popular councillor. In the last state-wide council election in October 2024, he <a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/results/council-election-results/2024-council-election-results/darebin-city-council#North%20West%20Ward">won the North West Ward</a> with a first preference vote of 57.8 percent, ahead of Labor’s Geraldine Wood on 20.1 percent, the Greens’ Patchouli Paterson on 12.3 percent and VS candidate Adam Slater on 9.8 percent.
Seven candidates competed to fill his vacant spot, with all but one of those pitching themselves as (various shades of) progressive. VS candidate Cat Rose—a nurse and long-time community activist who has in recent years been part of the Save the Preston Market campaign along with local organising around Palestine—<a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/voting/current-elections/darebin-city-council-north-west-ward-by-election/results">received 14.5 percent of first preference votes</a>, coming in third, behind progressive independent Angela Villella on 27.4 percent and Labor’s Daniel Scoullar on 17.6 percent.
After the distribution of preferences, however, Rose came out ahead of Labor, finishing second on 42.4 percent behind Villlella on 57.6 percent. Villella was one of two candidates whose pitch to voters centred on their connection with Greco and desire to continue in his footsteps (the other was George Kanjere, who received 7.6 percent of first preference votes).
Rose’s first preference vote represents a swing of 4.7 percent from VS’s North West Ward result in 2024. This is a good outcome in a crowded field of progressive candidates. For comparison, the Greens’ first preference vote was down 4.2 percent from 2024.
The by-election for the Lalor Ward in Whittlesea City Council was called after the 2024 election for that ward was voided by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal due to suspected fraud. During the vote count, which was narrowly won by long-time Labor councillor Stevan Kozmevski, Victorian Electoral Commission staff found that there were a high number of “multiple returns”: numerous postal ballot papers being sent in by a single voter.
Eleven candidates ran in the by-election. VS candidate Omar Hassan—a teacher and long-time Palestine solidarity campaigner who was the party’s candidate for Scullin in the recent federal election—came in second on first preferences with <a href="https://www.vec.vic.gov.au/voting/current-elections/whittlesea-city-council-lalor-ward-by-election/results">15.5 percent of the vote</a>, behind Kozmevski on 22.3 percent. They were followed by a group of three candidates who received between 11 and 12 percent. After the distribution of preferences it was the fifth-placed candidate, Michael Labrador, who received just 11.2 percent of first preferences, who jumped ahead to win with 52.4 percent to Kozmevski’s 47.6 percent. 
It’s difficult to come to any firm political conclusions from this result. Labrador stood on the far-right of the field of candidates, foregrounding his Christian faith and family values and calling for more “fiscal responsibility” from council. As the third-placed candidate on the ballot, though, he benefited from what VS scrutineers said was a significant donkey vote—where voters, not knowing (or not caring) who they should vote for, simply number the boxes starting with “1” for the top-placed candidate and going down the ballot paper from there.
The results for VS provide further evidence for the existence of a decent-sized audience for socialist politics in these areas. Both Lalor and Reservoir (which Darebin North West Ward covers) are heartlands of Melbourne’s multi-ethnic working class that have traditionally been Labor Party strongholds. In many parts of Australia, workers’ disillusionment with Labor is translating into increasing votes for parties on the far-right fringe. To the extent that VS can win a portion of these people to vote for and identify with socialists instead, that in itself will be a positive intervention into Australian political life.
Our aim, however, should be to do much more than that. There’s no indication that we’re approaching a ceiling for the socialist vote in these areas. Socialist organising in places like Lalor and Reservoir is only just getting started. The biggest barrier we face is the pervasive disillusionment with and disengagement from politics, more than any entrenched commitment to Labor or far-right candidates and parties.
If Victorian Socialists can further establish itself as a genuine, radical alternative to the utterly corrupt and pro-big business politics of both Labor and the Liberals, and to the progressive small ‘l’ liberal but ultimately pro-capitalist politics of the Greens and the Teals, there’s every reason to think that the current upward trajectory of its vote (and its membership) will continue and even accelerate. And with the party’s recent decision to expand across Australia, there’s no reason to think this success can’t be replicated in other states and territories too.
James Plested is the Victorian Socialists communications director.

James Plested

Solid result for socialist candidates in local council by-elections

The National Union of Students has endorsed a call by Students for Palestine to hold a national student referendum on Palestine. Across the country, university campuses will hold mass meetings at which students will vote on the following motions:
1. Students censure the Australian government for its complicity in the genocide in Gaza. We demand an end to all weapons sales to Israel by Australia and Australian companies, and call for sanctions on Israel. 
2. Students call on all Australian universities to end their complicity with Israel’s genocide by ceasing all partnerships with weapons companies.
The votes on each campus will be reported as they come in and collated into a national result. The intention is to send a clear message to the government and Australian universities that students will not stay silent in the face of their complicity in the Gaza genocide. 
The Albanese government has all but admitted that Australia is arming Israel through the export of crucial weapons components. As the Guardian
<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/aug/15/is-australia-supplying-weapons-to-bomb-gaza-heres-what-we-know-about-fighter-jet-parts-in-the-f-35-program">recently reported</a>, the company RUAG Australia is the only global supplier of a key part of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets used by Israel in Gaza. According to <a href="https://asiapacificdefencereporter.com/ruag-australia-achieves-manufacturing-milestone-on-uplock-actuator-system-for-f-35-joint-strike-fighter-program/">an Australian defence industry website</a>, the “uplock actuator system” opens and closes bay doors “to enable the F-35 to drop its payload more quickly and maintain its stealth capability”.
Australian universities enjoy research partnerships with and scholarship funding from major weapons companies, including Lockheed Martin, which manufactures the F-35. This is what Defence Minister Richard Marles meant when he told David Speers on ABC’s Insiders that Australia is “<a href="https://youtu.be/uxUntSTXpGc?si=Yfo31D11IP3N1aK2">an F-35 country</a>”. 
The Labor government’s and universities’ complicity in the genocide is at odds with public sentiment, which continues to grow in favour of the besieged and starved Palestinians and for an end to Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza. A <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/03/most-people-across-24-surveyed-countries-have-negative-views-of-israel-and-netanyahu/">recent poll</a> conducted by Pew Research found that about three-quarters of Australians now have an unfavourable view of Israel. 
And why wouldn’t they? Anyone with eyes and a heart should feel outrage and horror at the images of one-year-old children dying of hunger while food sits in trucks only kilometres away. Or footage of American and Israeli soldiers using breadlines in Gaza for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKpkZNAFwkc&amp;ab_channel=SenatorBernieSanders">target practice</a>. 
That broader public sentiment is echoed on university campuses, which continue to be major sites of protest and dissent on Gaza. The referendum is an opportunity for students across the country to send a vote of no confidence to our universities and our government, a mass and defiant gesture of dissent in the face of their complicity. 
It is important that the National Union of Students, the peak union body for university students across the country, supports and promotes the referendum. Members of Socialist Alternative on the NUS national executive have largely done this, pushing for the union to publicly condemn the genocide and support student protests. 
Across the country, student unions are generally run by different factions of Young Labor, meaning that the NUS operates as little more than an anaemic cheer squad for the ALP and a career stepping stone for Labor students. 
Members of Socialist Alternative in the NUS and in student unions across the country have consistently argued that our unions should not limit their horizons to those of a right-wing neoliberal Labor government that has stood steadfastly by Israel <a href="https://x.com/AlboMP/status/1710737658362876219">from the start</a>. It is not only our moral responsibility to stand against the crimes of our government and of Israel, but a vital question for the relevance and continued existence of student unionism in this country.
The national student referendum is an example of precisely the sort of thing student unions should be throwing themselves into, giving a lead to students who are sickened by the live-streamed images of mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Gaza and outraged at the role the Labor government and our universities are playing in it. 
To join other students standing up and demanding to be counted, register at <a href="https://palestinereferendum.org/">palestinereferendum.org</a>.

James McVicar

Students to hold nationwide vote on Gaza

The University of Melbourne has begun construction on a new $2 billion “defence” research campus at Fishermans Bend. The campus will allow the university to further its collaboration with international arms manufacturers to design new weapons. 
Last year, students demanded that the university divest from partnerships with more than thirteen weapons companies. But now, the university is angling for even closer connections with the defence sector. This is despite at least two of the companies, Boeing and BAE Systems, <a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/06/states-and-companies-must-end-arms-transfers-israel-immediately-or-risk">being warned last year by the UN</a> that their transfers to Israel could make them complicit in war crimes. 
Now, UoM students are demanding that the university halt the construction of this “weapons campus” and end its complicity in Israel’s genocide.
The Citizen, a publication of the university’s Centre for Advancing Journalism, <a href="https://www.thecitizen.org.au/articles/at-fishermans-bend-university-of-melbourne-angling-for-defence-contracts-relationships#:~:text=In%20an%20August,of%20Melbourne%E2%80%99s%20campus%E2%80%9D.">reported in February</a> that the university previously petitioned the Department of Defence to “consider greater connectivity” between the proposed Fishermans Bend campus and the Defence Department’s specialist Defence Science and Technology Group, which is also located in the suburb. 
“The University claims to be on about the big social challenges and trying to make the world better”, Tilman Ruff, an honorary associate professor and a founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, <a href="https://www.news.com.au/national/victoria/news/the-university-of-melbournes-new-campus-has-students-and-academics-seething/news-story/ed698e07f91089b4defaa5bbcdba8fff">told news.com.au earlier this month</a>.
“It’s hard to see how getting in bed with war profiteers and particularly makers of now illegal weapons of mass destruction fits with trying to do good in the world for the betterment of humanity.”
Boeing manufactures and sells F-15 fighter jets and Apache AH-64 attack helicopters to the Israeli Air Force. BAE Systems, another of the world’s largest defence contractors, is a key supplier to the F-35 fighter jet program. 
Documents obtained from the university under Freedom of Information reveal that, after a student protest against a forum hosted by Boeing at the Parkville campus in 2024, the university reprimanded students speaking out against war crimes while reassuring the company of the university’s solid commitment to collaboration at Fishermans Bend.
The “weapons campus” aligns with a broader Victorian government initiative to lure more arms manufacturers and military contractors to the area. Melbourne University will provide space and materials for companies to improve their weapons and hardware. It will also funnel engineering students into the war industries. The campus will serve as the brains behind the bombs. 
The university is open about its intent to develop “leading-edge defence technologies” and describes the campus as “a site for multinationals and SMEs to engage in the Defence ecosystem ... supported by our state-of-the-art materials fabrication laboratory, ocean simulation facilities and autonomous robotics testing sites”.
The university is also gushing about the opportunities presented by the federal government’s proposed acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines. It is hard to miss the connection between its <a href="https://www.unimelb.edu.au/newsroom/news/2023/november/university-of-melbourne-welcomes-student-places-to-support-nuclear-powered-submarines-student-pathways">positive statements about training nuclear scientists</a> and the Fishermans Bend campus’s intended defence research into “marine systems technologies” and “optimising the performance and security of submarine, ship and amphibious operations in the open ocean and coastal areas”.
Students for Palestine Unimelb opposes collaboration between the university and the military. We have collected signatures from more than 1,000 students for a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DMpBwh5zmEC/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==">special general meeting for Palestine</a>, organised by the student union. If four hundred students attend, the meeting’s decisions will be binding on the union. If a mass meeting votes in favour of all motions, the union will campaign against the construction of Fishermans Bend, against all university ties to weapons companies, against the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/melbourne-university-expels-palestine-solidarity-activists">repression of student activism</a> and to organise a <a href="https://freedomflotilla.org/">fundraiser for the next Freedom Flotilla</a> sailing to break Israel’s blockade and bring aid to Gaza.

Emma Dynes

Students campaign against Melbourne University’s ‘weapons campus’

During Berlin’s Internationalist Queer Pride on Saturday, 26 July, more than 15,000 people marched through the streets of the German capital under the slogan “None of us are free until all of us are free”. Our numbers grew as we marched through the working-class neighbourhood Neukölln, picking up many locals watching from the footpaths who were drawn in by the parade’s central demand: end the genocide in Gaza. It was not long before riot police, stalking us in massive numbers from the start, launched an unprovoked attack. Dozens of us were beaten and arrested, myself included, and the march was forcefully dispersed well short of its destination.
In Germany, this sort of police response has come to be expected at Palestine rallies, especially in Berlin. As in most other countries, there has been a steep rise in support for the Palestinian cause, especially among young people, and the German state is resorting to desperate and draconian measures to stop the rising tide.
Since October 2023, the German state has cracked down on Palestine activism by raiding homes, shutting down events, cancelling art exhibitions, cutting off funding to cultural institutions and issuing deportation orders to foreign nationals who dare to criticise Israel.
More than 30 raids on activists have taken place since October 2023. These raids—which usually happen at night and involve dozens of heavily armed police—serve one purpose: intimidation.
In April 2024, the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace was raided by the Berlin police. A three-day conference they were hosting was shut down, and several organisers were arrested, including Udi Raz, a Jewish Israeli living in Berlin. Only months earlier, Raz had been fired by the state-funded Jewish Museum for describing Israel’s actions in the West Bank as apartheid.
In another case in December 2023, the Berlin home of Salah Said, a German-born Palestinian activist, was raided by police, who confiscated personal items and electronic devices. He was raided two more times over the following eighteen months, despite never being accused of any crime.
Since October 2023, several cultural organisations and exhibitions have been cancelled, and artists threatened with deportation. The Folkwang Museum in Essen cancelled a planned exhibition curated by Haitian artist Anaïs Duplan, citing his support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. In Berlin, the cultural centre Oyoun lost all public funding after hosting a Jewish-led pro-Palestine event.
Several academics have been fired or had their professorships rescinded after voicing support for the BDS campaign, including Nancy Fraser, a Jewish American who was stood down by Cologne University for calling Israel an “ethno-supremacist state”. 
But possibly more disturbing than all of this has been the criminalisation of everyday acts of resistance by ordinary people, especially Arabs and Muslims, showing solidarity with the Palestinians.
In February 2025, Berlin police implemented a racist ban on Arabic chants at demonstrations, citing “public order” concerns. Despite this ban, and despite arrests, protesters have defiantly continued to chant in Arabic. During the Pride march, “Al-Hurriya li-Filastin” (Freedom for Palestine) was chanted by thousands of Arabic and non-Arabic speakers alike. The phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” has been criminalised, and Palestinian flags and keffiyehs are banned in all schools across Berlin.
However, none of this has stopped the movement from growing.
At the start of Israel’s latest assault on Gaza in October 2023, pro-Palestine rallies were banned and several attempts to march were met with arrests, pepper spray and hundreds of riot police. In the days and weeks following Israel’s ground invasion, protesters continued to defy the ban. A candlelight vigil held by Jewish Voice for a Just Peace was a protest form that the authorities hesitated to crush, which created space for demonstrations immediately afterwards that managed to reclaim the streets.
In Neukölln, “illegal” spontaneous gatherings in support of Palestine turned into organised demonstrations, and on the night of 18 October 2023, riot police cracked down on a large pro-Palestine gathering. This time, the protesters—mostly young, local residents of Middle Eastern background—fought back. Protesters used fireworks, stones and Molotov cocktails to fight the police, and built barricades in some places. Over the next three nights, police used water cannons, pepper spray and mass arrests to subdue the protests. The police were subsequently forced to soften somewhat their hardline stance, fearing further rioting.
By 21 October, demonstrations were allowed, and about 5,000 attended a protest in Berlin. The right to protest had been won on the streets.
In the following weeks, rallies were mostly limited to major cities like Berlin, Frankfurt and Hamburg, and usually numbered less than a few thousand. In the past twelve months, however, hundreds—sometimes thousands—have repeatedly protested in other major cities including Leipzig, Freiburg, Stuttgart, Münster and Cologne.
In Berlin, the rallies have grown into the tens of thousands over time, reaching a peak on 21 June this year, when a demonstration called by two influencers on Instagram drew more than 50,000 people. These are numbers never before seen for Palestine protests in Germany.
The growth of the protest movement mirrors a recent change in public opinion. Despite the rabidly pro-Israel German media, public opinion has shifted strongly in favour of the Palestinians.
The newspaper Die Zeit found that support for Palestine among under-30s has risen from 53 percent in 2019 to 63 percent today. In the same poll, 43 percent of respondents said they would support a pro-Palestine demonstration, even if Hamas flags were present. 
A poll conducted by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
newspaper this year found that 57 percent of Germans now hold a negative view of Israel, up from 23 percent in 2022. Another poll conducted by the public broadcaster ZDF in May found that only 13 percent of Germans support Israel’s actions in Gaza, and 80 percent think Israel’s actions are unjustified. It cannot be overstated how big a shift this represents in a place like Germany.
Germany is arguably the staunchest supporter of Israel after the United States. The term Staatsräson, or “reason of state”, is used by politicians to argue that Germany can atone for the Holocaust only by making the survival, security and success of the Israeli nation a core reason for its own existence. Exactly why the Palestinians should have to pay the price for the Holocaust is never clarified. But unwavering support for Israel is much more about the priorities of German imperialism than about atoning for the Holocaust. 
As the post-World War Two geopolitical map shifted from rivalry between European colonial powers to the Cold War stand-off between the US and the USSR, Germany became America’s key European ally. Even after the fall of the USSR, the US maintained more troops and military bases in Germany than in any other European country—and still does. Germany is one of the most powerful countries in the world. It leads the European Union, the world’s largest economic bloc, and benefits immensely from the geopolitical status quo. Reining in Israel would mean reducing the West’s influence in the Middle East, which is unacceptable for Germany, America and its allies.
The German state justifies its violent repression of pro-Palestinian protests by labelling participants as antisemitic. And if you label something antisemitic in Germany, you can do whatever you want to it.
There has also been a long and steady campaign of Islamophobia and anti-migrant sentiment in Germany (particularly towards Middle Eastern migrants), led by mainstream parties. It’s a convenient scapegoat tactic when the economy is stagnating, housing is becoming unaffordable and public services are crumbling. When an entire religious and ethnic group is dehumanised, it becomes that much easier to meet its protests with outright violence.
While most political parties, including the Social Democratic Party and the Greens, have backed this genocide, the left party Die Linke has moved in the right direction. Die Linke has at times acted shamefully by suppressing pro-Palestinian voices within the party, insisting that Israel has a “right to defend itself” and hesitating to use the word genocide. But there is a growing pro-Palestinian movement within Die Linke that has forced it to call rallies and field pro-Palestinian candidates for election.
In this year’s federal election, Die Linke built a strong grassroots campaign in parts of Berlin, led by activists who had been involved in local struggles for Palestine, against police racism and against evictions and deportations. The Die Linke candidate for Neukölln (one of twelve Berlin boroughs), Ferat Kocak, won 30 percent of the candidate vote and was elected to parliament. This was a 17-point increase from the 2021 election, in which Die Linke won just 13 percent of the same candidate vote.
Berlin-wide, Die Linke increased its vote by nearly 8 percent and won the overall party vote with 20 percent, easily beating all other parties. There was a surge of support in neighbourhoods with high Arab, Muslim and Turkish populations, as well as increased support from young people.
In the mainstream media, a shift has taken place in the past few months towards accepting some criticism of Israel and allowing support for the Palestinian cause. News organisations that until recently parroted Israeli talking points have started to change, ever so slightly, their coverage of the war on Gaza. The horrifying images of starving children are difficult to spin and defend. But the Palestinians’ determination to live, along with the growing protest movements, have surely also played a part.
In Germany and elsewhere, something is happening that is rare to see: the realisation by masses of people that the entire facade of Western democracy, freedom and human rights is nothing more than a bunch of lies that can be discarded at a moment’s notice. People will not soon forget how the entirety of the Western world’s political and media establishments aided and funded this live-streamed genocide.
The Germans have a phrase regarding the Holocaust: “nie wieder”, or never again. Never again will we allow genocide to happen. More people in Germany are coming to realise that “nie wieder ist jetzt”. Never again is now.

Eric Oliver

Repression and resistance: the Palestine movement in Germany

Sunday, 3 August, will go down in history as the day that 300,000 people, in pouring rain, marched over the Sydney Harbour Bridge to demand an end to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and that the Australian government sanction Israel. The people have spoken. It is the day the whole political and media establishment and the pro-Israel lobby, which have spent nearly two years trying to convince us that Israel’s endless slaughter is justified, definitively lost the argument.
They tried to stop this march from happening, because they understood its potential power. The New South Wales Labor government said it couldn’t happen. The police took us to court to try to stop it. The media ran with their scare campaign about “disruption”, “chaos” and a potential “crowd crush”. 
The media and government also tried to put the spotlight on me, hoping they could discredit and split the Palestine movement. They ran a good old-fashioned campaign of Cold War red-baiting, “outing” me as a Trotskyist, dismissing me as a “serial pest” and a “professional protester” and decrying that I had cost the state $10 million. The Sydney Morning Herald
suggested that I would “jump behind a megaphone for the facile thrill of annoying the establishment”. This attempted character assassination had a transparent intent: to discredit the cause without engaging with the arguments being made, and to drive a wedge between Palestine activists and the growing numbers who agree with them. 
This strategy failed sensationally. In the wake of the campaign’s Supreme Court victory and the enormous numbers who mobilised on the bridge, it was the media’s campaign that looked out-of-touch and the genocide apologists the real serial pests. Not used to failure, the right went into meltdown. The Australian ran a series of hyperbolic pieces, in which they both doubled down on their attacks on me and turned on the Supreme Court for enabling me and revealing its supposedly communist sympathies. 
“The most powerful man in Sydney on Sunday leads his pro-Palestine supporters across the Harbour Bridge basking in the global spotlight—and revelling in a sweet victory handed to him by the NSW Supreme Court”, lamented the Australian. “Josh Lees, the 43-year-old Trotskyist who now calls the tune in the harbour city, has captured the nation’s most iconic landmark and plans to use the moment well into the future ... The keffiyeh-wearing Lees has led a string of causes in the last two decades, his exploits on behalf of refugees, LGBTQI rights and against capitalism all breathlessly recorded in the Red Flag, his Socialist Alternative news outlet. On Saturday night the Red Flag was hailing Lees’ court win as a triumph in the ‘test of wills between the forces of injustice and imperialism’ ... Lees walked away from the court waving the Palestinian flag. And making it very clear: this was just the beginning.”
It may come as a surprise to readers of Red Flag that in fact I do not “call the tune in the harbour city”, nor that Trotskyism or socialism has yet triumphed. What the gigantic success of the March for Humanity does signify is a huge collective victory of people power over the capitalist establishment, which has backed the genocide in Gaza from the outset. The credit for this belongs to all those who argued, endorsed, organised and mobilised to make that day what it was, and especially to those in the Palestine Action Group Sydney who have stuck it out and kept this movement going for the past two years, most of whom don’t get the “glory” of mainstream media hit pieces. And above all it goes to the hundreds of thousands, who represent many hundreds of thousands more, who took a stand in the face of two years of pro-Israel propaganda, repression and slander from the government, the media, the universities, the arts establishment, but who can recognise a genocide when they see one and refuse to remain silent. 
The establishment is right to be worried, because we do now have a platform to build a much stronger Palestine solidarity movement, with much wider social backing, which is calling into question the entire rotten reality of imperialist deals like that by which Australia is still helping to arm Israel’s military machine. The dam has burst, and the federal government’s attempts to run for cover under Palestinian statehood recognition have already fallen apart. We are going to see a huge mobilisation all around the country on Sunday, 24 August, for the Nationwide March for Palestine, demanding sanctions and an end to the two-way arms trade with Israel.
In this sense, our victory in the Battle of the Bridge is more than just a victory for the Palestine campaign. It is a powerful demonstration that decency and humanity can win out against this vicious capitalist system, that we can win against the governments, the media empires and the institutions that uphold the status quo regardless of the human cost. It is an inspiring example of what socialists always argue: that hope lies with the people, the working class and the oppressed, who can stand together in the spirit of solidarity and internationalism against their common enemies in the ruling establishment; and that those masses are far more fit to rule the world than the media barons, billionaires and their political lackeys who have justified, supported and profited from genocide.

The neo-Nazis behind the ‘March for Australia’

Fighting imperialism then and now

Australia rises for Palestine

La Trobe staff and students speak out against university censorship

Freelance journalists in Australia vote for Palestine solidarity

Solid result for socialist candidates in local council by-elections

Students to hold nationwide vote on Gaza

Students campaign against Melbourne University’s ‘weapons campus’

Repression and resistance: the Palestine movement in Germany

Right-wing media in meltdown after protesters win ‘Battle for the Bridge’

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