As a socialist, I’ve always found elections to be somewhat depressing events. After all, whoever wins them, most of us lose. Billionaires and corporations can rest easy knowing that their power and profits are in safe hands, because the capitalist system will roll on unchallenged. For decades, their share of the world’s wealth has been steadily rising, while that of those who actually produce that wealth has been in steep decline. 
This palpably growing inequality is just one of the salient features of the world today. But we also face existential threats. The hideous ongoing wars in Palestine, Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar (and in the case of Palestine, genocide), have killed, maimed and displaced millions of people, with no end in sight. And there’s an increasing threat of a global war driven by the rivalry between US and China. Military spending is on the rise around the world, inevitably draining funds for the things people actually need. Australia’s alliance with the US—a solidly bipartisan affair—would make this country a prime target, thanks to the Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap, which provides crucial surveillance intelligence, and the US military bases dotted around the country. 
Catastrophic climate change is making parts of the world completely uninhabitable. In Australia, as elsewhere, supposedly “once in a generation” disasters such as major fires and floods are now regular occurrences. Yet governments of all persuasions have not only failed to do anything meaningful; they have continued to expand the extraction of fossil fuels. The much-touted goal of limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees is already a pipe dream.
Then there’s the running down of health, education and welfare services, assaults on the rights of migrants, women, LGBTI+ and other oppressed groups, the rise of racism and Islamophobia, and the increasing erosion of democratic rights such as freedom of speech and assembly; the list goes on. 
None of the major parties offers anything of substance to address these issues. At best, they will just tinker around the edges. You only need to look at what they’re offering in response to the cost-of-living crisis, the issue uppermost in most Australian voters’ minds. While more and more people are being forced into homelessness or having to choose between paying their rent or mortgage and putting food on the table, the Labor government promises a pathetic $5 per week tax cut and the Liberals a temporary cut to the petrol excise. At the same time, both parties shell out billions for a bunch of nuclear-powered submarines, continue to open and subsidise fossil fuel projects and hand buckets of money to private providers of aged and childcare services.
Their priorities and allegiances are crystal clear and demonstrate their contempt for working people and the poor. The old saying about the Roman emperor Nero, “fiddling while Rome burned”, springs to mind (although Nero wasn’t actually in Rome when the devastating fire broke out, and fiddles didn’t exist in AD 64). The phrase remains a metaphor for “someone insensitive or inattentive to a crisis”, which certainly applies to our parliamentary representatives. At best, they have stood by while a cost-of-living crisis driven by corporate profiteering has trashed the living standards of workers and the poor. For the most part, though, they’ve colluded in this process.
So yes, it’s hard to get excited about an election when you know nothing will really change for the better, and things will likely get worse for ordinary people. But if you live in Victoria, it’s different. Since 2018, it’s been possible to campaign and vote for Victorian Socialists candidates in state, federal and council elections. It’s been an exciting experience showing the potential to build a real alternative to the barely distinguishable major parties.
Attempting to lower our sights and aspirations, capitalist politicians and the media constantly try to convince us that radical change isn’t possible. Yet Australia is among the world’s richest countries, with more than enough wealth to fund affordable housing for all, boost welfare, and provide everyone with quality health care and education—the basics of a decent life. 
The problem is that the wealth is increasingly hoarded by a tiny minority at the top. In 1974, Australian workers received 56 percent of GDP in wages. Today it’s down to 48 percent, representing a massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. This rampant inequality is supported and enabled by politicians. In return for their high wages and multiple perks and privileges, they keep the system ticking along for their class. 
The Victorian Socialists project is based on the belief that working-class people—the vast majority of the population—can collectively challenge the power of the rich and build a society that looks after all those left behind. 
A key issue in this election is housing, which is an important factor in the cost-of-living crisis. Housing insecurity and homelessness are the result of a market-driven society organised around private ownership of residential property. The major parties fully concur with this state of affairs and are firmly in the pockets of the developers and landlords. 
Governments are destroying public housing, and since most parliamentary representatives own multiple properties, they are utterly opposed to measures that would lower property prices (ending negative gearing, capital gains tax discounts and similar rorts), or regulations to cap soaring rents. Victorian Socialists stand unequivocally for all those struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Secure, quality housing should be a right, not a money-making opportunity for the rich. 
That’s why we’re standing Jordan van den Lamb as a candidate for the Senate. Jordan (aka “purplepingers”) has built a significant following as the hero of renters and scourge of scumbag landlords via his website shitrentals.com. By running for the Senate, he hopes to take his online campaigning a step further, winning a broader audience and building an activist base to fight for the Victorian Socialists’ housing policies. These include Commonwealth funding for public housing, with the goal of building 1 million new units over the next decade and imposing a five-year freeze on rent increases. 
In addition, Victorian Socialists would tackle inequality and the cost of living by such measures as heavily taxing the ill-gotten gains of the rich. For example, by increasing company tax to 50 percent and making sure they actually pay it, ending tax breaks for property investors, cracking down on price-gouging and profiteering by supermarkets, energy companies etc., and significantly increasing the minimum wage and welfare payments. 
Historically, unions have played a crucial role in defending workers’ rights and living standards. But Australian unions today are in a parlous state; rather than mobilising workers to fight the bosses’ attacks, they put their resources into getting Labor re-elected. And they actively discourage strikes, our most important weapon. Victorian Socialists stands for rebuilding the fighting strength of our unions and for getting rid of anti-strike laws and other restrictions on workers’ ability to organise and fight for better wages and conditions.
The military alliance with the US has embroiled Australia in horrific wars against Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The bipartisan commitment to the alliance is largely behind Australia’s unwavering support for Israel, even as it commits genocide. And it puts Australia right in the firing line if the imperialist rivalry between the US and China escalates into open war. The best way to defend Australia from the threat of such a war is to break the alliance. That means not only scrapping AUKUS, but also shutting down Pine Gap and other US military installations. Victorian Socialists also calls for cutting military funding and redirecting it to shamefully underfunded areas such as health care, housing and education.
The demands of capitalism—the endless pursuit of profit and power—mean that the major parties are incapable of solving the problems that blight the lives and living standards of workers and the poor, even if they wanted to. In many countries, this failure has contributed to the growth of the far right and, along with it, increased racism and bigotry of all kinds. 
Capitalism benefits directly from oppression in all sorts of ways: the scandalous gender pay gap for women is just one example. But the indirect benefits of pitting ordinary people against each other, whether on grounds of ethnicity, gender or sexuality, are equally important. Divisions such as these help to prevent the collective unity we need to fight back against the bosses’ attacks. Standing up to all forms of bigotry—racism, attacks on women’s and trans rights etc.—is not only morally imperative, it is key to building working-class unity. 
These are just some of the policies that Victorian Socialists stands for (visit our website for more detail). But good policies are one thing, achieving them is another. Clearly, there’s no prospect of Victorian Socialists forming government. But that’s not the point. As the Irish civil rights leader Bernadette Devlin said when elected to the British parliament in 1969: “My function in life is not to be a politician in parliament: it is to get something done”.
For us, the main reason to contest elections is to build a movement from below. Victorian Socialists is attempting to broaden the horizons of politics by putting forward a vision of society that’s sharply at odds with the mainstream. Having even one elected representative would provide a voice and platform, not just to advocate for better policies, but primarily to organise resistance on the ground. History demonstrates that if we stand together, organise and fight back, we can win. To quote Devlin again, “Never underestimate the power of ordinary people to bring about extraordinary change”.
So in this election (at least in Victoria), you can vote for candidates who stand for fundamental social change: for Jordan van den Lamb in the Senate, for Victorian Socialists in Cooper, Fraser and Scullin, and for Socialist Alliance in Wills.
But ultimately, we don’t only need votes. Victorian Socialists’ good showing in previous elections is down to the activism, commitment and enthusiasm of our members. We want to broaden the audience for radical politics, and to do that we need more people committed to building a bigger socialist movement (not just in Victoria)—a movement that can keep fighting for a better deal for workers, no matter who is sitting in parliament.

Tess Lee Ack

Why you should vote for the Victorian Socialists

Another day, another round of baby kissing, hi-vis vests and soirees with rich potential donors for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Peter Dutton. Meanwhile, the string of crises and injustices affecting the lives of millions—from the rising cost of living to global warming, genocide in Gaza, inequality, military build-up and the fascistic rampage of Trump—is studiously avoided in this election campaign. 
There has been a marked turnaround in the polls from late 2024 to the election campaign. From Labor being well behind Dutton and hoping at best to cobble together a coalition to form government, some polls now suggest it could win a majority. Either way, there has been a clear swing away from Dutton’s Liberals. While this could all change by 3 May, it does partly reflect something positive—the unpopularity of Donald Trump in Australia.
It is not just that Liberal policies failed to land (or in some cases even to exist), but also that the association of Dutton with Trump, who even before the tariffs chaos was unpopular in Australia, has hurt the Coalition. 
And Trump is indeed very unpopular here. Australia Institute polling released on 4 March showed that more Australians (31 percent) saw Donald Trump as a greater threat to world peace than Russian President Vladimir Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping. Half of Australians think Trump’s election is a bad thing for the world, double the number who think it is a good thing.
It has taken the Coalition quite a while to recognise this. Initially, the Dutton camp made some minor gestures of differentiation from Trump; hence Dutton’s early disavowal of attacks on abortion rights and assurances that trans issues will not figure in this election. 
But like a dog returning to its vomit, Dutton couldn’t quite keep away from Trumpiness, whether promising our very own Musk-style DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) headed by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, or nominating health, education and the ABC as targets for its cuts. On the assumption that everyone was dying to drain the Canberra swamp, Dutton offered the mass sacking of 41,000 public servants, with those who survived being denied the right to work from home.
Since the election date was set, Dutton has been trying to pivot away from the Trump connection, largely by being an echo of Albanese. For example, ahead of the so-called “Liberation Day” tariff announcements, Albanese announced Australia’s pharmaceutical scheme, online news payment and biosecurity protocols were not up for negotiation. “Not on my watch”, he said, and was immediately echoed by Dutton.
Then, in the face of the unpopularity of mass sackings, Dutton backflipped on attacking public servants. One after another, Liberal candidates and campaign managers who turn out to be women-￹haters, Islamophobes and cookers of all kinds have had to be disendorsed or sacked. 
While it is positive that there is no appetite for Trump’s far-right, billionaire-first style of politics in Australia, the focus on Trump has given the major parties breathing room when it comes to their shared do-as-little-as-possible approach to the issue that matters the most to people in this election: the cost-of-living crisis. 
The 3 percent cheaper energy bills Dutton claims will be delivered by the Coalition’s energy policy equals a saving of roughly $50 to $70 a year for most east coast families according to the ABC, almost exactly the miserly household savings Labor has pledged through its tax cuts. Neither of these policies will make a significant difference to the difficulties facing working-class people.
Meanwhile, both parties are determined to hand $176 billion to corporate landlords and property investors over the next decade, and there is seemingly limitless bipartisan largesse available for military spending and subsidies to fossil fuel companies. 
Even though one or other will win the election and form government, the increasing decline in support for the major parties is likely to continue in this election. An aggregate of current polling produced by the Guardian
showed the primary votes share for Labor and the Coalition at 68.5 percent, an all-time low and the continuation of a long-term decline since the two parties claimed 98 percent of votes in 1951.
Nonetheless, both Labor and the Liberals have ruled out minority government or even negotiations with the Greens, something which only emphasises how right-wing Labor is, not that the Greens are some radical threat.
The Greens’ policies are better than Labor’s, especially on housing, renters’ rights and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. But they’ve also gone to water again and again in parliament, eventually waving through the useless Housing Australia Future Fund housing program and Labor’s meaningless emissions reduction target.
Worse, there has been a shift in the Greens’ messaging as the election has got nearer. This was really summed up in their press release of 28 March 2025: “Greens hit go on biggest ever national campaign for minority government”. Their electoral positioning—“Greens will keep Dutton out and get Labor to act”—has seen a marked reduction in attacks on Labor in favour of praising them for adopting some aspect of the Greens’ policies.
One sign of this shift is the Greens’ new defence policy, which, although it involves an overall reduction in military spending and the scrapping of AUKUS, nevertheless represents a shift within the party towards greater commitment to military spending and legitimisation of the Australian military and the future conflicts in which it may be a part. Why are the Greens suddenly doing this, having never before released “a formally costed policy to fund new military programs”? With electoral possibilities in the air, parties like the Greens that see parliament as the place where change is made need to prove their reasonableness as a potential partner in government. Showing that they accept a range of capitalist non-negotiables, such as the military, is part of that. It also fits in with the growing tide of Australian nationalism in response to Trump.
In this new era, revived Australian nationalism will likely come in a variety of forms. One will involve the attempt to rehabilitate the myth of an “independent” Australian military that only ever acts in self-defence, ignoring the history of Australian imperialism and the capitalist logic that underpins its alliance with the US. 
Another will take the form of patriotic consumption of locally made goods. The budget committed $20 million towards the government’s “Buy Australian” plan. Western Australian Labor Premier Roger Cook last month launched a “Made in WA” campaign, which he said would “put manufacturing back at the heart of the economy [and help] make more things in WA”. 
Yet another will take the form of overt class collaboration as Labor and union leaders promote sacrifice of wages and conditions for the salvation of Australian industry in a more hostile world market.
An inevitable accompaniment to rising nationalism during a drive to rearmament is repression and the demonisation of dissent. This has already been evident in relation to anti-democratic attacks and vilification of Palestine campaigners, as well as in the politically motivated claims about the supposed rise in antisemitism. Even the revelation that almost all the Sydney graffiti, arson and the infamous caravan were not the action of antisemites but a cynical attempt by organised criminals to try to reduce their sentences, has done little to dent this narrative.
A raft of new anti-protest laws has been passed federally and by some state governments. This is occurring in the context of a McCarthyite-style witch-hunt of Palestine supporters across media and educational and cultural institutions. The message is clear: if you are on the wrong side of Australia’s imperialist interests and those of its allies, you will be treated like a criminal.
This both builds on and fuels the wider law and order beat-up that is a feature of politics in almost every state. This offensive is directed first and foremost at Indigenous children, such as Queensland’s “adult crime, adult time” laws, as well as immigrant youth. 
All this cries out for resistance. Given that unions, even at only 13 percent membership, still have great social power to take a stand on these issues and many more, it is criminal that the union bureaucracy reduces them to foot soldiers for Labor in its various marginal seat campaigns.
On the campaign trail the only positive has been the left-wing hecklers who both leaders have faced, from campaigners against fossil fuels to opponents of the genocide of the Palestinians to Indigenous people keen to proclaim that Jacinta Nampijinpa Price does not speak for them.
And whatever the result of the election, the issues that animate the hecklers, and the desire to fight those issues, will remain. The hostility to Trump is important not just for its effect on the elections, but for its potential mobilising power in Australia as Trump’s and Musk’s outrages in the US strike a chord here. 
The cost of living remains for very good reason the main election issue for most workers, with the election coming on the back of a steep decline in living standards over the life of the Albanese Labor government. While prices are not rising as fast as they once were, workers and the poor are still burdened with the increases of the past two years. And for most, the prices of housing, food and health care have risen much more than their wages. Wages rose just over 10 percent between March 2022 and December 2024, while inflation rose more than 12 percent and many goods, including essentials such as housing and food, increased even more.
When even Peter Dutton can do it, it’s not enough just to acknowledge that “working families are doing it tough”. Neither major party mentions inequality, let alone offers to do anything about it, because that would draw attention to the fact that those they actually serve—Australia’s capitalists—are raking it in.
The wealth of the richest 200 Australians has risen from 8.4 percent of GDP in 2004 to 23.7 percent in 2024. Australia Institute research shows the gas corporations have paid zero royalties on over half (56 percent) of all gas exports. In fact, the government collects more revenue from HECS than it does from the petroleum resource rent tax.
There’s nothing inevitable about any of this. What’s on offer at the election isn’t a reflection of popular sentiment. Genocide, destroying the environment, far-right crazies and being ripped off by the rich aren’t inherently popular. Better funded health care, decent public housing and climate action are. But sentiment alone isn’t enough. Even voting for Victorian Socialists once every three years isn’t enough. Those sentiments and those votes need to be translated into socialist organisation that persists day in and day out, animated not by “put Liberals last” but by a desire to wipe out the whole profit-driven, crisis-ridden system.

Diane Fieldes

We deserve better than what Labor and Liberal offer

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

More than 300 people gathered at Brunswick Town Hall in Melbourne on Friday evening to launch the Victorian Socialists’ campaign for the federal election.
The party will contest four lower house seats in Victoria in the election on 3 May and run Jordan van den Lamb, aka purplepingers, for the Senate.
Hundreds of people have already been involved in the campaign, either by attending forums in Melbourne and regional towns or by helping to distribute letters, yard signs and socialist arguments to working-class people across the state.
Friday’s launch brought some of these people together, and many new faces, to hear our socialist platform for the federal election.
Kath Larkin, candidate for Cooper in Melbourne’s inner north, spoke at the launch about rising inequality and poverty. It’s an indictment that, in one of the wealthiest countries on Earth, demand for food banks and homelessness services is increasing.
The major parties don’t care about this pain; they’ve helped facilitate it. Under federal Labor, we’ve seen a massive transfer of wealth to the richest at the expense of workers’ living standards. 
Victorian Socialists are fighting to increase taxes on big businesses and the ultra-wealthy to take back what they’ve stolen and to pour that money into cost-of-living relief and public housing, healthcare and education. 
The housing crisis is the sharpest edge of Australia’s cost-of-living crisis. Evidence for this is the popularity, both online and at campaign forums, of van den Lamb, who has tapped into widespread discontent among renters with his “shit rentals” videos targeting dodgy landlords and developers. Speaking at the launch, he outlined a socialist solution to the housing crisis:
“We’re not here to beg for crumbs. We’re here to demand housing for all. We’re here to demand the empty homes be taken off speculators and distributed to the people who need them ... We’re here to fight for an end to this system that treats our homes like poker chips in a casino.” 
It’s this fighting anti-capitalist approach to politics that sets Victorian Socialists apart. We need to see more of it in parliament, not another do-nothing, pro-capitalist moderate.
Omar Hassan, candidate for Scullin in Melbourne’s outer north, spoke about the rise of the far right globally and the response we need in Australia. Labor is sucking up to Trump, while Dutton and the Liberals are seeking every opportunity to blame migrants for the problems we face. 
“It’s only socialists who know how to fight right-wingers, the far right and fascists”, he said. “All around the world we’re seeing that the mainstream cannot defeat the far right. Vote socialist to fight that scum—whether in the White House, or here in Australia.”
Despite the economic and political challenges, the mood was not despair but hope—and determination to fight for something better. 
“We know that society can be better”, said Jasmine Duff, candidate for Fraser in Melbourne’s west. “We can live in a world that puts people before profit. And that’s because working-class people have at their core the empathy and sense of solidarity that can make that world possible.”
Most hopeful of all is the feeling of standing alongside hundreds of people who aren’t going to accept the current state of politics. We’re going to fight in this election and beyond to force a much-needed socialist perspective into Australian politics that puts people before profits—on doorsteps, voting booths and wherever else we can get that message.

James Gallagher

‘We know that society can be better’: Victorian Socialists launch federal election campaign

No matter who wins the federal election on 3 May, most of us will lose. This election is about the rich vs. the poor, and both major parties are firmly in the camp of the former.
Since the Albanese government took office in May 2022, Australian workers have suffered their steepest decline in living standards in modern history. Household disposable income has dropped by 8 percent, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Every cent of real wage growth made in the 2010s has been obliterated. Property website Domain’s rental reports show that the median rent for a house in a capital city has increased by 26 percent. Those who took out the average mortgage for a new home were spending $2,218 to $2,694 on monthly repayments back in 2022—now they’re spending $4,096, according to ABS data.
Food is more expensive. Bills are more expensive. Clothes, shoes, flights, coffee, petrol, brunch: everything is more expensive.
Some, however, have done very well for themselves over the last three years. The 200 parasites who grace the Australian Financial Review’s Rich List have increased their combined wealth from $520 billion to $625 billion. That $105 billion is enough to wipe all outstanding HECS debt and have enough left over to raise the rate of welfare payments to $88 a day, lifting 2.3 million people—including 840,000 children—out of poverty. 
Instead, Australia’s billionaires have hoarded their wealth, grown their share portfolios and expanded their property holdings. An article about the luxury property market on the National Australia Bank website sums it up well: “Despite broader economic uncertainties, the high-end property segment remained largely insulated due to resilient demand in high-net-worth individuals”.
The Labor government has done basically nothing to try to rectify this startling rise in inequality. It handed out tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the rich and has refused to touch the generous concessions provided to landlords. “We’re not trying to bring down house prices”, Labor Housing Minister Clare O’Neil declared on ABC radio in November. At least she’s honest. Albanese’s solution to the housing crisis? Purchase a $4.3 million clifftop mansion with timber-lined cathedral ceilings and sparkling ocean views. 
Labor has allowed supermarkets, airlines and energy companies to price-gouge while dismissing calls to hit them with a super profits tax. The minuscule increases it has made to poverty-inducing welfare payments have been eaten up by inflation.
And there is no illusion that the Liberals would do anything differently. Peter Dutton proved where his loyalties lie when he flew to Sydney to attend a lavish fundraiser hosted by billionaire pub-and-club boss Justin Hemmes as Cyclone Alfred approached his hometown of Brisbane. A new mural hanging in the reception of Australia’s top billionaire Gina Rinehart’s Roy Hill mine depicts a banquet on her 70th birthday with Dutton seated next to the mining magnate herself. 
Now that the election campaign is well underway, what are the major parties offering to entice our vote? For Labor, it’s a $5-per-week tax cut. For the Liberals, it’s 25 cents off a litre of petrol. That’s the extent of the choice we have in this election.
While it’s pennies for us, billions are spent on the most odious industries. Both major parties have committed to doubling military spending, from about $50 billion in 2022 to $100 billion by 2034. Federal subsidies to fossil fuel companies totalled $14.5 billion in 2023-24, an increase of 31 percent on the $11.1 billion recorded in 2022-23, according to the Australia Institute think tank. 
We deserve much better than this. It’s no wonder that combined support for the major parties has been steadily falling over the last twenty years—in 2022, a third of all votes went to candidates not from Labor or the Coalition. But we also deserve better than what’s on offer from the existing minor parties and independents. 
A small chunk of the vote is going towards crackpot right-wingers who’d love to see a MAGA movement in Australia. The Teal independents are, broadly speaking, “lapsed Liberals” targeting the wealthiest electorates with a conservative economic framework and girl-boss energy. 
Then there’s the Greens, who had their best run yet in 2022. Across the board, their policies are better than Labor’s, and they’ve done some heavy lifting in calling out the government on the housing crisis, renters’ rights and Israel’s genocide in Gaza. But despite having the numbers to block shitty Labor policy in the Senate for the last three years, they’ve waved through some of the worst—from do-nothing housing programs to climate policy that ensures the continued destruction of the environment. 
Recently, the Greens announced that ending native forest logging will be a key demand put to Labor in negotiations to form a minority government following the upcoming election (no other “key demands” have been raised). Worthy as this is, it hardly gets to the heart of the assault on living standards, the fossil fuel industry, Labor’s brutal refugee policy or rising militarism. 
We need a socialist political alternative that takes on the major parties and fights for a world that puts people before profit. In Victoria, this means a vote for Victorian Socialists in selected lower house electorates, the Socialist Alliance’s Sue Bolton in the seat of Wills and Jordan van den Lamb (aka “purplepingers”) in the Senate. Elsewhere, vote socialist where possible. 
But we also need to get organised beyond the federal election—socialist activism is not a once-in-three-years activity. If the last three years has taught us anything, it’s that no-one is coming to save us but us.

Eleanor Morley

Labor and Liberals rule for the rich—we need a socialist alternative

1. Because the super-rich in Australia are taking the piss—and the piles of cash 
Back in 1983, the wealth of the hundred richest people in Australia totalled $3.2 billion. If that wealth had increased in line with inflation, today it would be nearly four times more—an obscene $12.5 billion. 
But this would be viewed as chickenfeed by today’s super-rich. The wealth of the one hundred richest people last year was 163 times greater than that of the richest 100 in 1983, according to the Australian Financial Review—an extraordinary $524 billion. 
If we include the AFR’s full annual “Rich List” of the 200 wealthiest people in the country, we get to $624 billion, 24.7 percent of Australia’s annual gross domestic product. 
To call this wealth “stratospheric” is a massive understatement. If piles of $100 notes were stacked up to the value of $624 billion, they would reach 878 kilometres into the sky: the stratosphere runs out after about 50 km. And as Red Flag
has <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/annual-rich-list-200-ugly-faces-australian-capitalism">pointed out</a> in the past, the wealth of the billionaires is only the very public tip of the iceberg of wealth that the capitalist class accumulates from the labour the rest of us perform.
If Gina Rinehart and Twiggy Forrest took a month off, or a year, their money would continue to accumulate. This is because it’s the work of others—in the mines these billionaires own, but also the vast network of communications, transport, education, finance and health, throughout the country and around the world—that creates the vast fortunes of the rich. So no-one would notice if Rinehart et al. dropped off the planet—but if enough of those workers stopped working for just a few days, the flow of wealth would stop stone cold dead. 
What’s the correct word for those who accumulate this sort of wealth from the labour of others? “Capitalists” is accurate. So is “parasites”. And it’s about time they faced a serious challenge.
2. Because the rest of us are sick of being ripped off
As Albo and his treasurer sprinkled a few crumbs on budget night to a standing ovation from Labor MPs, and most of the rest of us scratched our heads wondering just how we’ll spend our $5 weekly tax cut from the middle of next year, Victorian Socialists crunched the numbers. As our <a href="https://www.facebook.com/share/p/18g2mgZsmo/">budget reply</a> stated: 
“In 1974, Australian workers (aka the people who create all the wealth) received 55.9 percent of GDP in wages. Today it's 47.9 percent. If that share increased back to 1974 levels, it would mean workers would, collectively, be $220 billion better off (more than $15,000 per employee, per year). Keep that in mind when Labor politicians are spruiking $5 a week tax cuts, 5 cents off a pint of beer, or modest cuts to HECS debts.”
And imagine what we could do with that $220 billion—equivalent to around $10 per hour for every employee. Maybe we could take a well-deserved pay raise and a greater share of the wealth we create. Or maybe we could take some of that wealth back in the form of transformative public infrastructure. A massive new hospital costs <a href="https://www.vhba.vic.gov.au/health/hospitals/new-footscray-hospital">$1.5 billion</a> to build; <a href="https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/energy-transition-will-likely-need-400b-renewables-marshall-plan-20230719-p5dph9">official estimates</a> of what the country is spending on our criminally slow transition to a renewables-powered electricity grid are currently around $10 billion per year. You can work out the maths from there. 
3. Because housing for profit means people without homes
It’s obscene, but it’s true: as far as anyone can tell, there are more empty houses than homeless people in this country. On census night in 2021, there were a million empty houses in Australia—eight times the estimated number of people experiencing homelessness. 
Of course, even during the lockdowns of 2021 some homes would have been empty due to people travelling or visiting or being in hospital. But a much more conservative 2023 <a href="https://www.prosper.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Prosper_SpecVac11_July2024-web.pdf">estimate</a> by the think tank Prosper Australia found 27,000 houses in Victoria didn’t use any water at all for the entire year—so were almost certainly empty for the whole year. 
This pretty much matches the estimate of 30,000 people experiencing homelessness in Victoria right now. Prosper points out that another 70,000 houses appear to be entirely or very largely vacant, judging from a level of water use consistent with a couple of dripping taps, or a bit of watering from an occasional visiting gardener. 
Similarly, the Tenants Union of Tasmania has used water use data to <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-29/census-finds-1-million-empty-houses-amid-affordability-crisis/101190794">show</a> that 2,000 homes in that state have been unoccupied for three years or more—pretty much matching the official homelessness figure of 2,350. 
It’s no mystery why: there’s no profit to be made from matching empty houses with people who desperately need them. 
Many investors find it more convenient to leave a house empty while the value steadily rises, rather than renting it out as a home. The law of the land allows this outrageous situation, even encourages it through tax incentives. Property—and profits—are sacred, while people are left to sleep rough (or pay through the nose for a <a href="https://www.shitrentals.org/">shit rental</a>). 
The solution? Do what Victorian Socialists candidate Jordan van den Lamb (aka purplepingers) <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DHXkKUNTkya/?hl=en&amp;img_index=7">advocates</a>: take over houses left vacant for twelve months or more and use them as homes. And we should shift Australia’s construction sector to building public housing rather than ever glitzier shopping malls.
Once we remove the profit motive and organise ourselves to do what’s needed, everything becomes a whole lot simpler.
4. Because we need more strikes
There. We’ve said it. No-one else apart from the socialists are stating this blindingly obvious fact. 
If we don’t fight, we lose. The figures from recent decades show that, over the last few decades, the less we’ve fought, the more we’ve lost.
So while the mainstream parties either denounce industrial action, or perhaps drop in to a picket to murmur some polite nothings for a few minutes, or post an Instagram or two, socialists do our best to turn up, in numbers, when it matters most. 
One example was Victorian Socialists bringing a couple of hundred members and supporters to the pre-dawn picket line at Dandenong South in Melbourne during the Woolworths strike in December last year.
Other parties see parliament as the be-all and end-all of politics. In contrast, socialists want to use election campaigns and any representation we win to build active participation by ordinary people in activities that can actually change things: protests, activist campaigns and strikes.
5. Because bigotry and oppression: capitalism counts the cash 
Some of the benefits that capitalists get from sexism, racism and other forms of oppression are staring us in the face. 
A swathe of Australian employers get a massive cash discount on wages due to the gender pay gap. If we use Australian Bureau of Statistics <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/employee-earnings-and-hours-australia/latest-release#data-downloads">figures</a> for non-managerial employees, a gender pay gap of $4.10 per hour translates to a $700 million cash discount on wages for employers every week. This is more than $36.5 billion in discounted wages each year, straight to the bosses’ bottom line, due to sexism. 
Unpaid labour in the home to raise the next generation of workers, estimated at up to half of GDP, is disproportionately done by women—another handy cash benefit for the ruling elite, flowing from the sexist oppression that affects half the population. 
Other benefits for our rulers from bigotry and oppression are harder to measure exactly, but no less real for that. For instance, it’s hard to quantify the benefit the system gets from having young men buy into the foul, blatant sexism of Andrew Tate. Tate’s gross objectification and contempt for women is the central plank of his thoroughly dog-eat-dog world view. The point of life, according to Tate, is to be out for yourself: everyone else on the planet, and especially women, are just objects to be used. It’s impossible to put a dollar value on the benefit to the rich and powerful from this perfectly pro-capitalist world view being propagated—but it’s substantial.
Similarly with racism. It’d be a difficult task to calculate the “worth” to Australia’s bosses from having <a href="https://grattan.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Migrants-in-the-Australian-workforce.pdf">at least 7 percent</a> of Australia’s working class on some sort of inferior or insecure visa status, generally bound to their employers and therefore reluctant to speak up about <a href="https://www.migrantworkers.org.au/lives_in_limbo">wage theft</a>, health and safety or a punishing pace of work.
It’d be possible to put a dollar value on all the straight-up theft of land from Indigenous people (e.g. the estimated $700 million owed to the Gumatj people in the Northern Territory for a bauxite mine imposed on them in the 1960s, according to a recent High Court <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/14/high-court-native-title-ruling-may-affect-compensation-claims-nationwide-experts-say">decision</a>). But it’d be much harder to calculate a figure for the value our rulers derive from the racist political campaign drummed up against Aboriginal people around the Voice referendum—which has helped Dutton drive politics in this country in a more right-wing, dog-eat-dog direction, undermining solidarity to the benefit of the capitalist class.
Which gets us to Trump.
6. Because fuck Donald Trump and the horse he rode in on 
The modern world has never seen a more blatant example of the rule of the rich. The thirteen billionaires appointed to cabinet posts by President Trump are <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-net-worth-cabinet-billionaires-b2654841.html">reported</a> to be worth US$340 billion—more than the annual gross domestic product of well over 100 countries. 
This government by the obscenely rich, for the obscenely rich, tells us a lot about what capitalism, at its core, is all about. 
It’s about whipping up bigotry and fear. Just one example is the extraordinary US$215 million that Trump and his allies spent during last year’s presidential election campaign whipping up hatred against trans people—<a href="https://truthout.org/articles/republicans-spent-nearly-215m-on-tv-ads-attacking-trans-rights-this-election/">calculated</a> at US$143 for every trans person in the US. 
It’s about vicious anti-migrant politics and the repression of democratic rights: snatch squads from Immigration and Customs Enforcement stalk the streets of US cities, grabbing pro-Palestine activists and whoever else they can for deportation. University administrations and media outlets have rushed to drop any pretence of seeking the truth without fear or favour, in compliance with Trump’s directives.
Of course, a government of billionaires is about trashing workers’ rights: Trump’s <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/15/business/nlrb-trump-musk-workers/index.html">gutting</a> of the National Labor Relations Board is the start of rolling back the legal protections won by workers in the 1930s. This is a gift of love to Amazon owner Jeff Bezos (the second-richest person in the world), and to every other employer who has been troubled by their workers forming new unions in recent years.
And perhaps the most terrifying of all—behind the chaos of Trump’s economic and tariff policy is the cold hard logic of rebuilding US industry to rapidly prepare for war with the US’s fast-rising imperialist rival, China.
And in Australia? Billionaires like Gina Rinehart and Anthony Pratt love Trump just as much as their US counterparts. The Liberals want to copy as much of his agenda as they can. Labor can’t bring itself to make even token criticisms, sending Foreign Minister Penny Wong to applaud Trump and his billionaire sieg-heiling mates at the presidential inauguration. 
Why is this an argument to vote socialist? Because it’s only the socialists who say that every single one of these policies—and the whole system and logic behind them—have to be rejected. And it’s only the socialists who are consistent about building a politics of hope and resistance based on the one power that, throughout history, has shown itself capable of challenging the rule of the rich: ordinary people, and in particular workers—organised, mobilised and armed with radical politics. 
The world needs a socialist movement as a living, breathing, organising, fighting opposition to Trump and to the system he rode in on. 
This means plenty of hard work over the next five weeks, and far beyond. But <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/victorian-socialists-putting-socialism-on-the-political-map">putting socialism back on the political map</a> during the current campaign is an important contribution to the movement that we need.

Jerome Small

Six reasons to vote Socialist

Socialism is a state of affairs in which the working class governs society over the whole of the Earth. The people whose labour produces the vast bulk of the wealth— the people who build, operate and maintain the extraordinary productive network that spans our globe—will rule. 
As soon as we describe such a society, it’s clear that it will never come into existence by merely voting for it. Regardless of the outcome of elections, the Gina Rineharts, the Elon Musks, their political servants like Albo or partners like Trump and the totalitarian rulers of China, are not going to simply hand power to the billions of workers who work to create the wealth they control.
So if elections aren’t going to usher in socialism, what’s the point of socialists participating in them?
Measuring forces, building forces
Good ideas don’t just grow legs and start wandering around in the world, changing things for the better. History, for good and for ill, is made by organised political forces. Helping to build such a movement that can fight for socialism is one important reason for running electoral campaigns.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels talked about socialists participating in elections in order to “measure our forces”. This is good advice in general, but there’s not a great benefit in following it if our forces are small enough to fit into a single, not-very-large room. And more fundamentally, there’s something that isn’t quite captured by the idea of elections being a passive “measuring” of socialist forces or a “thermometer” of the class struggle, as Engels put it.
Part of the joy of Victorian Socialists is that the party involves enough dedicated socialist campaigners to actually win a credible vote. Most recently, we won 7.2 percent in the by-election in the Victorian state seat of Werribee, with booth results as high as 14 percent.
This matches our results from the 2022 Victorian state election. We won an average of 6.2 percent of votes in the eleven seats in Melbourne’s north (8 percent in Broadmeadows, 7.7 percent in Thomastown, and 8.1 percent in Brunswick), and 5 percent in the eleven seats in Melbourne’s west (including 6.6 percent in St Albans, 6.8 percent in Kororoit, and 9.3 percent in Footscray). In the upper house, we won more than 50,000 votes: our two main candidates won more primary votes than several successful upper house candidates in other parts of Victoria, though both of us missed out on a seat on preferences.
The fact that a socialist electoral project could win this sort of vote—the highest number of votes for a socialist outside of Labor since the 1940s—has been an important contribution to the project of hauling socialism off the margins of political life in this country and into the daily and weekly political discussions of many thousands of people.
Our federal campaign is now kicking off in earnest and is already clearly having the same effect—both through our campaign activities, and through engagement with many of those familiar with our excellent Senate candidate Jordan van den Lamb (aka Purplepingers), the scourge of every scumbag landlord through his shitrentals.org site.
All of our campaigning—letterboxing, doorknocking and talking with voters wherever we can—plays a role in normalising socialist campaigns and building support for socialist political positions. This activity also gives essential training for the campaigners themselves as we engage with all sorts of people with a listening ear and a socialist message of hope and resistance.
In other words, we run in election campaigns not just to “count our forces” but to build socialist political forces. Victorian Socialists has been quite successful in doing so, as the growth of the project—already by far the largest socialist political project in this country in decades—continues to show.
What would a socialist member of parliament do?
Victorian Socialists’ purpose in winning a parliamentary seat is not to be first in line for the daily buffet in the parliamentary dining room, nor to rain socialism down upon a grateful public. In keeping with a long-held socialist principle, our elected representatives will take only the wage of an average worker, with the rest going to build community and worker campaigns.
One of the main jobs of our elected representatives will be to build every act of workers’ struggle and collective resistance outside the parliament. And inside the parliament? We’ll be there to take on the major parties, not just to make pious speeches.
Though socialist MPs are a rarity in Australian history, we can get some idea of what’s possible from past practice.
Percy Brookfield was elected to the New South Wales parliament as the representative for the militant mining town of Broken Hill in 1917, during the greatest social and political revolt in Australia’s history. Expelled from Labor in 1919, he was re-elected as an independent in 1920 despite a statewide red scare against him.
Brookfield worked tirelessly to support the NSW general strike of 1917, and the epic eighteen-month “Big Strike” for shorter hours by 4,000 Broken Hill miners, which started in May 1919. He was outspoken in support of the Russian Revolution of October 1917 and was part of the discussions that led to the formation of the Communist Party of Australia.
In addition to building strikes and socialist organisations outside of parliament, Brookfield used his position in parliament to build the class struggle. He used parliamentary privilege to reveal how police had fabricated evidence against the IWW Twelve, members of the militant Industrial Workers of the World who had been jailed in a frame-up case.
When Labor needed his vote to stay in government after the 1920 election, Brookfield made his support conditional on Labor releasing the IWW Twelve and meeting the strikers’ demands for shorter hours in the ongoing Big Strike in Broken Hill. Both demands were achieved within six months—thanks to months and years of organising and struggle involving many thousands of people, and aided by Brookfield putting his political weight on the scales at a crucial time.
Two decades after Brookfield, in 1944 Fred Paterson became the only member of the Communist Party elected to a parliament in Australia. Paterson represented the seat of Bowen, south of Townsville, in the Queensland parliament. Bowen at this time included major coal centres, a large meatworks, sugar plantations, rail and ports—and twelve CPA branches.
Paterson was on the central strike committee of the massive Queensland rail strike, which started in February 1948, helping to coordinate the distribution of 850,000 leaflets supporting the strikers and visiting the pickets each day before attending parliament. When police tried to disperse the pickets, Paterson pointed to a loophole that allowed the pickets to remain as long as they kept moving.
The Queensland Labor government rammed an anti-strike law through parliament; they described it as the “Paterson bill” because it was designed to undermine the legal strategies he had advised. Paterson returned the compliment, describing the new law as “the greatest scab-herding strike-breaking piece of legislation ever introduced by a Labor government anywhere in Australia”.
On 17 March 1948, while observing workers being dispersed by the police, Paterson was bashed unconscious from behind by a cop. Paterson’s bashing sparked a Brisbane rally of 15,000 to 20,000 in support of the strikers. Protests, stop-works and meetings were held in Townsville, Bowen and Collinsville, and coal miners in NSW struck for 24 hours. The rail strike was settled a few weeks later, with the government conceding wage rises of 77 percent of the initial claim for trades workers and 95 percent for labourers.
Our short roll call of socialists outside of the Labor Party who have been elected to Australian parliaments should also include George Petersen. Petersen was part of a Trotskyist group when he became active in Labor Party politics in Wollongong and was elected to the NSW parliament in 1968. One of the most radical members of an Australian parliament, Petersen was an agitator for homosexual law reform, abortion law reform and prisoners’ rights. He used parliamentary privilege to expose the reign of terror exercised by guards in NSW prisons. Petersen campaigned to expose the frame-up of the alleged Hilton bombers in 1978 and was a staunch supporter of the Palestinian struggle.
Petersen worked closely with union members in the Illawarra, and his reminiscences contain plenty of thoughtful reflections. Petersen developed a political relationship with Brian Phipps, an electrician who was secretary of the Combined Mining Unions committee at Huntley Colliery in Petersen’s electorate of Illawarra. Petersen recalled of Phipps:
“He is a militant socialist and we worked together harmoniously for seventeen years promoting the cause of these workers, and, in return, receiving their total support ... I often thought that the relationship between Brian and me was the relationship I would like to have with all worker militants. That would have required me to be a member of a Leninist-type party, combining my work in a bourgeois parliament with that of fellow party members who occupied the same sort of position in the trade union movement as Brian did at Huntley Colliery. My great problem was that there was no such party to which I could belong.”
In 1987, Petersen voted against the Unsworth Labor government’s attacks on the NSW workers’ compensation scheme. Automatically excluded from the Labor caucus, Petersen contested his seat as an independent but lost despite a spirited campaign.
Of course, circumstances in Victoria in the 2020s differ in various ways from the examples above. Notably, the reformist and Stalinist political forces that dominated working-class politics for the past century have decayed or collapsed. For this reason at least, any newly elected, radical socialist MP will have to focus on building socialist political forces rather than just providing expression to pre-existing forces.
All of this lies in the future, along with the many challenges and opportunities that having a socialist MP will bring. In the meantime, no-one in Victorian Socialists plans to just sit around waiting for a socialist movement to rebuild itself. Rather, this is our central project.
Like many political campaigns and projects, Victorian Socialists includes revolutionaries (such as Socialist Alternative members) as well as non-revolutionaries who are just sick of Labor’s sell-outs, and many people engaging with socialist politics for the first time. We’re an electoral front in which no-one has to hide their politics and in which anyone who wants to help rebuild a socialist political current is welcome to join.
Our party program popularises socialist political positions—for the right to strike, for pulling out of the US alliance, for a punitive tax on billionaires to fund the services we need, for taking over empty houses to ease the housing crisis. Many of us are knee-deep in community campaigns, worker organising and other socialist political projects.
All of us are serious about fighting for the socialist future we need: joining Victorian Socialists and getting active is a positive contribution to that project.

Why do socialists run in elections?

The National Defence Strategic Review, released in 2023 by the federal government, notes “only a remote possibility of any power contemplating an invasion” of Australia. This is the federal government’s official position, formulated by, among others, Army Major General Richard Vagg and Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, a former head of the armed forces. 
It is astounding, then, that the Greens have launched <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/4-billion-sovereign-defence-capacity">a policy to develop Australia’s military-industrial base</a>, which would allocate $4 billion to “sovereign manufacturing capabilities” of drones and missiles, purportedly to “defend” Australia. When not even the military can outline a plausible scenario in which a foreign invasion threatens this continent, why are the Greens suddenly positioning themselves as defenders of the realm against an undefined enemy? 
Australian governments have a history of lying and fearmongering about national security threats. But they usually at least provide scenarios or statements capable of being critically evaluated, such as, “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction”. The Greens don’t offer even this level of phantom to critique.
Last year’s National Defence Strategy, which outlines the Defence Department’s evaluation of “security risks”, didn’t even mention the possibility of an invasion of Australia. But it did discuss the need for a military “more capable of the impactful projection” of power and for “a sovereign defence industrial base” to manufacture weapons and drones, among other things, to aid this “force projection” (otherwise known as invasion and interference operations in the Pacific and Southeast Asia). 
The Greens’ brains trust says its proposed military-industrial base reinvigoration will be used “for strictly defensive purposes only”—presumably unlike the similar-sounding military-industrial base the war hawks at Defence have proposed. Are the Greens really so naïve as to think that increased domestic military production capacity will not be used for force projection—the bread and butter of Australian statecraft since Federation? What will their next policy announcement be? A program to rebuild Australia’s derelict pubs “for purposes strictly related to sobriety”?
“We see this as the first step ... we don’t pretend this is the beginning and the end of the significant reorganisation required for Australia’s defence force”, Greens spokesperson David Shoebridge <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/4-billion-sovereign-defence-capacity">told ABC defence correspondent Andrew Greene</a> on the weekend. Greene noted that the party has never before released “a formally costed policy to fund new military programs”.
Responding to the announcement, Euan Graham, a director at the hawkish and pro-US Australian Strategic Policy Institute, told Sky News that the Greens’ “willingness to talk about increased defence spending and production” is a sign of “positive change” in the party.
Of course, it would be unfair to describe the Greens as a bunch of warmongers. The new policy, announced last Saturday, also calls to “decouple” the Australian armed forces from the US military and comes as the party <a href="https://greens.org.au/news/media-release/end-aukus">urges the federal government to withdraw from the AUKUS pact</a>, a military and technology-sharing partnership with the United States and the United Kingdom through which Australia will obtain a suite of nuclear submarines. 
The Greens propose funding social programs from the savings gained by scrapping the pact—some $70 billion over ten years. Further, the party’s policies would likely reduce Australia’s military spending by perhaps half a trillion dollars over several decades. 
Scrapping AUKUS is a supportable policy. But it is not particularly progressive, nor all that controversial. Even former foreign minister Bob Carr, and former PMs Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull have rubbished the pact. Indeed, sections of the old Labor right were the first to criticise it. Yet the key issue in all this is not the precise locations from which Australia’s military sources its weaponry or the price it pays to obtain its hardware. 
The Greens’ shift comes as we enter <a href="https://redflagnewsletter.substack.com/p/note-5-europes-military-spending" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">a period of global rearmament</a> in which two superpowers, China and the United States, are preparing for a confrontation. President Trump demands greater military spending by European members of the Western imperialist alliance and is shifting the US posture towards a range of states. 
In many cases, this has given militarism a new colour. Countries that fear losing Washington’s backing bow to Trump’s demands while selling the rearmament programs as some newfound independence. <a href="https://redflagnewsletter.substack.com/p/note-6-adam-tooze-and-the-liberal" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">It’s progressive liberalism’s imperial revenge</a>: build the military to resist the far-right ogres in the White House and in the Kremlin. 
The Greens have tapped into this sentiment to sell their own policy shift. In this context, they are floating with the tide when every left-wing organisation ought to be swimming against the current. 
First, they float along with the liberal conceit that decoupling rearmament programs from “Donald Trump’s military” (as the Greens press release refers to US imperialism) is progressive or “independent”—as though the Australian ruling class is qualitatively different from others around the world. 
Second, they float along with the China panic by proposing a significant boost to “defensive” military-industrial capacity when, in reality, Australia’s military force posture and structure are being aggressively reconfigured for a confrontation with China. 
The Greens say they oppose military operations that “threaten our neighbours”. But the AUKUS pact, the renewed Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, India, Japan and the United States, and Australia joining NATO as an “Indo-Pacific partner” are manifestations, rather than causes, of the underlying dynamic toward war in the western Pacific. While objectionable, these mini pacts are not the main thing. Nor is Donald Trump, the widespread distaste for whom the Greens are leveraging to build support for their military policy. 
Australia’s steadfast political alliance with the United States is far more important than its technical and logistical incorporation into US military planning. The alliance is foundational to Australia’s foreign affairs, not simply its defence policy. As such, the Greens’ talk about developing an “independent foreign policy” is risible when the party proposes little more than haggling around military procurement. So is the talk about “not threatening our neighbours”, which is a fantasy when Australia is a strategic base for and an unbending ally of US imperialism. <a href="https://greens.org.au/magazine/closepinegap-13-years-later">Former Senator Scott Ludlam understood this</a>. It’s not clear that David Shoebridge does—what’s his position on closing Pine Gap?
Without a commitment to breaking the US alliance in all its forms, expelling all US military forces from Australia, and dismantling all US intelligence-gathering installations, “peace”, “non-alignment”, “neighbourly respect” or other feel-good phrases are nothing but foreign policy bromides. Yet the Greens’ position is not to tear up the ANZUS treaty, considered the foundational document of the alliance, but to “renegotiate Australia’s position” within it.
Yet even a commitment to breaking the US alliance is not enough. Given the global dynamic, left-wing parties cannot settle for “detachment”. We have to fight against all manifestations of military aggression, whether they emanate from the new far-right aligned with Donald Trump or from the liberal alternatives. This is particularly true in imperialist countries such as Australia, which has joined criminal invasions or interfered in the domestic affairs of several countries in the region and beyond.
All this is too much for the Greens. Being tolerated as a “reasonable” party capable of forming government means accepting a range of capitalist non-negotiables, such as the state’s need for a competent military. “Self-defence” is the immediate argument to legitimise the new defence policy. But the party is probably also signalling that it should be considered a potential partner in the event of a hung parliament in the upcoming election.
To resist the new militarism and to prevent more war, we have to call bullshit on the rhetoric of “self-defence” used by governments to justify rocketing arms spending. And we have to build an international alliance of working-class and oppressed people—not an alliance of states and their rulers. On this front, the Greens’ new defence policy points in the wrong direction.

Ben Hillier

A criticism of the Greens’ defence policy

In a <a href="https://www.afp.gov.au/news-centre/media-statement/afp-deputy-commissioner-national-security-krissy-barrett-statement">bombshell press conference</a> on 10 March, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and NSW Police shredded the entire story that we have been fed about a supposed tsunami of antisemitism gripping society and leading to a wave of violent attacks on Jewish people and property. It has all been based on a pack of lies, a “criminal con job”.
For more than a month, attention has been focused on the discovery in January of a <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/dural-caravan-nsw-police-find-explosives-in-caravan-synagogue-targeted-20250130-p5l87g.html">caravan in Dural, Sydney, filled with explosives</a>. It was described as a terrorist plot targeting a synagogue. We now know that it wasn’t.
“Almost immediately, experienced investigators within the Joint Counter Terrorism Team believed that the caravan was part of a fabricated terrorism plot—essentially a criminal con job”, AFP Deputy Commissioner National Security Krissy Barrett said. “Today, I can reveal that the caravan was never going to cause a mass casualty event but instead was concocted by criminals who wanted to cause fear for personal benefit.” 
For this reason, the police never classified the caravan as a terrorism incident. But that didn’t stop the politicians. On 30 January, NSW Premier Chris Minns <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/radio-interview-abc-sydney-10">told ABC radio</a>: “This is the discovery of a potential mass casualty event. There’s only one way of calling it out and that is terrorism”. This is the exact opposite of what the police thought, in their own words, “almost immediately”. It is inconceivable that Minns did not know by this point that he was telling bald-faced lies. In the six weeks since, Minns has never corrected the record nor apologised for his dishonesty. 
In the same ABC interview, Anthony Albanese was asked, “Do you classify this as terrorism as well, prime minister?” He answered, “I certainly do. I agree with Chris Minns. It’s clearly designed to harm people, but it’s also designed to create fear in the community. And that is the very definition”. 
Except that the prime minister surely also knew that the police had immediate and serious doubts and believed it to be a “fake plot” with no plan nor prospect of the caravan or its cargo of 40-year-old explosives harming anyone.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton called it a “grave and sinister escalation in this insidious rise of unchecked antisemitism in our country”. He later <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/feb/06/australia-politics-news-live-labor-anti-hate-speech-laws-mandatory-sentences-federal-election-campaign-anthony-albanese-peter-dutton-ntwnfb">claimed</a> that it was “believed to be the biggest planned terrorist attack” in Australia’s history. 
None of this is true. 
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-11/burke-says-dutton-conned-by-caravan-hoax/105033778">accused</a> Dutton of deliberately avoiding police briefings so that he would have more freedom to “continue to make the most outrageous claims. He wanted to make sure that he could stoke the most fear”, Burke said. Dutton’s claims were outrageous, but so were those of Albanese and Minns, who cannot pretend they didn’t know the truth.
Beyond the caravan, the police said they believed all of the high-profile antisemitic attacks in recent times in Sydney, which have resulted in dozens of arrests under Operation Pearl, had a “common source” with the caravan plot. “The caravan job was orchestrated by the same individual or individuals that were orchestrating the Pearl incidents”, said NSW Police Deputy Commissioner David Hudson. “None of the individuals we have arrested during Pearl have displayed any form of antisemitic ideology”, he said.
This is an extraordinary revelation, although one that the police had been repeatedly theorising about in press statements for weeks. In the first press conference NSW police gave about the caravan, they speculated that it might be a “set-up”. This was ignored by politicians and the bulk of the media, who instead breathlessly reported that an antisemitic “terrorist” massacre “with a blast radius of 40 metres” had been imminent. 
Indeed, the biggest hoax has not been the one carried out by a few organised criminals looking for bargaining chips with the legal system. The main hoax, the biggest con job of all, has been carried out by the entire political and media establishment. They have cynically used this plot to whip up fear, suspicion and hatred for Muslims and Palestinians and the Palestine solidarity movement, to justify a hysterical witch-hunt and purge of Palestine supporters throughout many institutions, and to rush through a new set of draconian anti-protest laws.
This campaign was on full display at the recent Sky News
Antisemitism Summit, a conference of right-wing and far-right politicians, activists, media outlets and the pro-Israel lobby. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), Australia’s main pro-Israel lobby group, presented a <a href="https://www.ecaj.org.au/15-steps-to-defeat-antisemitism/">fifteen-point plan</a> for combating antisemitism, beginning with a call to “declare the existence of a National Emergency and establish a Joint Counter-Terrorism Taskforce [to] fight against antisemitic terror”. This was followed by a wish list of extreme censorship, attacks on free speech and the right to protest, and purges of pro-Palestine students and academics. 
ECAJ and other pro-Israel lobby groups, who routinely propagandise in support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and promote the dehumanisation of the Palestinian people, have been given tens of millions of dollars by the Australian government as part of its so-called campaign of combating antisemitism. Jewish organisations that are critical of Israel have not received a cent. 
The attempt to tie what has been confirmed as a criminal plot to the Palestine solidarity movement reached its zenith with the passing of a series of new <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/new-anti-protest-laws-target-opponents-of-genocide">anti-protest laws</a>, especially in NSW. The laws were justified with constant reference to the “antisemitic terror” gripping Australia. 
We now know that Minns, and at least several other senior ministers, clearly knew that they were rushing through these laws based on complete lies. Perhaps they were rushing to beat these revelations coming out. Not only were the attacks not motivated by antisemitism—being in fact, according to the police, a “criminal con job”. There was absolutely no link between these attacks and any protest activity.
Chris Minns must apologise to the people of NSW, and to the Palestine solidarity movement, for using lies and distortions to trample on our democratic rights. He should repeal these laws immediately, and he should resign.
Minns should also apologise to Jewish people in this state. Antisemitism is real and must be opposed, and the actions of these crooks caused legitimate fear among Jewish people. But Minns’ lies, along with those of the media and pro-Israel lobby, who have all made the most of this criminal hoax, have falsely portrayed these criminal acts as a result of a rising tide of antisemitism in society. 
They have deliberately exaggerated the threat posed to Jewish people in a reprehensible and cynical ploy to whip up fear in order to attack and silence opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They were, in effect, the accomplices in this entire hoax.

Josh Lees

The great antisemitism con job

This International Women’s Day, the Labor government has tried to reassure Australian women that things are moving in the right direction by pointing to all the ways it has supposedly made life better for us since 2022.
“This Government has achieved many firsts”, federal Minister for Women Katy Gallagher said in a press release on 3 March, “including the lowest gender pay gap, 11.5 percent, and a Federal Parliament with over 52 per cent women”. Similarly, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reminded women at an IWD breakfast that Labor had changed the single parent payment to help single mothers get by.
Awkwardly for Gallagher, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) reported that the gender pay gap in 2023-24 was actually 21.8 percent on average. The WGEA calculation includes base salary, overtime, bonuses and additional payments. It also accounts for part-time and casual work—categories in which women are disproportionately represented. According to its report, “this offers a more complete picture of the real remuneration differences between women and men in Australia”. 
Gallagher appears to have quoted the pay gap calculated by the Bureau of Statistics, which reports only base salaries for full-time employees, a much more limited statistic. But hey, why let accuracy get in the way of some election spin?
Single parents can now access support payments until their youngest child turns 14, up from 8. This is a welcome change given the cost-of-living crisis affecting many single mothers. However, let’s not forget that it was former Labor (and first woman) Prime Minister Julia Gillard who lowered it from age 16 in 2012. That the Labor party hasn’t even expanded the scheme back to 2012 levels doesn’t exactly make it an anti-sexist hero.
In New South Wales, public sector nurses have been campaigning for a 15 percent pay rise, taking strike action against the Labor state government. This overwhelmingly female-dominated workforce is among the lowest paid in the country. The union is specifically highlighting this fact in its fight with the government, linking the struggle to raise wages in the sector with addressing pay disparities between female- and male-dominated industries. 
Premier Chris Minns has so far refused to meet the pay demand, claiming there is not enough money in the budget to raise nurses’ salaries. However, Minns somehow found a few extra million down the back of the couch to raise police salaries by up to 40 percent. But don’t despair, ladies, this doesn’t mean that Minns isn’t absolutely dedicated to gender equality; for the first time ever, 50 percent of the NSW cabinet is made up of women! Slay.
If Labor was serious about increasing the standard of living for women in Australia, implementing measures to ease the housing crisis would make a huge difference. The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute highlighted in a <a href="https://www.ahuri.edu.au/analysis/brief/what-are-real-costs-australias-housing-crisis-women">brief</a> last year that lower weekly earnings translate into single women taking longer to save for a deposit on a home, being less likely to find an affordable rental, having less superannuation to pay for housing in retirement and facing a higher increased risk of homelessness than men. 
Labor has refused to cap or freeze rents, or abolish regressive tax concessions for wealthy investors. Its centrepiece housing policy, the Housing Australia Future Fund, involves a limited spend on social housing in partnership with private investors who are guaranteed to make a profit out of renting to low-income people, instead of directly investing in new, publicly owned affordable housing. 
And finally, the Labor government has refused to stand up to, or even blandly criticise, the new Trump administration, which is decked out with misogynists who are determined to claw women’s rights back to the 1950s.
Gallagher, Albanese and Minns would have us believe that a vote for Labor is a vote for women’s equality. But don’t be fooled. Labor governments, like their Liberal counterparts, are nothing but bad news for women.

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