Amid a flurry of competing Socialist Alliance and Socialist Party candidate announcements, there is renewed talk of possible electoral collaboration. Bob Sparks takes a look at recent developments.
The Socialist Alliance and state branches of the Socialist Party have in the last few weeks fielded dozens of candidates for the South Australian, Victorian and NSW state elections. While this burst of candidate announcements looks suspiciously like a scramble for electoral territory, there are also signs of socialist electoral cooperation emerging.
The most likely state so far for this is in New South Wales. A Socialist Alliance statement issued on 28 February via social media says that “Socialist Alliance NSW, following positive votes by members at our state and branch conferences to request dialogue, will shortly be meeting with NSW Soc [the NSW Socialists] to discuss the possibility of collaboration in the 2027 NSW elections” [see Socialist Alliance for NSW Instagram and Facebook pages].
Ahead of the NSW poll, socialists will be standing in a number of state elections over the next 12 months. The first cab off the rank is the South Australian state elections on 21 March 2026.
South Australia
There are three socialist candidates standing in the suburbs of Adelaide. The Socialist Alliance has nominated left-wing activist Anne McMenamin to stand in the seat of Port Adelaide. McMenamin is running under the slogan “No to AUKUS: Yes to housing, health and education”. Her campaign will call for a halt to the billions of dollars being poured into the construction of AUKUS-class nuclear powered submarines at an expanded Osborne Naval Shipyard in Port Adelaide.
McMenamin has previously stood in the Port Adelaide area as an SA Greens candidate, first in the 2004 federal elections where she won over 4600 votes (5.4%) and again in the 2006 state elections where she won almost 1300 votes (6.6 percent). For these elections McMenamin will be obliged to stand as an independent, as the Socialist Alliance does not currently have electoral registration in South Australia.
The SA Socialists have recently their gained state electoral registration and are running two young candidates in Adelaide’s inner-north. Ahmed Azhar is standing against SA Labor Premier Peter Malinauskas in the seat of Croydon. Azhar is a pro-Palestine activist who was arrested after attending a peaceful protest in support of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and detained under draconian anti-protest laws introduced by the state Labor government in 2023. Public school teacher and community activist Leila Clendon is standing in the neighbouring seat of Enfield.
All three of these South Australian electorates are safe Labor seats. While Port Adelaide with its long history of waterfront unionism and radicalism has seen several socialist and communist electoral challenges over the years, Croydon and Enfield will see socialist candidates for the first time since their formation in 1998.
Victoria
The Victorian state elections slated for November will see socialists wage a substantial electoral challenge across the state. More than 30 socialist candidates are set to stand across both Greater Melbourne and Geelong.
The Victorian Socialists (VS) are running an extensive list of candidates across Melbourne, with a total of 25 lower house candidates and two teams of two upper house candidates already announced at the time of writing.
Unlike most Australian states, the Victorian Legislative Council (upper house) is divided into eight regions which elect five members each. With a electoral quota of 16.7% (one-sixth), VS has a much better chance of getting someone elected to the upper house than they do a lower house seat.
With this in mind, the Victorian Socialists have chosen Melbourne’s Northern Metropolitan Region as their primary target. VS are standing Omar Hassan and Louisa Bassini as this region’s upper house team. In the lower house, VS is fielding candidates in all 11 Northern Metropolitan seats, including housing activist Jordan van den Lamb (aka purplepingers) in the seat of Melbourne and rail union delegate Kath Larkin in Northcote. Voters in Broadmeadows and Pascoe Vale will also witness the unedifying spectacle of Victorian Socialists and Socialist Alliance candidates standing against one another (see more below).
Of the region’s 11 lower house seats, nine are comfortably held by Labor and two won by the Greens after close Greens/Labor competitions.
The Victorian Socialists are also targeting Melbourne’s Western Metropolitan Region. The VS upper house team consists of Anneke Demanuele and former City of Maribyrnong councillor Jorge Jorquera. VS are also standing candidates in six of the region’s 11 seats, including national convenor of Students for Palestine (S4P) Jasmine Duff in the seat of Footscray and artist (and Kevin Rudd’s nephew) Van Thanh Rudd in the seat of Laverton. All eleven lower house seats in the Western Metropolitan Region are comfortably held by state Labor MPs.
Other Victorian Socialists candidates are standing in lower house seats scattered across three other regions: four in the South Eastern Metropolitan Region including Dandenong and Frankston; three in the North East Metropolitan region including Box Hill; and Brighton in the Southern Metropolitan Region.
The Socialist Alliance does not have state electoral registration in Victoria, having lost it in late 2019 while helping the Victorian Socialists to get registered. But that hasn’t stopped the Socialist Alliance from fielding two candidates in Melbourne and four in Geelong.
Four-term local councillor Sue Bolton has been chosen to stand in the seat of Broadmeadows and Socialist Alliance national co-convenor Jacob Andrewartha in the adjacent seat of Pascoe Vale. Bolton has a respectable track record as a socialist candidate, winning just over 8800 votes (8%) in the federal seat of Wills last year and around 1700 votes (4.2%) in the state seat of Pascoe Vale in 2022.
The problem is that the Socialist Alliance and Victorian Socialists both ran candidates in Broadmeadows and Pascoe Vale in 2022. And they look set to repeat the same mistake this year. Both parties should ensure that this doesn’t happen in 2026. Given Sue Bolton’s high profile as a long-serving local councillor, an agreement that sees the VS candidate in Broadmeadows stand down to give Bolton a free run and Andrewartha stand down in favour of the VS candidate would seem an obvious solution.
In Geelong, the Socialist Alliance is standing candidates in all of the region’s four lower house seats. The lead candidate is Sarah Hathway who will run in the seat of Lara. Hathway is a social worker and former City of Greater Geelong councilor. She was elected in 2023 after a councillor resignation triggered a countback. Hathway served as a councillor for a year and a half before she was defeated at council elections in November 2024. The three other candidates are university student Dom Williams for the seat of Bellarine, painter and decorator Brenden Grull for the seat of Geelong and trans woman Freya Hedley for the seat of South Barwon. All four state seats in Geelong are comfortably held by state Labor MPs.
New South Wales
The NSW state elections might be 12 months away, but the Socialist Alliance and the NSW Socialists are already preparing themselves.
The NSW Socialists have achieved state electoral registration on their second attempt. The NSW Electoral Commission approved the group’s application on 6 February. However as previously reported in Labor Tribune, the NSW Socialists have been forced by undemocratic electoral laws to officially register as New South Wales Soc and adopt the awkward abbreviation NSW Soc. This will do little to help them win ‘brand’ recognition against the Socialist Alliance.
While the NSW Socialists were waiting for their electoral registration to be approved, the Socialist Alliance announced its first NSW upper house candidates. An announcement made via social media on 4 February listed an initial team of Socialist Alliance candidates for the NSW Legislative Council: Isaac Nellist, Paula Corvalan, Ben Radford and long-term Socialist Alliance leader Pip Hinman. This announcement looks suspiciously like a Socialist Alliance attempt to steal a march on its socialist competitors in the election for the NSW upper house.
This could now be subject to negotiatin, with the NSW Socialist Alliance since announcing its intention to seek dialogue with the NSW Socialists on the possibility of future electoral collaboration in the state.
Spirited socialist electoral campaigns are only to be welcomed. To the extent they are successful, they also strengthen the fight for socialist politics inside the ALP.
But the spectacle of socialist candidates standing against one another has to end. Both the Socialist Alliance and the various state branches of the Socialist Party must work to ensure that joint upper house tickets and non-aggression pacts are in place for future elections. The signs for this occurring are looking better than they have in quite a while.