Posted on Monday, 5 May
Congratulations and thank you to the around 2,000 volunteers who were part of our 2025 federal election campaign!
We handed out or letterboxed 600,000 leaflets and put up 1,500 yard signs. We knocked on more than 10,000 doors and talked with literally thousands of voters on the booths yesterday with our message of rage, hope and resistance.
As we explain below, the unprecedented reach of our campaign represents a solid step forward for Victorian Socialists’ project of pulling socialism off the margins of political life and introducing it into the daily and weekly political discussions of many tens of thousands of people. The extent of our campaign, as well as our strong results, opens up possibilities for consolidating and expanding our project which we’ll be assessing in the weeks ahead.
We want every member and supporter to be a part of this!
There’s never been a better time to join
We’re delighted to see Peter Dutton, his appalling party and every Trump enthusiast in the country reduced to a pathetic loserish rabble. Their dreams of surfing to victory on a wave of utterly reactionary sewage has turned into a Saturday night and Sunday morning of weeping, wailing, and pathetic right wing whining.
Great, great, great. The Liberals are down to their lowest ever seat count, and Dutton himself was dumped with a swing of over 8%. We love it.
Of course, this still leaves us with the task of fighting Labor. The party which has presided over a historic cut to working-class living standards; which has helped enable the Gaza genocide and then lied about it; and which has betrayed thousands of refugees left in limbo under their 'fast track' process. The party that is merrily expanding the fossil fuel industry even as historic floods in Queensland put an area twice the size of Victoria under water; the party that has paid the first $800 million to Trump’s administration as a down payment on nuclear-powered attack submarines for Australia – this party is back in power.
And of course, last night’s result still leaves intact the system which produces all these horrors in the first place. Just as well, then, that we’ve spent the past few weeks and months – and especially yesterday – building a political alternative to all that: Victorian Socialists.
So how did we go?
In Bendigo, a plucky group of campaigners around Vic Socialists’ local councillor Owen Cosgriff set off to contest a federal election for a socialist candidate – Rohan Tyler – for the first time in decades. They won 4.8% of the vote at the Castlemaine booth, 7.8% at Castlemaine South, and 4.7% at the large Golden Square booth in Bendigo itself.
At close of counting last night Rohan was on 1.8% across the electorate. The campaign has succeeded both in cohering a budding group of Bendigo socialists, and building a platform for future campaigns.
In Cooper, Victorian Socialists’ Kath Larkin was on a remarkable 9.4% of the vote as of early this morning. By comparison, our Cooper vote at this point in the count in 2022 was 3.9%. So 9.4% is a very, very solid result.
Seventeen booths in Cooper reported votes of 10% or more for Kath yesterday, including 16.5% in Preston South and 15.3% at Thornbury. The team blitzed it at the massive Northcote early voting booth, winning 8.9% of the 17,948 votes cast. At Preston early voting 10.1% of the 13,049 voters cast a vote for Kath.
In Wills, Victorian Socialists volunteers supported Sue Bolton’s campaign for the Socialist Alliance. Sue is on a very creditable 8.7% of the vote overnight.
This includes fourteen booths with a vote of more than 10%, peaking at 13.6% in Fawkner, Sue’s local council ward. At the Brunswick prepoll centre, 11.3% of 17,771 voters cast their ballot for Sue. This compares with a final combined vote of 6.4% for Vic Socialists and the Socialist Alliance in the 2022 election, so a significant uptick.
In Fraser, Jasmine Duff is currently on 6.8% with all early votes counted, a substantial step up from the 4.8% we won in Fraser in 2022. We won a terrific 9.1% of all votes cast in Fraser yesterday. At Footscray Central booth we won 18.8% of yesterday’s first preference votes, and 18% at Footscray South.
Of the 13,125 people who voted over two weeks at the Footscray early voting centre, 8.8% voted for Jasmine. We won 5.5% at the massive Sunshine early voting booth, another very creditable result.
In Scullin, Omar Hassan is on 7.4%. This is more than double our 2022 result, where we only campaigned in part of the seat. Yesterday we won more than 10% of the vote at fifteen booths, peaking at 19.6% in Campbellfield and 17.4% at Epping Views.
We scored more votes than the Liberals in all four Thomastown booths, and won a creditable 7% of the vote at Epping early voting, the biggest booth in the district.
When we get to the Senate, a bit of context is needed. Even parties with a much higher name recognition than us can struggle to make an impact across the entirety of Victoria. Building a network of members and supporters who can hand out how-to-votes at polling booths across the state, looking voters in the eye and trying to win a few votes, is a massive task.
Jordan van den Lamb’s candidacy has been crucial in helping Victorian Socialists take some important steps forward on this task, as we explain below – which is at least as important for the long term as the voting results achieved in this campaign.
As of early this morning, out of the twenty registered tickets running in the Senate Victoria (as well as eight ungrouped candidates), Victorian Socialists is sitting in seventh place on 2% of the vote.
Labor, Liberal and the Greens – as the only parties with both name recognition and an established state-wide party apparatus – are way ahead of us. Out of the others, we’re sitting behind One Nation (4.4%), Legalise Cannabis (4.3%) and the appalling Trumpet of Patriots (2.5%). This puts us ahead of the Libertarians (0.7%), Sustainable Australia (0.3%), the Shooters Fishers and Farmers (1.2%), Animal Justice (1.5%) and Fatima Payman’s Australia’s Voice party (1.2%).
Of course, where we have an established presence and active campaigners, we do much better than this average suggests. In Scullin we’ve won 4.6% of the Senate votes counted. Our Senate vote is currently 7.9% in Fraser, 8.7% in Wills, and a wonderful 9.1% in Cooper.
Which brings us to some further points.
We’re proud of these results. They are actually really great for a minor party, especially given we’re only a few years into building what has previously been a totally marginal electoral current.
They are a huge credit to all of our campaigners, a credit to every conversation had and every supporter who helped out in any way. These results are proof, if any more was needed, that Victorian Socialists is no flash in the pan; that many thousands of working-class people and others can be won to socialist politics; that our vision of a living, breathing, mass socialist movement in this country is not just a remote dream but a realistic prospect for us to work towards in the months and years ahead.
However it’s important to realise that the results themselves don’t fully capture some of the crucial aspects of our campaign which have set us up for further advances.
First, the sheer reach of Victorian Socialists in this election campaign was unprecedented – thanks both to the solid foundation built by previous campaigns, and the wonderful addition of this country’s most high-profile housing activist, Jordan van den Lamb, as our Senate candidate.
To have socialist ideas discussed on Abbie Chatfield’s podcast; to have our formerly Greens-voting relatives realise via Build A Ballot that their politics actually aligns with Victorian Socialists; to have our lead Senate candidate go viral, sticking to his guns after being personally denounced by the Prime Minister – all of this made our campaign the most high-profile socialist political campaign in this country in decades.
Second, this increased profile for Victorian Socialists is reflected not just in new and old media, but in the geographical spread of our party.When was the last time a small but serious socialist campaign won up to 7.8% on a booth in regional Victoria? Has there ever been a socialist meeting of dozens in Ringwood? Or a cluster of serious socialist campaigners in Box Hill?
We’re not sure of the last time when plucky individual socialist campaigners were toughing it out on election day in Victorian towns from Warrnambool to Wonthaggi – building a small but real foundation with each leaflet and each conversation. Ballarat has socialism woven into its working-class history – but to have a group of campaigners start on the challenge of building socialism as a living political current in a major regional centre is a totally different – and really wonderful – thing.
Third, and related: our party is now able to conduct campaigns at scale– involving not just dozens or hundreds of activists but thousands of us. Of course, relative to the size of the task we’ve set ourselves – no less than “a ‘radical reorganisation of society’ in the areas of wealth inequality, housing and workers’ rights” as the Age put it recently, quoting our party platform – our forces are still very small. But relative to the scale of socialist political campaigning which has been possible in this country for decades, we’ve taken some major steps forward with this campaign.
For many of us who have been part of the socialist movement for years or decades, it’s quite breathtaking to see and be part of such a large-scale campaign, capable of engaging with thousands of working-class people and many others about the politics of hope and rage and resistance and working class power – in other words, the politics of socialism.
This opens up the obvious question: where to next?
We’ve got nearly 2,000 people who have been part of something big. We’ve got thousands more who have supported our campaign in different ways – voting for us, donating, talking us up with their friends and on social media. We’ve got a party infrastructure capable of coordinating us into a campaign that can win tens of thousands of people to support socialist political positions. We’ve got people literally around the country looking at what we’ve built in Victoria.
We don’t have a ready-made answer (or series of answers, more likely) to this question of next steps. And of course, our future steps will be a matter of discussion and decision for every member of Victorian Socialists – including at our annual conference, to be organised in coming weeks. But we can guarantee that we won’t be resting on our laurels. Our campaign debriefs are a great place to start and continue the conversations.
There will be plenty more sifting through the results in coming days – both in terms of Victorian Socialists’ results, and the election as a whole. There’ll be plenty of gloating at the sudden and very welcome demise of the despicable potato-head reactionary and his wannabe-Trump gang. And plenty of crucial fights to continue and prepare for under Labor’s dismal regime.
But for now, every single member and supporter of Victorian Socialists should have a spring in their step, for once again taking another solid step forward for the task of building a living, breathing, fighting, organising, winning socialist movement which can transform politics in this country.
There are far, far too many stories to tell from our campaign than can be told here. Anyone who campaigned for us will have their favourite stories. Of warehouse workers who remember Victorian Socialists’ role supporting the Woolworths strike; people full of rage at the sickening onslaught on Gaza, and glad to find a party that publicly opposes Israel’s genocide (on each one of our 600,000 leaflets); working-class and poor people delighted to find a party which campaigns to save public housing rather than using 'public housing' as a swear word.
We’ll finish (for now) with this story from our campaigner Holly, at a booth in Cooper yesterday:
“This is Chris. He's been a unionist and Labor voter his whole life, first ETU and now UFUA. I stopped him to chat, he'd never heard of us before.
“I talked about the need to rebuild the union movement in Aus, he didn't say much but was smiling. I told him about Kath’s unionism and explained that my parents were unionists when he asked how I got into politics.
“He said 'can I tell you a secret? You've just changed my vote'. When he'd finished voting he doubled back to tell me that the thing that changed his mind was my passion, he told me I cared more about the world than any of the other campaigners. He said that now he knows about us this is the first election in years where he's actually cared about the outcome.”
Connecting workers with the socialist politics of hope and resistance, one conversation at a time. Thousands of us have been doing exactly this for the past few weeks. We should be proud of what we’ve achieved, and excited about the foundation we’ve built for what’s to come.
If you're not already a Victorian Socialists member, join us today.