Two absent figures loomed large at the Victorian Socialists state election launch on Saturday August 1, as the party kicked off what it claims will be the largest socialist campaign Australia has seen in decades.
The first was One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, whose rise will no doubt form part of every left-leaning party’s campaign at the November state election. One Nation, which is polling above 20% in Victoria, came up repeatedly in speeches and interviews, as speakers talked of the need to offer struggling voters a radical alternative to the far right.
“The status quo made it possible for someone like Pauline Hanson and the One Nation party to actually gain traction,” says Cranbourne candidate Reem Yunis, a Palestinian-Australian who has worked as a high school teacher here for 26 years. “I will fight tooth and nail to not allow that to happen.”
The second was a figure I recently wrote about for Deepcut, Democratic Socialist Mayor of NYC Zohran Mamdani, whose 2025 mayoral race victory has many hoping that socialism’s time has come. The Victorian Socialists certainly think so, with many citing Mamdani as inspiration and aspiration, evidence that socialism is gaining ground in response to the crises of capitalism. Mamdani, they argue, is a model for how to take on the right, not with centrist incrementalism but with a serious progressive offering.
Memberships growing
Party communications director James Plested says Mamdani “put the word socialism back in the mainstream”, noting their own membership has grown to around 2,200 members, up from 800 at the last state election. Many of the newer members are in their late 20s, says Plested, university graduates finding themselves unable to make ends meet and for whom the social contract is broken.
The Victorian Socialists (VS) registered with the VEC ahead of the 2018 election. The party’s vote has grown marginally since then, but remains below 2% statewide, with its best results in Broadmeadows, Brunswick, Footscray and the Northern Metropolitan Region at the 2022 poll.
VS also ran at the 2025 federal election, with Senate candidate Jordan van den Lamb (aka Purple Pingers) winning 1.54% of the vote in Victoria. The party has now launched chapters in every state and territory, though a move to change the AEC registration to the “Socialist Party” was rejected over its similarity to Socialist Alliance (VS, in which Socialist Alternative is the largest group, have reapplied as “The Australian Socialist Party”, and remain open to uniting with Socialist Alliance)*.
A cost-of-living focus
VS plans to run candidates, for the first time, in every seat and region in the November state election – no small task for what remains a relatively small grassroots party. Their ticketed campaign launch, however, was impressively packed, with around 700 people filling the Aboriginal Advancement League’s community hall on a cloudy Saturday afternoon.
On one side of the room, volunteers are selling copies of “A Socialist Manifesto” – a full-colour 48-page booklet outlining the party’s Victorian pitch – at $10 a pop, along with t-shirts ($35), hoodies ($50) and bucket hats ($25). On the other side, large print outs of the booklet’s pages are displayed over a series of pin boards, in what feels somewhat like a campus orientation event.
The “Socialist Manifesto” lists clear policies, many of which echo Mamdani’s. Plans include a “25% rent cut for all residential tenancies followed by a rent freeze for five years”, a “publicly owned and run construction firm to build energy-efficient public housing”, and a “state bank offering low interest rates to working-class households”.
There is a Mamdani-esque proposal for publicly-owned cost-price food hubs, as well as making supermarkets introduce a “$100 trolley scheme”. A mandate to ensure sporting matches are shown on free-to-air TV sits between “free public transport” and “moving to a four-day work week”, while there is a page dedicated to how they would raise funds, including a 10% billionaire wealth tax and a 5% luxury property tax on the top 1% of residences.
It’s a solidly progressive platform that might have added appeal during a cost-of-living crisis, assuming the group can actually reach those they need to speak to.
Searching for charisma
The candidates – who are mostly on the younger side – don’t speak with the polish or charisma of Mamdani (at 34, Mamdani is also young, but offers a highly professional image of a socialist). The crowd is not dissimilar to a university campus event, with black-clad attendees proselytising about socialism to their fellow ticketholders.
For some attendees of the launch, this is about winning a seat at the table with a potential vote in the wild parliament November might produce; for others this is merely part of a larger project to build a mass socialist movement – a point van den Lamb made when I previously spoke to him about his 2025 Senate run.
It doesn’t feel like a group on the crux of launching a broader movement, despite plans to run a large-scale election campaign, though early iterations of the Democratic Socialists of America were said to have similarly ragtag vibes. Where DSA succeeded was transforming their grassroots movement into something larger, finding ways to speak to the marginalised and break out of their smaller community of ideological adherents.
Plested says VS has more than 100 people signed up to campaign in the focus seat of Footscray. The candidate, Jasmine Duff, gives one of three keynote speeches, and receives the most rapturous applause of the launch. Niddrie candidate Brendan Laws, meanwhile, repeatedly refers to his Labor opponent Ben Carroll as Victoria’s new “premiere” – an unfortunately side effect of his American accent, though his work as a public high school teacher gives him a solid platform from which to criticise the former education minister.
It’s fair to say the left has never been short of policy ideas that would demonstrably improve the lives of working people. Where it has often struggled is finding charismatic messengers to convey those policies to a wider electorate, and cut through the nonsense political attacks that are sure to follow – a problem that Mamdani, and now Michigan Democratic primary winner Abdul el-Sayed, seem to have overcome.
Democratic socialism no doubt has a renewed appeal in Victoria, Australia, and around the world. The question remains as to whether the Victorian Socialists can sell it, while remaining true to their radical roots.
*Correction: Clarification added regarding an AEC name change application and the party’s relationship with Socialist Alternative and Socialist Alliance.
This is a fairly honest and accurate account. However, what is not adequately described is the pervasive optimism and enthusiasm of a party that has mobilised and inspired a younger generation.
And it has done that for me as well, and I am decades older than most members. I was a teenager at the end of the Vietnam war.
The platform lacks polish. The party machiney is under done, but overcomes the fact that there are no billionaires or comfortable boomers donating funds with some savvy use of digital tech and volunteers. The party is not accountable to any interest groups except its members and the people of Victoria. It is not weighed down with the polite civility of the Greens middle class base.
Its growing whilst other parties (except ON are stagnant).
Main stream media willfully ignores the party's' existence, but I expect that will be replaced with the usual deluge of garbage criticism once the numbers start to be significant.
Good article. I am perpetually of the hope a socialist group (VicSoc, Socialist Alliance) can break through to the masses, but getting past some of the more stupol-ly elements of a small socialist party (minor quibbles blowing up, personality conflicts) is a challenge, it seems. Plus it's not a leftist group if it's not on the verge of fracturing every couple weeks 😉
Good on VS for trying to grow their ground presence and getting people for all the state election positions. Here's hoping that they get a couple people in, and if not, are at least able to spread the word that there's an alternative to the right wing populism that has infected a lot of the world right now. It's an uphill battle with horrible rich people funding the white supremacists.