In light of the positive results for Victorian Socialists (VS) in the federal election and the significant momentum the party has gained, the VS executive on 11 May decided to expand the project across the rest of Australia. 
Year after year and decade after decade, the wealth of the richest few has soared while millions struggle daily just to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. The trend of increasing inequality has continued whether Labor or the Coalition has been in power. 
Last year, the collective wealth of Australia’s 47 billionaires—people like Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer—increased by $28 billion. That works out to $67,000 per billionaire, per hour. A 2023 report by the Australia Institute, Inequality on Steroids: The Distribution of Economic Growth in Australia, found that in the decade from 2009 to 2019, the top 10 percent of income earners received 93 percent of the benefits of economic growth.
The evidence of this growing inequality is everywhere. We see it in the decades-long housing boom in which those with money to spend have enjoyed massive wealth gains from buying and selling property, while increasing numbers are consigned to a lifetime of housing insecurity and many to homelessness.
We see it the mega-profits of big banks, fossil fuel companies and other big corporations that often pay no or very little tax, at the same time as politicians claim there’s not enough money to properly fund public housing, health care, welfare and other essential public services.
The Labor Party has shown no interest in changing this. Labor politicians have spent much of the time since the election attacking the Greens—the one mainstream party that did offer something in the way of a left alternative to aspects of the status quo.
There’s a class war going on, but Labor is waging it against workers and the poor on behalf of the capitalist class and the rich. And part of the thing that has made them so effective at that is the sense, consciously fostered by politicians, the media, the education system and all the other instruments of ruling-class ideology, that there is no alternative.
The Victorian Socialists was established in 2018 as an attempt to push back against that, and to force open a space for the politics of rage, hope and resistance (as Jerome Small aptly puts it on page 8 of this issue)—the politics of socialism—in an otherwise barren political landscape.
Every election we’ve contested since then has seen us take another step forward. In this federal election we gained a vote share of 15 to 20 percent on individual booths in both inner urban areas like Footscray and Thornbury and more working-class areas in outer suburbs like Epping and Campbellfield.
Where socialists can run a decent campaign, we can gain a hearing and often even win people away from voting for the faux anti-establishment parties of the far right. And there’s no reason, given the shared political context, that this would be any different in other parts of Australia.
Join the Socialists in your state today and help us rebuild socialism as a living, breathing, organising and fighting movement in Australian political life—one that can shake up the rotten status quo of capitalism and finally start to win real change.
If you’ve been following VS’s growth as a small but serious force on the left of politics in Victoria, and would like to be part of replicating that in your state or territory, then sign up as a member today by following the QR code link below.
James Plested is the Victorian Socialists’ communications manager.

James Plested

Expanding the Victorian Socialists project

The Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF), Labor’s flagship policy to address the housing crisis, described by Housing Minister Julie Collins as “life-changing legislation that will help generations of Australians”, has not resulted in a single home being built in the nearly two years since it was passed. This was revealed in Senate Estimates Committee hearings in February, when Labor’s Finance Minister Katy Gallagher tried to claim that the HAFF had “completed” 340 new homes (already a derisory number). She was quickly forced to admit that these were existing properties that had been acquired. 
From the beginning, the HAFF was a fig leaf to hide Labor’s inaction on the housing crisis. What was touted as a $10 billion boost to housing was actually an investment fund, with the money gambled on the stock market and a maximum of $500 million in returns to be spent on housing each year. Labor claimed the HAFF would build 30,000 “social” and “affordable” houses over five years, but <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/05/19/housing-australia-future-fund-10-billion-welfare/">reporting by Crikey</a> showed that it would construct around 14,000 properties at best. With 122,000 people homeless, 172,000 on the social housing waitlists and thousands more people being pushed into housing insecurity each year, the HAFF was only ever going to help a tiny number of people to afford a home.
Two years on and the HAFF hasn’t helped anyone. Anglicare’s 2025 Rental Affordability Snapshot reported that affordability has crashed to record lows. Buying a home is more out of reach than ever: you’d need an income of more than $275,000 a year to get a mortgage for a median-priced house in Sydney, according to a SQM Research report. As this article is being written, Queensland police are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/08/police-rangers-and-excavators-move-in-to-brisbane-parks-as-tent-city-residents-face-eviction">clearing a “tent city”</a> of the homeless in Brisbane’s Musgrave Park. Where these people are supposed to go is anyone’s guess. 
The Liberals have blamed the HAFF’s failure on government bureaucracy and red tape, but this is cynical rubbish coming from a party whose idea of “red tape” is a planning control requiring windows in an apartment or paying construction workers the minimum wage. The Liberals’ real objection to the HAFF is that they don’t think the government should even pretend to be building affordable housing. They’d prefer to dispense with the fig leaf and openly shovel public money into the pockets of the developers and let the market rip. 
The HAFF hasn’t resulted in any properties being built because almost none of the money was ever intended to go directly into the construction of affordable homes. The HAFF is a <a href="https://www.housingaustralia.gov.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/2024-01/HAFFF%20NHAF%20Fact%20Sheet%20-%20Developers%2C%20Builders%2C%20Financiers%20and%20Investors.pdf">financial instrument</a> that gives concessional loans and subsidies to private developers who partner with community housing providers. In other words, it’s a handout to big corporations, which can get cheaper debt to build for-profit developments in return for providing a small number of “social” or “affordable” properties. The government has no control over when the homes are built, or whether they are built at all. Instead, it’s up to developers, whose sole concern is maximising their profits. If the market looks good, then maybe they’ll build, but if not, they’ll wait and build nothing, as we’ve seen for the past two years. 
The HAFF is a failure. If the government’s priority was building affordable homes rather than underwriting corporate profits, there are straightforward measures it could implement now to tackle the crisis. It could spend $10 billion (or more) directly on housing, rather than gambling it on the stock market and drip-feeding the returns. It could establish a public builder to construct new homes, rather than holding itself hostage to the market and developers’ profits. And it could keep the properties as public housing, not hand them off as “social housing” to external providers. 
In the wake of Labor’s election win, Albanese has told the Greens and anyone who cares about housing justice to “get out of our way on housing”. Get out of the way so Labor can do what? Introduce more policies like the HAFF that can’t get a single property built? Give more cash handouts to developers like Build to Rent? Tout more token measures like Help to Buy that drive up house prices? We shouldn’t get out of the way; we should get in the way and fight a Labor government that has made the housing crisis worse.

Martin Barker

A HAFF is not a home

What do you get when you throw billions of government subsidies at private, for-profit childcare providers with little regulatory oversight? Unacceptable levels of child abuse and negligence, wage theft and exploitation alongside a booming investment opportunity for property developers, bankers and private equity firms.
A recent Four Corners <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-17/betrayal-of-trust/105063150">investigation</a>
into early childhood education and care (ECEC) has revealed a rise in incidents of sexual abuse, serious physical and mental injury, inappropriate use of restraints and missing children. This is the latest in a string of reports highlighting chronic staffing shortages, regulatory breaches and child welfare concerns in the sector. Meanwhile, the ballooning $20 billion-a-year industry is <a href="https://www.apimagazine.com.au/news/article/is-childcare-still-a-property-investors-playground">marketed</a>
as an attractive investment opportunity, due to the heavy injection of government subsidies and high fees charged by providers.
Some of the more extreme cases of reported abuse include children being strapped in highchairs for hours at a time, being kicked and roughly handled, force fed and screamed at. Cost-cutting measures mean many children are fed meals with inadequate nutrition or not fed at all. In some cases, staff lack proper first aid training and knowledge of allergy management. This has resulted in children being hospitalised for serious injuries, often by parents after staff failed to call emergency services at the time of the incident.
This is the predictable outcome of a system that prioritises profit over quality education and care for young children.
Child care has fallen victim to the neoliberal privatisation of public services in Australia over several decades. As a United Services Union member previously <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/early-childhood-education-shouldnt-be-profit">wrote</a>
in Red Flag, “Over the last three decades, Labor and Liberal governments have shaped the sector more and more in favour of private providers, moving away from funding service provision by government or community-run providers, and towards per-child subsidies available to private providers”.
Early childhood education is the only level of education in which private, for-profit providers benefit from government subsidies. The Australian Consumer and Competition Commission (ACCC) projects that government handouts to the sector will reach $15 billion by 2026-27.
The result has been a rapid rise in the number of for-profit providers opening childcare centres across the country. According to Professor Gabrielle Meagher, interviewed by Four Corners, of the 300 to 400 new centres opening each year, 95 percent are for profit.
In order to generate maximum returns on investment, for-profit childcare providers have an incentive to drive down operating costs. This means sacrificing child safety and welfare and cutting back on staffing costs to increase profit margins. The latest report into the sector by the Australian Children’s Education and Care Quality Authority (ACECQA) shows that for-profit centres are consistently rated lower quality than not-for-profit providers. The report found that just 13 percent of for-profit childcare providers exceed national minimum standards for the provision of ECEC, compared to 28 percent for not-for-profit providers. The latter figure is still far too low and indicates that problems in the sector are widespread, likely due to chronic staffing issues. 
Early childhood educators, the vast majority of whom are women, are some of the worst-paid workers in Australia, even after the government’s pay rise of 15 percent over two years. A 2023 ACCC inquiry found that for-profit providers spend significantly less on staff, have a higher proportion of casual employees and employ less experienced educators than not-for-profit providers. Although the rates of pay for staff vary across providers, qualified educators covered under level 3 of the Children’s Services Award were paid on average $35.48 per hour at not-for-profit centres, while their for-profit counterparts were paid $33.69 per hour. As a result, there has been an exodus of workers from the sector. Desperate for staff, operators are cutting corners, hiring under-qualified educators and skipping background checks to fill vacancies.
Despite these issues, governments have not prioritised adequate funding for regulating the burgeoning sector. A report by the Productivity Commission last year found that industry regulators are under-resourced, meaning compliance inspections are infrequent or in some cases do not occur at all. According to the ACECQA, almost one in ten providers have never been given a quality rating yet are allowed to continue operating and enrolling children.
Whistleblower Ashley Sy, an early childhood educator, told Four Corners that centres she has worked at regularly gamed the system to achieve ratings that don’t reflect the reality of the services they provide. “There are materials that children can’t use on a day-to-day basis that are kept in staff rooms that are only brought out for assessment and rating time.” She said staff feared reprisals for speaking up about conditions in the centres they work in because many are migrants and did not want to risk losing their jobs and visas.
Even when assessments do take place, the ratings are next to meaningless. Centres that do not meet the minimum standards are given the euphemistic rating of “working towards” and allowed to continue to operate and rake in huge profits.
In an environment where profits are put before child protection and staff working conditions, it’s no surprise that there are frequent reports of breaches in laws and regulations. Yet the consequences are minimal even for serious breaches.
In a particularly heinous case in which several children suffered brutal physical and psychological abuse, childcare provider Jumpstart and an educator were fined just $186,620 and $38,650, respectively. The mother of one of the children affected expressed the inadequacy of this, saying to Four Corners: “Children being abused and having trauma for the rest of their lives, that’s what it’s worth? As a parent, if I was to do that to my son and had it reported I would lose my son, I would be considered an unfit parent”.
Clearly, the sector is in need of reform. At a minimum, federal and state governments should shut down providers that do not meet quality standards and direct more resources to the regulators to conduct frequent spot checks. They could cap fees charged by for-profit providers and mandate wages for educators on par with primary and secondary schools to address the staffing shortages.
However, Labor seems reluctant to investigate seriously and address the issues. The NSW Labor government attempted to block Greens MLC Abigail Boyd from accessing reports from the regulator about serious cases of abuse and neglect. A selection of documents was made public only in early April, six months after she first requested them. In March, Boyd moved a motion to censure Labor MLC Penny Sharpe, the leader of the government in the NSW Legislative Council, for not producing the documents as directed.
“I have spent five months trying to get this information out, and none of the excuses stack up”, Boyd said when presenting the motion. “The fact that our regulatory authority cannot produce this information when it is responsible for keeping children as young as nought to three years safe is incredibly worrying.”
The response from Minister for Education and Early Learning Prue Car so far has been to order an independent assessment with narrow terms of reference and no concrete time line, further kicking the can down the road.
Labor is reluctant to address the crisis in child care because it is committed to raising women’s participation in the workforce to fill skills and labour shortages. According to a 2023 report by the Women’s Economic Equality Taskforce, boosting women’s participation in the paid workforce by removing barriers, such as limited access to affordable child care, could add $128 billion to the economy. So, the government doesn’t have an interest in bringing the inadequacies of the sector to light, or to fund a robust regulator for that purpose, as this could interfere with its broader economic objectives. 
Given the documented superiority of publicly operated providers, an immediate solution to this crisis is to nationalise the sector to ensure the welfare and safety of children are the priority while significantly improving staff pay and working conditions. This would ensure that child care exists for public good rather than private wealth accumulation. 
However, Labor—like its Coalition counterpart—is committed to the idea that the market, with its competition between private providers, produces the best outcome, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary. Until this changes, children will continue to be placed at risk, educators will be underpaid and overworked, and the industry will remain a playground for private profiteering rather than a service that truly supports working parents and their children.

Clara da Costa-Reidel

Profits before children: The crisis in Australian child care

The entire political establishment has united in a smug, self-serving tirade against the Greens following the federal election. The indirect target is anyone who wants a more egalitarian country. 
The ABC’s Laura Tingle, who gets far too much credit from progressives, started the onslaught with her initial election summary, arguing that voters had “comprehensively rejected” the Greens’ “grievance politics”. This was despite the party’s national vote being more or less the same as three years ago. 
Sydney Morning Herald
chief political correspondent David Crowe blamed party leader Adam Bandt’s loss on his “hyperbolic and offensive” comments about the genocide in Gaza and his opposition (in rhetoric, rather than votes) to Labor’s (rubbish) environment and housing policies. Crowe also charged the Greens with backing “public protests that became platforms for antisemitism”, despite there being not a shred of evidence linking the mass Palestine solidarity campaign to antisemitism. 
In the Australian Financial Review, former ALP adviser and speechwriter Nick Dyrenfurth asserted without evidence that “voters came to associate Adam Bandt’s federal and state outfit with the corrosion of social cohesion and an explosion of antisemitism” and that the party’s vote (which, again, didn’t change substantially from the last election) “reflects a broader collapse of public trust in a party that increasingly prioritises performative activism over genuine progressive outcomes”.
The Guardian
published an opinion piece by Griffith University lecturer Paul Williams, who argued: “the Greens may need to temper some of its post-material aspirations with material economic relief”. This is despite the party running on a moderate social democratic program, which included wealth redistribution from rich to poor, more social services and an end to the rampant expansion of, and tax breaks for, the fossil fuel industry and other big capitalists. Williams cited the Greens’ support for Palestine as one of these “post-material aspirations”, as though electoral considerations ought to determine whether to oppose genocide.
Politicians joined the pile-on. Anthony Albanese clearly loathes the Greens more than his actual parliamentary opposition, the Liberal Party. The prime minister celebrated Max Chandler-Mather’s and Bandt’s seat losses more than Peter Dutton’s. Penny Wong also chimed in, arguing: “Australians rejected the politics of conflict and the politics of grievance”. 
The establishment’s hatred of the Greens came together neatly on the ABC’s election night panel, when Queensland LNP Senator James Mcgrath embarked on an unhinged rant:
“The Greens are a nasty, horrible, racist antisemitic party ... they are just horrible people. I’d happily take the Labor Party and, with all due respect, union thugs any day of the week compared to the Greens. They’re horrible people ... the ugly side of politics in Australia. They are a horrible political movement.”
Journalists Sarah Ferguson, David Speers, Annabel Crabb, Laura Tingle and Patricia Karvelas, and Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers sat quietly through the tirade without any pushback, apart from Crabb’s “there have been allegations on all sides about rival parties tearing down corflutes”. 
Imagine if Chalmers had called the Liberals a “nasty, horrible, racist, antisemitic party”. He would’ve been countered with outraged calls to maintain a “respectful dialogue” and been roundly denounced across media outlets for resorting to name calling. (As an aside, <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/world/london-mayor-sacks-australian-over-race-jibe-20080624-gdsj7z.html">McGrath was sacked as an adviser to Boris Johnson</a> in the UK after making racist remarks about the West Indian immigrant community.)
Among all detractors, the objective is the same: to present the Greens as out-of-touch fringe radicals. Yet the Greens’ most prominent policies are generally popular. Last year, Essential Research found that four in five Australians support dental costs being covered by Medicare—a core Greens policy. A 2023 Guardian Essential poll found that three in four believed rent increases should be capped to inflation or frozen until economic conditions improved. 
Also in 2023, two-thirds of the population supported a windfall profits tax on the oil and gas industry, and 59 percent supported a levy on fossil fuel exports to fund efforts to prepare for the consequences of climate change, according to the Australia Institute. A standards-meeting Lonergan Research poll commissioned by Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi found that a clear majority think universities and TAFE should be free and fully funded by the government.
This gets to the heart of the matter: the ruling class in Australia is united in opposition to the idea that the government should improve the living standards of the majority at the expense of the increasingly wealthy minority. And the political establishment of the ALP and the Liberal Party, along with their supporters in the media, is united in slavish service of the capitalists.
So, to the extent that the Greens tap into some of the broader social sentiments for wealth redistribution and curbs on unfettered markets, and question some of the ruling foreign policy priorities, the entire political and economic establishment is united against the party.
The ruling class, through its political apparatchiks, spent the better part of two decades smashing the Labor left—from Gough Whitlam’s intervention into the ALP’s left-controlled Victorian branch in 1970 to the ALP-ACTU Accords in the 1980s and early 1990s to crush militancy in the trade unions and introduce neoliberalism. The goal was to make Labor a more reliable “partner” of the bosses by eradicating any nagging internal opposition while making Australian capitalism more friendly to big business. 
It was a highly successful endeavour. As Rodney Cavalier, a former NSW state Labor minister, noted fifteen years ago in his book Power Crisis: “No force describable as a ‘left’ has engaged in active contest within the ALP over ideas, policies or a framework to respond to unfolding issues, since the mid-1980s”. 
With the left faction’s degeneration into a club with no purpose other than dividing the spoils of office among its parliamentary representatives, there was pretty much zero organised opposition within the ALP as government-run services were privatised, company taxes were lowered and housing became a lucrative means through which property investors made millions. The union movement was smashed with the complicity of the left officials, paving the way for a sharp rise in inequality. 
Yet in recent years, the Greens have grown in influence and shifted to the left, particularly in the lead-up to and after their 2022 lower house breakthrough. The party’s overt campaign message this year was that it would basically be a revived Labor left, summed up in the campaign slogan “Keep Dutton out and get Labor to act”. That is: make us part of a minority government so that we can force Labor to govern more like the olden days of social democracy. This is almost identical logic to the old Labor left argument that, to get a left-wing Labor government, you have to elect more left-aligned delegates to the national conference, get more left-aligned MPs, and thereby drag the whole party to the left.
No-one was more upset at the prospect of such a role for the Greens than the nominal Labor left—whose uselessness is exposed by the existence of a party with more left-social democratic policies than the ALP—and the broader establishment that it now serves. The message was clear: we worked long and hard to establish untrammelled capitalist rule, to dampen working-class expectations, to make Labor utterly subservient and to get rid of this niggling parliamentary left. There is no going back; we won’t cop a new left opposition after 40 years of neoliberalism.
That’s the political basis on which the major parties preferenced each other over Bandt’s party and on which a Liberal senator could say on national television that he prefers the ALP and “union thugs” to the Greens. There isn’t any serious opposition from Labor and the (mostly Labor-aligned) union leaders to the status quo. So the Liberals often do get along with them just fine.
Viewed in this light, the attacks on the Greens represent something much broader than hostility to one party. They show that the ruling class and its political and media servants won’t countenance the slightest shift to a more equal, less dog-eat-dog society.

Eleanor Morley

Why the establishment hates the Greens

The ALP and the Coalition have spent roughly equal time governing Australia in the last four decades. Several elections in that period have been politically meaningful. Yet, looking at society’s wealthiest people and the companies they run, election outcomes have been largely irrelevant to their fortunes.
No matter how you measure it—the income share of the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, the share of national income going to company profits, billionaire wealth as a share of the total economy—the fat cats have gotten fatter decade after decade, regardless of which party was in power.
In 1984, just after the Hawke Labor government took office, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population took home about one-quarter of all domestic income. Corporate revenues were about 21 percent of the annual gross domestic product (the total value of all the goods and services produced in Australia), and the wealth of the richest 200 Australians was 3.5 percent of GDP. 
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/np6GS-the-rich-have-gotten-richer-for-50-years.png" alt="" /></figure>
Reviewing Business Review Weekly estimates of ruling class accumulated wealth after almost a decade of federal Labor government in 1992, Matthew Eaton and Frank Stilwell wrote in the Journal of Australian Political Economy:
“Overall, the BRW data provides a striking picture of the private wealth amassed by corporate cowboys, paper entrepreneurs, wealthy families and the ‘captains of industry’ in the last decade ... [I]t shows the powerful tendency towards increased wealth concentration.”
That was just the start of it. By 2004, after twelve years of the ALP and eight years of the Coalition (give or take), the wealthiest 10 percent were taking home about one-third of all domestic income—a 30 percent increase in their share. The wealth of the richest 200 Australians was 8.4 percent of GDP—more than double their share in 1984.
After another twelve years of the Coalition and eight of the ALP (give or take), the wealth of the richest 200 Australians in 2024 was 27.3 percent of gross domestic product—more than triple the 2004 figure and eight times more than in 1984. Corporate revenues climbed perpetually as well. If you take 1975 as the starting point, they have gone from 15 percent of GDP to 27 percent—an 80 percent increase.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Billionaire-pigs-at-the-trough.png" alt="" /></figure>
According to the <a href="https://www.afr.com/rich-list/australia-s-10-richest-people-revealed-20240521-p5jfe4">Australian Financial Review</a>
(which took over publishing the rich list in 2017), the fortunes of the Rich 200 grew by more than 10 percent to $624.9 billion in the last twelve months of Labor in office. Even when accounting for inflation, the growth in the wealth of these people in just one year is more than the wealth the top 200 families of the early 1980s had accumulated in their entire lives.
To put the $624.9 billion figure in a different light: <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/monthly-employee-earnings-indicator/latest-release">the total wages earned by all 14.5 million people in the labour force across Australia</a> in the last six months is less than what the top 200 are worth.
It’s not just the super-wealthy and big corporations raking it in under the two-party system of Labor-Liberal governments. The upper-middle classes have also thrived.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/australia-s-property-casino.png" alt="" /></figure>
In the 21st century, residential property speculation has become one of the most reliable paths to riches among the wealthy layers below the billionaire class (although some billionaires, such as Harry Triguboff, Australia’s second richest person last year, have certainly built property empires as well).
Both the ALP and the Liberal Party have turned housing into a casino in which investors, on average, never lose. Real property prices have more than doubled since 2000. The biggest beneficiaries? The wealthiest 20 percent of the country, who “earned” three-quarters of the gains in investment property values between 2002 and 2022.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/nutso-property-boom-mainly-benefits-the-wealthy.png" alt="" /></figure>
So while the smashing defeat of Peter Dutton’s right-wing Coalition is a tremendous political victory, the ultra-wealthy who have increasingly accumulated the country’s wealth will not lose much sleep over the election result.
They know that, whoever is in office, the big winners will continue to be those with the biggest bank accounts.

Ben Hillier

The biggest winner of the federal election? Capitalists

If you’re as old as me (soon to be 45), you’ll remember setting up your first Hotmail account and choosing a super cool email address. Using lyrics from my favourite song (“32 flavors” by Ani DiFranco) seemed like a great idea at the time. The same goes for purplepingers, as I found out when I first met Jordan van den Lamb in a bar in Brunswick to suss out whether I wanted to lead his campaign team. He was gracious in answering the question that he’s been asked hundreds of times. It turns out that “purplepingers” was a high school gaming handle that stuck. 
As Karl Marx (roughly) said, the political challenge we faced was set by the circumstances we found ourselves in. As a founding member of the Victorian Socialists, I have been part of the party’s development. Last year, we won more than 70,000 votes in the local council elections and got a councillor elected in Bendigo. 
We’ve got some great policies, one measure of which is how many of them have been adopted by the Greens over the last few years. Most importantly, we have fantastic volunteers. At the core of the party are serious socialists. Many more are local activists, and plenty are enthusiastic young people who would do (allegedly) anything to tear capitalism to pieces with their bare hands. 
But since 2018, we’ve never had the opportunity to campaign with a candidate who had a following way beyond our limited socialist circles: a candidate bemoaned and/or celebrated as a TikTok influencer who set up a website to document “shit rentals” and found thousands of people eager to send in submissions (4,755 and counting).
As a Senate candidate, you need to win votes. So how do you get people concerned with the shit state of their rental properties or radical solutions to the housing crisis to vote for a party they’ve probably never heard of? And could we get these people involved in a socialist party as volunteers? How would we run a ground campaign across a territory the size of the UK and appeal to an electorate of 4.5 million people to put a 1 in the Victorian Socialists’ box on the Senate ballot paper?
Not afraid of a challenge, we set up the Pingers4Parliament website, and I chaired our first campaign committee on 8 October last year. After some serious discussions, we decided to organise a tour of the state to see whether we could meet real people and talk to them about socialism. The selection of locations for the tour was partly scientific (demographics, voting history, size of population), partly “vibes” (aka where could we go wild swimming after the meeting). Luckily, the alchemy worked. 
We started in Bendigo, where, with socialist Ned Kelly (aka VS councillor Owen Cosgriff) promoting the meeting, we had a turnout of more than 60, including 30 new to socialist politics. They may have been new to organised socialism, but they had clear ideas and were keen to share their experiences. 
The tour continued, visiting fifteen locations and attracting more than 750 participants. At all of the meetings, there was no shortage of contributions to the discussion. What should we be talking about at this election? I didn’t have to ask twice. 
In Castlemaine, a grandma worried about her grandchildren’s future living in a regional town where minimum-wage jobs and the explosion of Airbnbs mean that they will never be able to afford a rental. 
On a hot day in Ballarat, a local council worker talked about the failures of local “social” housing promises to deliver anything real. 
In Geelong, a young person described receiving a call that week about emergency accommodation—eight years after lodging their original claim.
We launched an “empty home crime scene” campaign to highlight (with bright yellow stickers) that the housing crisis is more about distribution than supply. The simple fact is that more empty homes exist than people experiencing homelessness. Jordan took part in a live online debate with Fiona Patten (now with Legalise Cannabis) and “bad Jordan” (the Libertarian candidate), during which we discovered that Legalise Cannabis has only one policy (no prizes for guessing it). 
Our volunteers did the time-consuming but vital work of delivering more than 700 yard signs and thousands of letters to the mailboxes of people who had never had the opportunity to vote for a socialist before. We hit our target of raising $25,000 in donations in two weeks. 
When the ABC broke an exclusive story featuring “Carol”, whose empty house had been moved into by squatters after Jordan listed the address online (with no connection found between those two facts), we finally had the opportunity to get some mainstream media coverage. 
When Albo described Jordan’s activism to address the housing crisis as “a disgrace”, a former Greens candidate suggested we send him a bouquet of flowers as a thank you. That night, Jordan went on The Project to defend his actions and suggest that building public housing would be a step in the right direction. More than 360,000 people watched the video. 
The evening before election day, we had the final training session for new volunteers. While we were hopeful Jordan’s social media reach would translate into votes, we also knew from previous elections how important it is to talk to people in person to convince them of the importance of putting us number one on the ballot. 
The centre was packed. One volunteer had driven nearly two hours to collect materials for a voting booth at which he would spend the next day on his own. Another new volunteer wanted to make sure they understood preferential voting so they could explain it to their friends and neighbours at their kids’ primary school booth. On election day, dozens of new volunteers set themselves up at booths from Warrnambool to Wonthaggi to campaign for a socialist senator. 
To each and every one of our volunteers: thank you! We know the steps we’ve taken are hard fought and small, but they matter. Now, more than ever, we need to rebuild a socialist opposition to capitalism. Let’s go and meet the next layer of people who can help us build it.

Roz Ward

Inside the Pingers campaign

Let’s take a moment to celebrate the downfall of the election’s biggest loser, Peter Dutton. Scott Morrison’s electoral loss in 2022 was the worst Liberal-National Party result for at least 70 years. Dutton has topped that, with a further swing away from the Coalition and the loss of at least a dozen more seats. The Liberal Party’s lower house representatives have been wiped out of many major Australian cities, and the entirety of Tasmania, the ACT and the NT.
Dutton says his hero and mentor is the conservative former PM John Howard. Dutton has managed to emulate none of Howard’s successes, only his final act of humiliation by losing his seat of Dickson, just as Howard lost Bennelong in 2007. In fact, Dutton has made history by becoming the first opposition leader to lose his own seat, suffering an 8 percent negative primary vote swing, more than twice as bad as his party’s terrible national average, and falling a whopping 12 percent short of Labor’s Ali France in two-party preferred terms.
Dutton praised his other hero, Donald Trump, as a “big thinker” after the US president announced his plan to ethnically cleanse Gaza. He suggested that he would be best-placed to have a cosy relationship with the far-right billionaire. But Dutton is such a loser that, after the election, Trump said he had “no idea” who Dutton even was. Sad.
On election night, Labor Treasurer Jim Chalmers said he did not “intend to dance on Peter Dutton’s grave”. That’s fine, because we don’t want to share the dance floor with Labor politicians who spent far too much of their last term dancing to Dutton’s tune. For everyone else, join us as Red Flag, Australia’s leading “hate media” outlet, leads us on this merry jig atop the corpse of the despicable career of Peter Dutton.
Dutton grew up in Brisbane and joined the Young Liberals at age 18. By 19, he was already running (and losing) as a Liberal candidate. He failed out of his business degree at Queensland University of Technology and, in a logical move for a human failure, joined the police force. He remained a cop for a decade, until he <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-11/federal-election-peter-dutton-ali-france-united-by-trauma/11057856">crashed</a> and rolled his unmarked Mazda 626 while on a stakeout outside a fast food restaurant. He then joined his father’s property development business, reportedly making more than $30 million in property transactions over the subsequent 35 years, making him one of Australia’s richest politicians. Dutton became a member of parliament in 2001.
His <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=375542584398963">maiden speech</a> in 2002 railed against our “over tolerant society” and the “politically correct”, singling out “the Civil Liberties Council, the Refugee Action Collective, and certainly the dictatorship of the trade union movement”. Under the Howard government, he championed attacks on civil liberties, welfare recipients and workers’ rights and justified the “war on terror”.
In 2015, after the Tony Abbott government tried (and failed) to dismantle the public health system and introduce compulsory fees for seeing a GP, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/jan/12/peter-dutton-ranked-as-worst-health-minister-in-35-years-in-poll-of-doctors">doctors voted Dutton</a> “the worst health minister in 35 years”.
Dutton’s whole political career was built on law-and-order scare campaigns and racism, while hating unions and ruling for the rich. This is hardly unique among right-wing politicians, but Dutton brought a certain zeal that marked him out even among his appalling colleagues as a sociopathic thug who dreamt of imprisoning or deporting half the population. He has been at the forefront of every racist campaign in Australia for a decade or more.
In 2008, Dutton boycotted parliament so he wouldn’t be present as the official government apology was delivered to the Aboriginal Stolen Generations. In 2023, he led the racist campaign against the Voice.
In 2018, Dutton railed against “Sudanese gangs” in Victoria and said Melburnians were afraid to go out to restaurants due to violence perpetrated by South Sudanese people. This year, he tried again, saying Melburnians were afraid to go to the shops due to crime. On both occasions, the Liberals subsequently got thumped.
Dutton once said that Lebanese Muslim migration to Australia had been “a mistake”. He cheered on Israel’s genocide in Gaza, threatened to deport anyone who protested against it, promised to introduce support for Israel as a condition of Australian citizenship and pledged to stop any refugees from Gaza coming to Australia.
Dutton’s time as immigration and home affairs ministers from 2014 to 2021 cemented his reputation as a sadistic authoritarian. During this time, he presided over a cruel regime of offshore concentration camps in which asylum seekers were indefinitely detained, abused, beaten, raped and vilified. In many ways, Peter Dutton helped pioneer the cruel treatment of refugees and immigrants that has since taken hold in Europe and the US.
Such was his reputation that Dutton had to wheel out his wife to reassure the public that he was, in fact, a human being and “not a monster”. The memes were glorious, perfectly balancing the menace that Dutton represented with the ridicule this potato-headed mediocrity deserved.
From failing business school, to rolling his police car, Dutton has now crashed the LNP and his own Temu Trump political career. We can only hope for a climate change-induced cyclone or a youth crime spree to destroy his property portfolio and complete the schadenfreude. 
While Dutton’s loss is a setback for hard right politics in Australia for now, the right and the far right are far from dead. The conditions that give rise to them, and the capitalist forces that back them, are alive and well all around the world. 
What’s more, almost everyone Dutton spent his career punching down on is also being punched under the newly elected Labor government. Our goal must be to turn this repudiation of Dutton into a repudiation of the similarly right-wing agenda pursued by Anthony Albanese, who himself covets his “warm” relationship with Donald Trump.

Josh Lees

Peter Dutton, a sad loser

Labor has won a smashing victory in the lower house and, with the backing of the Greens, looks set to control the Senate as well. The Coalition has done disastrously, losing its leader and scoring the lowest vote in its history. 
Peter Dutton—one of the last relics of the Howard government and one of humanity’s most embarrassing specimens—has been roundly defeated. He lost a record number of seats, including his own (the first opposition leader in history to do so). The main reason for Dutton’s drubbing was the comprehensive rebuking of Trump style politics in Australia. For all Dutton and his team tried to distance themselves from Trump, the association is just too organic to hide. This is the thug who relished locking up and torturing refugees as immigration minister under Tony Abbott, and as Home Affairs minister under Scott Morrison. He made his mark as opposition leader by whipping up anti-Aboriginal racism. 
Of course, it is a qualified victory. The right-wing Labor government is not going to defend workers, refugees or Indigenous people and, rather than living his days out in a cell on Nauru, Dutton will likely be gifted a lucrative corporate board position and become a Sky News commentator. But it is for good reason that so many people want to take a moment to celebrate this monster’s political failure.
The Liberals and Nationals needed to gain nineteen seats to win office; they lost fourteen. In the Senate, they are reduced to just 27 seats out of 76. Trends that became apparent in 2022 have only continued. The Coalition is increasingly a party of rural and regional Australia. No state escaped the carnage. It failed to advance in targeted outer suburban seats in Victoria and went backwards in Queensland. At the time of writing, it now holds no seats in Adelaide. In Melbourne, it has just three. In Tasmania, it was wiped out. 
The Liberals failed to make any ground against the teals, who now dominate traditionally blue-ribbon Liberal electorates in Sydney and Melbourne. In many cases, teals topped the polls rather than coming second and relying on preferences, as they did in 2022. 
It was not a good night for the Greens in the House of Representatives. They entered the contest with four seats and hoped to pick up four more. Instead, they will likely hold only two. Leader Adam Bandt, who previously appeared to have a lock on his seat of Melbourne, is fighting to stay an MP. In Brisbane, the Greens lost two of their three seats and one of their most high-profile figures, Max Chandler-Mather. Whatever criticisms socialists might have of the Greens, their loss of seats is a setback for progressive politics in Australia 
The Greens’ failure in the lower house was cause for celebration by the political class, who treated the party as a threat to the Lib-Lab consensus and were dreading a minority government dependent on Greens votes in the lower house. They said it would cause “instability”. They meant that the Greens might have held back some of the ALP’s more right-wing legislation in its second term. 
You only had to have witnessed Queensland LNP Senator James McGrath’s extraordinary spray at the Greens on the ABC’s election night coverage—in which he called them “a nasty, horrible, racist, antisemitic party” and got no push back from ALP treasurer Jim Chalmers nor any of the show’s hosts or panellists—to get some idea of the hostility the Greens arouse in the establishment.
Less reported than the Greens’ losses in the lower house is the party’s record-high Senate vote. The Greens will maintain Senate spots in every state. So, while the establishment wants to paint the Greens as beyond the pale and its lower house failure as an indictment of left-wing politics, more people than ever voted for the party.
The desire for a progressive alternative was also evident in the vote for the Victorian Socialists, who recorded a big jump in their vote in the Melbourne electorates of Cooper, Scullin and Fraser, while the Socialist Alliance also increased their vote in highly contested Wills. These are the best results for a clear socialist alternative for decades and were notched up in inner-city and mid-suburban booths. In multicultural, working-class Scullin, the Victorian Socialists scored between 15 and 20 percent of the vote in Thomastown, Epping Views and Campbellfield booths. 
Independent Arab and Muslim candidates backing Palestine also scored decent votes in Western Sydney, helping to break the stifling pro-Israel consensus of the major parties.
The other bright spot is the failure of the hard right to break out. Polls were suggesting One Nation could potentially win up to six Senate seats. It fell short. The party’s lower house primary vote went up partly at the expense of Clive Palmer, whose Trumpet of Patriots was more shambolic than its United Australia Party predecessor. But One Nation’s lower house vote increased by just over one percentage point, to 6.2 percent. 
In the Senate, it picked up one to two percentage points in most states, taking its vote to around 5-6 percent. The party might gain one or two extra spots, but its vote went backwards in Queensland. Given the Senate’s likely composition, One Nation will have zero leverage to pursue its racist agenda.
Explaining the results
The defining feature of the Albanese government’s first term was the dramatic drop in living standards: household disposable incomes fell to their lowest in a decade. Other government positions angered those who had hoped Labor might enact progressive change—the approvals of more coal and gas projects, the promises of massive spending on nuclear submarines and its do-nothing approach to the housing crisis, for example.
Beginning in late 2022, the government’s fortunes fell in the polls for two years. In the first few weeks of this year, though, the situation began to turn around. Several things have gone its way.
First, there has been some relief from the squeeze in living standards because of falling inflation, increased wages, the first interest rate cut in nearly five years and the prospect that more will follow. Unemployment remained low even as interest rates shot up in 2022-23, mitigating the worst effects of the cost-of-living crisis. There is a sense that things might finally be getting better.
Second, Labor was helped by the ruling class’s willingness to give it another go. Under the ALP, the economy continued to grow on the back of high immigration, the stock market and property prices climbed­—so the investor class did magnificently—and the fossil fuel industry, the banks and the supermarkets reaped super profits. Meanwhile, the prime minister attacked the construction division of the CFMEU, one of the few unions with a reputation for delivering higher wages for its members.
Third, Labor’s job ruling for the rich was made easier by the trade union leaders who sat back and watched as the cost-of-living crisis ravaged workers’ pay packets. The union leaders’ apathy was not because workers did not want to fight for higher wages. Time and again, workers voted to strike for inflation-busting wage increases, only for union leaders—many of them ALP-aligned—to accept some rotten deal that left workers further behind. 
Fourth, the Albanese government was helped by the uncharismatic, untalented and charmless political hacks who made up the Opposition front bench. Many were holdovers from the Morrison government, which voters enthusiastically dispatched only three years ago.
The Coalition did capitalise on government weakness for a while. In 2023, it began to reduce Labor’s early polling lead when Peter Dutton took up the fight against the Indigenous Voice to Parliament and defeated the referendum. Given the string of defeats of incumbent governments worldwide last year and the impact of the cost-of-living crisis, Dutton may have thought things would just fall into his lap. Instead, once the federal election approached, support for the Liberal leader began to evaporate. 
Dutton’s former Queensland cop/property investor/right-wing head kicker image may have warmed the hearts of Liberal loyalists but won him few friends elsewhere. Dutton promised an even more right-wing version of the unlamented Morrison government. If the cost of living was the most pressing issue for people, Dutton never made a convincing case for how he would address it. Anti-immigrant rhetoric may have poisoned the political atmosphere, but it wasn’t going to make Dutton prime minister. As public opinion hardened against the opposition leader, the media, who had given him a free ride, began to sharpen their criticisms.
Finally, there was Donald Trump. Trump has never been popular in Australia, and it didn’t take long in his second term for anti-Trump sentiment to revive. But Dutton initially seemed to believe Trump’s election would work for him. Albanese would be seen as out of favour with the White House, and Dutton, a fellow conservative, would be the man to cut deals with the new president. And so, Dutton described the US president as “a big thinker and deal maker ... shrewd”.
Fairly quickly, however, the Coalition realised that blindly following Trump would come with an electoral cost. So recent months have seen a consistent pattern of Dutton grabbing some element of Trumpism and then dropping it or shunting it to the sidelines—whether that be nuclear power, Jacinta Price’s DOGE-like government efficiency unit and her MAGA hat, scrapping working from home in the public service, or sacking tens of thousands of public servants. 
With two-thirds of respondents to a mid-April Resolve poll stating that Trump’s victory at the US election had been a bad outcome for Australia, Dutton’s identification with Trump seriously hurt the Coalition. It didn’t help him with the Liberals’ capitalist backers either. Few were enthused by Trump’s apparent determination to blow up trade with China, which the Albanese government had successfully restored after the Morrison government had sabotaged it. The ruling class didn’t love the Albanese government, but they opted for “better the devil you know”.
These broad trends came together at the election to demolish the Coalition. 
What can we expect from Albanese’s second term?
The Labor camp was overjoyed on election night. With a sizable majority government and a two-party preferred vote of nearly 55 percent, Albanese has been elevated to the ranks of Labor heroes, for now at least. But the rest of the country is hardly cheering; mostly, there is just relief that Dutton wasn’t elected. 
Labor has promised next to nothing to reverse the decade-long stagnation in living standards. All the things that have pissed off Labor supporters will continue—environmental vandalism, support for Israel, refusal to tackle tax breaks for the rich, rising inequality, denial of Aboriginal rights, billions for nuclear submarines and US bases and so on. The government will not say or do anything that will seriously antagonise business nor do anything to give workers the power to go on strike or fight for their rights.
Labor may have won, but Essential polling one week before the election showed that half the population believes Australia is on the wrong track, compared to less than a third who think it’s heading in the right direction.
This is all the more reason for the working class and oppressed to fight. 
The resistance we need means demonstrations and strikes that mobilise the working class where they have power. More than anything, if we are to push back against the sustained, decades-long ruling class attack on living standards, the working class must rediscover the strike weapon. 
But demonstrations and strikes rarely happen of their own accord. They need leadership. The problem is that the traditional organisations that might lead, most importantly the trade unions, have gone into hibernation. The union leaders’ refusal to call strikes has allowed the capitalists to grab more and more of the wealth produced by the working class. The Greens are no alternative either. They prioritise parliamentary games over campaigning.
We need to rebuild grassroots leadership that is not beholden to the ALP. Leaders who aren’t simply waiting for an appointment to a plum political position, as so many in the trade unions are. Leaders who aren’t compromised by dependence on government funding and contracts, as so many in the NGOs are. Leaders who resist all the arguments to go easy on the government for fear of giving the Coalition any advantage. Leaders who are serious about fighting for workers. That means we need more socialists agitating for class struggle, defiance and mass action, not polite lobbying.
A good place to start is joining the 24 May National Day of Protest demanding the government cut ties with Trump’s America. The protests have been called by Students for Palestine. They are backed by local Palestinian solidarity groups, the Independent and Peaceful Australia Network, the Campaign against Racism and Fascism and Labor against War. In this election, millions voted against a party identified with the Trump agenda. We need to turn that rejection of Trump into a movement on the streets.

Tom Bramble

Albanese triumphs but promises nothing for the working class

There are a lot of big political issues you might have expected to generate serious debate in this federal election. Rising sea levels, skyrocketing housing costs, global remilitarisation and historic levels of wealth inequality spring to mind. 
Instead, the campaign has been dominated by big headlines about the utterly mundane.
For instance, there’s the Teal independents vs. Liberals corflute wars. Ro Knox, Liberal candidate for Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, fired the opening shot when she accused sitting MP Allegra Spender’s campaign of sticking a poster over an image of an Israeli hostage family (Spender has since threatened to sue for defamation). 
The Sydney Morning Herald launched a detailed investigation, including analysing metadata from photos of said posters, to get to the bottom of the escalating dispute. This battle for the ages heated up when a grainy video emerged of three posh women using lipstick to deface a corflute of Teal MP Zali Stegall in Sydney’s Mosman. 
“It was Chanel! Why’d you let me do that?”, cried the first woman. 
“Oh, it doesn’t matter, do piggy things on her nose”, her friend replied. 
When Kooyong Teal MP Monique Ryan’s husband seized a campaign sign belonging to her Liberal rival, the incident received media coverage comparable to that of Trump’s tariffs. 
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s most media-saturated moments came when he fell off a stage and then spent a day bizarrely denying it (before presumably being told by his PR guy that this only made him look weirder), and when he tried to relate to the yoof in classic boomer dad style by saying the Coalition is “delulu with no solulu”. The cringe still reverberates weeks later. 
Liberal challenger Peter Dutton has also had a few moments in the spotlight. When he whacked a cameraman in the head with an errant kick of a football, the newspapers cleared their front pages. Melbourne’s Herald Sun
released a blow-by-blow account, imploring readers to “SEE THE PHOTOS, WATCH THE VIDEOS”. 
But of greatest interest to the media has been which taxpayer-funded mansion Dutton will live in should he win the top job: Sydney’s Kirribilli or Canberra’s Lodge? 
The first leaders’ debate was aptly described by satirical site The Chaser
as “a rare chance to see the two most boring men in the country squabble for an hour” and “a bid for both major parties to confirm their commitment to the leader of Australia, Rupert Murdoch”. 
It all seems kind of humorous, until you stop to think about it and realise it’s not funny at all. There are no substantial political differences, so the drama and the debate revolve around who’s better at holding steady on a stage, kicking a football or sabotaging an opponent’s plastic signage. 
And they’re pumped out by a corporate media all too happy to keep quiet on the fundamental issues facing most voters. To question the politicians seriously would mean questioning the current inequalities and injustices of Australian capitalism; good luck getting that headline past the Murdochs or Kerry Stokes.
When it comes to the cost of living, the only difference is a $5-per-week tax cut (Labor) or a 25-cent discount on a litre of petrol (Liberals). Both parties are in lockstep on protecting a housing market geared towards the bank balances of landlords, spending half a trillion dollars on nuclear-powered submarines, letting the fossil fuel companies ravage the environment and denying the humanity of refugees seeking safety. 
They’ve adopted the same campaign strategy: don’t rock the boat, i.e. don’t say anything that will piss off big business.
The boredom of this election campaign is contrasted with the dire need for a political alternative. Thankfully, socialists are trying to make that happen. The Victorian Socialists are running in four lower house seats and the Senate. 
With no attachment to or funding from corporate Australia, VS is implacably hostile to landlords, bosses and the political elite. The party’s program can be summed up as “people before profit”. The working class is getting screwed by rising living costs while the rich have never had it better, so we should redistribute wealth from the top to the bottom. With Trump in the White House and endless atrocities such as the genocide in Gaza, now is not the time to sit at home and despair but to go out and fight for a different kind of world.
In this election, vote socialist wherever you can, vote Greens before Labor (the Albanese government deserves a beating) and put the Liberals and right-wing micro parties last.
Socialists are not yet able to make a decisive stamp on the Australian political scene. But with declining support for the two major parties, there is an appetite for an alternative. The more people who get involved in fighting for that to be a socialist alternative, the better off we’ll all be.

An election campaign about nothing that matters

Looking through the Greens’ social media in recent weeks, you find many posts referring positively to the minority government the party formed with Labor PM Julia Gillard between 2010 and 2013. “The best parliaments are hung!” says one post featuring Sydney candidate Luc Velez. Gillard’s government was “one of the most productive parliaments in Australian history”, glows another published on the Australian Greens page. 
In a January interview with the Guardian, party leader Adam Bandt went so far as to argue that a new Labor-Greens coalition government could usher in “a golden era of progressive reform”. What better way to substantiate his claim than to recount the last time it happened? But was the Gillard experience really that wonderful? What did this “most productive” parliament deliver?
Gillard took an even more rightward course than her predecessor, Kevin Rudd. One of her first moves was to placate the mining industry by scrapping Rudd’s super-profits tax in favour of a watered-down Minerals Resource Rent Tax. Figures from the Parliamentary Budget Office from 2021 show that Gillard’s capitulation cost the government—and saved the mining industry—a whopping $33 billion between 2012 and 2020. Gina Rinehart’s newest Pilbara project was approved to sweeten the deal.
Cuts to services were another hallmark of the Gillard era. Despite its purported feminist credentials, the government slashed $700 million in welfare for single parents in 2012, lowering payments by $56 per week when children turned eight. This mainly affected impoverished single mothers. Despite announcing an “education revolution” ahead of the 2010 election, university funding suffered two rounds of cuts under Gillard: $1 billion in 2012 and a further $2.3 billion the following year. 
Even the NDIS, the flagship social program established by the Gillard government, has been riddled with problems. For one, it is a for-profit system based on private providers underwritten by tens of billions in government funding. Predictably, it has been a free money button for business owners wanting to make a buck off some of society’s most vulnerable. 
Also, Gillard was thoroughly conservative on social questions. Despite having majority support, she continued Labor’s opposition to marriage equality, arguing in a 2011 television interview that “for our culture, for our heritage, the Marriage Act and marriage being between a man and a woman has a special status”. The following year, she voted down a private members’ bill on the issue, sparking significant protests at Labor’s 2013 national conference.
Refugees perhaps suffered the most under Gillard. Soon after assuming the prime ministership, she announced the so-called East Timor solution—a plan to reopen mandatory offshore detention for refugees who arrive by boat. Refugee rights activists widely viewed the move as a return to the Howard-era “Pacific Solution”. 
This is the real record of the last Labor-Greens minority government. It was hardly a progressive paradise. 
What did the Greens win in exchange for propping up Gillard? Mostly, a series of commissions, committees, inquiries and some changes to parliamentary procedure. A suite of bureaucratic and non-binding measures that enabled Labor to do what it does best: talk about problems in a back room, commission a detailed report about them, and never have to act. The only substantial gain was dental being included in Medicare for under-18s, who today enjoy only partial coverage.
It’s a real reform. So it’s worth asking whether it was worth the compromise. Our society faces overlapping crises—climate, housing and cost of living, to name a few. Can we afford to limit our ambition to horse-trading on one issue for inaction on the others? Can the left win the radical change we need through a strategy premised on weighing up which oppressed group we can accept being thrown to the dogs in exchange for minor reforms somewhere else? Are these the heights we should aspire to? 
While they were not the architects of Gillard’s crimes, the Greens provided political support for them in government. Even when the Greens eventually decided to pull their backing for the increasingly unpopular Labor government in 2013, they still agreed to back supply and confidence, rendering the move functionally meaningless. Now, they are arguing for a repeat of the formula based on phoney receipts. 
Rather than facing up to the facts, the Australian Greens Instagram page talks up Gillard’s “mining tax legislation” and apparently “world-leading climate laws”. These are the same policies that saved extractive industries $33 billion in taxes. This sort of honest accounting complicates things if you want to convince progressive people to repeat the drama all over again.
Today, the Greens are approaching minority government with a shopping list of demands to negotiate with Labor. One social media post by WA Senator Jordon Steele-John spells it out. “It’s time to make way for a minority government where Greens hold the balance of power”, he writes. Only that way will we get dental into Medicare, proper funding of the NDIS, affordable housing, climate action, rent caps and other things. 
The Greens also entered 2010 with lofty ambitions—climate action, marriage equality, better treatment of refugees—and ended up reduced to the wagging tail of the Gillard government. We need to learn the lesson, not commit to repeating the same mistakes. Unfortunately, there’s no indication that the same compromises won’t come along with another minority government this time around. The Greens have already waved the white flag on housing and climate policy under Albanese. 
Resurrecting the corpse of the Gillard government has gone hand in hand with a quiet backpedalling on Gaza. As David Speers pointed out in a recent cross-examination of Bandt on the ABC’s Insiders, the Greens leader now avoids calling Albanese complicit in Israel’s massacre in Gaza. He is complicit. But it would be an awkward look for Bandt to accuse the man he wants to form a government with of being an accessory to genocide. 
It would also be awkward for The Greens to claim they will have significant housing policy wins by shacking up with the party that Greens housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather described in 2023 as “the political arm of the property industry”. 
This is one of the disagreements socialists have with the way the Greens go about politics. For all the accurate criticisms they may make of Labor, the Greens accept that the parameters for change are set by what a coalition with that same rotten party could achieve. Sadly, it’s the sort of politics that leads not just to one compromise, but to habitual compromise and, now, attempts to dress up, justify and replicate those compromises. This is precisely what the Greens are doing by peddling revisionist narratives about the Gillard years. 
Socialists campaigning in the federal election want to do things differently. We want to untether the left’s strategy from what a thoroughly right-wing Labor government is willing to agree to. We want to plant the flag for radical solutions to society’s problems—not as a bargaining chip to be traded in, but as a goal to fight for. 
Unless we build an alternative that is willing to stick to its guns, the left will constantly be pulled back into the orbit of what is tolerable to Labor.

Expanding the Victorian Socialists project

A HAFF is not a home

Profits before children: The crisis in Australian child care

Why the establishment hates the Greens

The biggest winner of the federal election? Capitalists

Inside the Pingers campaign

Peter Dutton, a sad loser

Albanese triumphs but promises nothing for the working class

An election campaign about nothing that matters

The Greens’ phoney history of the last minority government

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