Hello friends & comrades,
Welcome to another episode of the Radio Reversal podcast, continuing our current series on crisis, disaster & collective futures. This week, we’re turning our attention to the recent federal election here in so-called australia. Last Saturday, roughly 1 in 3 people voted Labor, 1 in 3 voted Liberal/National, and 1 in 3 voted for someone else.
Has anything changed?
With the centre-right-wing Labor party now dominant nationally, what lessons should we take from this election? Is running for elections still worth the time for those of seeking deeper radical change? Where should we all be putting our energy?
In this episode, we talk through some of the initial results from the election, and what we might be able to learn from these trends. With help from Mununjahli and South Sea Islander Professor Chelsea Watego’s new “Let’s Talk Race on the Run” series, we debunk the unhinged-from-reality narrative that this election constituted a “progressive” victory against Trumpism, and work to contextualise the election results in the context of the broader waves of repression that we’re seeing in this moment.
We wade through the mixed results that we saw for the Greens in this election: minor swings against the party in the lower house, an increase in the Senate vote, and some absolutely massive swings towards some key candidates, including our dear friend Remah Naji in Moreton, and Huong Trang in the seat of Fraser. Notably, both of these candidates ran on explicitly pro-Palestine platforms, and both Remah and Huong are actively involved in activism and community organising beyond the Greens. Both the Moreton campaign and the Fraser campaign drew explicit connections in their campaigns between racial justice, environmental justice, housing justice, and anti-colonial solidarity, focusing more directly on discussions around refugee justice, Palestinian liberation, and Land Back for First Nations communities on this continent. Perhaps not coincidentally, Remah & Huong are both the children of refugees: Remah’s family were displaced from Palestine during the 1948 Nakba and she grew up as part of the Palestinian diaspora in Jordan; Huong grew up in the seat of Fraser and describes herself as “the daughter of Vietnamese boat people.” Both Remah & Huong saw significant swings towards them, particularly in the most racially and culturally diverse and working class parts of their electorates.
But beyond these interesting shifts in voting patterns, and the rise in the Greens vote in outer suburban, less wealthy, more culturally diverse parts of the city: we also spend some time in this episode coming to grips with the loss of local Greens representatives Max Chandler-Mather in Griffith, and Stephen Bates in Brisbane, as well as party leader Adam Bandt, who is now confirmed to have lost the seat of Melbourne. As the only major political party that has been consistently outspoken on the genocide in Gaza, it should have come as no surprise to any of us to see the forces of Zionist repression at work in a coordinated smear campaign against the Greens in this election: one which sought to position the Greens as, to quote LNP Senator James McGrath on the ABCs election night panel, “a disgusting, racist, antisemitic party full of horrible people.” The scale of scare-campaigning against the Greens was unprecedented in this election, with record amounts of money spent by the property sector, the fossil fuel industry and the zionist lobby. You can see some more targeted commentary on this by Jonathan Sriranganathan in this excellent piece, and in these reflections from the wonderful Omar Sakr.
We reflect on what the scale of campaigning against the Greens in this election - and in the specific context of an ongoing genocide in Palestine - might tell us about the danger that any kind of anti-colonial solidarity (or perceived solidarity) poses to the political establishment. We reflect on Dr. Jamal Nabulsi’s argument that the scale of violence and repression that we are witnessing in this moment is a direct response to the very real threat that anti-colonial solidarity poses to the settler colonial order. But we also think about the very real limits of electoralism as a standalone vehicle for transformation: if nothing else, the scale of this negative campaigning has laid bare the impossibility of outperforming these powerful forces while we’re still trying to win “on their terms”.
So - what does this all mean for what’s to come? We end this episode with a generative reminder from local organiser Bec from the Community Union Defence League who are right now organising eviction defence, food support and mutual aid for folks sleeping rough in Musgrave Park. In case you missed it, the Lord Mayor, Adrian Schrinner, announced a couple of weeks ago that they planned to forcefully evict all homeless people from parks across the city on the grounds of “community safety” and “public accessibility”, despite the fact that no suitable housing could be provided to folks sleeping rough. I doubt that it is a coincidence that they decided to move ahead with the evictions only a few days after the federal election, perhaps in the hope that many organisers would be burnt out from the long election campaign. What they didn’t bank on was the scale of popular opposition to these evictions, and this week we’ve seen inspiring solidarity with hundreds turning out early each morning to support folks facing move-on directions, to challenge these evictions, and to refuse to allow this violence to go uncontested.
As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts, criticisms and questions - please do get in touch! And stay tuned for our next few episodes, digging into labour struggles during times of crisis (in honour of Labour Day last week!), and pulling apart the ongoing discourse of “gender crisis” being circulated in right-wing media and its role in whipping up a moral panic about trans liberation and queer justice.
Yours in solidarity,
The Radio Reversal Collective
(Artwork by Anna Carlson for the Anti-Poverty Network & Community Union Defence League for the current struggle for housing justice in Magan-djin. This original A2 lino print is currently available as part of a fundraiser for Palestinian families run by our friends at The Resistance - you can find it here if you want to make a bid and secure yourself a copy!)
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