CAMPAIGNS

Socialist Alternative members have been active participants in the Palestine solidarity movement for decades, and we’ve played a leading role in the campaign against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza today. SA members working in the social and community services sector in Victoria were the driving force behind what is the biggest workers’ strike for Palestine in Australia to date. Our student members played a central role in establishing and spreading the university Gaza solidarity encampment movement here.

We’ve been central to the struggle against the far right in Australia, working with other anti-fascists to confront and disrupt their mobilisations and organising efforts wherever they’ve raised their heads. In 2023 we organised protests targeting a neo-Nazi gym in the Melbourne suburb of Sunshine, contributing to the local council’s decision to shut it down.

Our members have played a central role in some of the most significant industrial battles in Australia in recent years, including a 40 day strike by plasterboard workers at the Knauf factory in Melbourne in 2022, major strikes in Melbourne warehouses in the 2010s, the 2020 defeat of the “jobs protection framework” in the NTEU, and strikes at Sydney and Melbourne universities in 2022 and 2023.

Socialist Alternative members are committed to fighting oppression in all its forms, and have been central to campaigns against sexism and racism and for trans rights. Our members were among the leaders of the fight for marriage equality in Australia, organising consistent mass protests that played a key part in the victory won in 2017. In 2023 we helped organise protests around Australia countering a tour by prominent British anti-trans campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen (aka Posie Parker).

After 9-11 attacks in 2001 our members were among the relatively few people who stood against the US-led “war on terror” from the start. We subsequently played a key role in the movement against the war on Iraq in 2003, and the devastating occupation that followed. Today, we are part of campaigns opposing the drive to war with China, including against the hundreds of billions being spent on the AUKUS deal.

During the bushfire crisis of 2019-20, Socialist Alternative initiated protests to demand more urgent action on climate change. At their height, these protests mobilised tens of thousands in cities around Australia, contributing to a political crisis for the Liberal government under Scott Morrison.

Socialist Alternative’s student members are central to on-campus political life at universities around Australia. In 2014 we led the victorious student campaign against the Abbott Liberal government’s attempt to remove all caps on the fees universities could charge for their degrees.

Our members are long-time participants in the campaign against the Australian government’s draconian refugee policies. We were there in 2002 when protesters tore down the fences at the Woomera detention centre in South Australia and helped free many detainees. We were still there in 2020 and 2021, organising weekly protests outside hotels in Melbourne where refugees were locked up during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Socialist Alternative is a leading force within Victorian Socialists, which since its founding in 2018 has achieved some of the best electoral results for an explicitly socialist party in Australia in the past 70 years. In the 2022 Victorian state election, VS got an average of 6.2 percent across the eleven lower house seats in Melbourne’s northern metro region, and 5 percent across the western metro region, and narrowly missed out on winning an upper house seat.