Analysis: How did the extreme left do in the election?

Now that the dust has settled and the leftist tears have been wiped away (or drunken) it’s time to check in on our old friends the completely batsh*t crazy left wing extremists and see how they went at the polls.

Now by extremists I don’t mean the Greens. The Watermelons may harbour Marxist and Anarchist crazies (especially in NSW) but the majority of Greens members and voters don’t actually want to violently overthrow the government and institute a totalitarian state. Their ideas may be extreme, but clearly they want to achieve their crazy goals through constitutional parliamentary change rather than civil war.

These other groups who contested the recent federal poll are not so tame; and while most of their results were laughable a couple of them performed scarily well.

Socialist Alliance

After the S11 riots in Melbourne in September 2000 the Marxist groups in Australia were on a high. They had mobilised somewhere in the realm of ten thousand people to shut down the Crown Casino district for several days using violence and blockades. Flush with their success the two biggest Marxist groups in Australia the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) and the International Socialist Organisation (ISO) decided to come together along with a plethora of smaller relative non entities to form an electoral alliance. Thus the Socialist Alliance was born. All involved were certain that there was a huge gap in electoral politics on the left and that the working classes of Australia were crying out for a good dose of unadulterated old-style Communism.

Which of course they weren’t.

For almost two decades now the Socialist Alliance has been failing miserably at almost every election they’ve participated in. The tens of thousands of hours put in by hundreds of people over twenty years have resulted in one council seat in inner northern Melbourne and one in Fremantle. Along the way all the members of the ISO have quit and all other members outside the DSP (as well as a large chunk of those inside it) have also departed.

So how did they go in the election? Even worse than usual!

Lilley

In the seat of Lilley north of Brisbane SA ran Mike Crook, a man best known for organising attacks against One Nation meetings in the 90s and more recently participating in the hilarious “Occupy Brisbane” protests in 2011.

So how did Mike go? Badly. 712 votes for a grand total of 0.76%.

Fremantle

In the leftie capital of WA the SA ran Sam Wainwright, one of their two councillors. You would think being an elected official with a local profile Sam would have done quite well, but… no.

899 votes for 1.08% with a swing against of 0.57%.

Brisbane

In the inner city hipster seat of Brisbane SA ran Kamala Emmanuel, an ever-so-slightly unhinged crazy eyed abortionist who seems to see her distasteful profession as somehow furthering the goals of revolutionary socialism.

How did Kamala do? 638 Votes for 0.71%. For context in this overwhelmingly left wing inner city seat Anne Perry of One Nation got 2,083 votes for 2.31%.

Socialist Alliance in the Senate

In Western Australia SA ran two candidates for the Senate: Petrina Harley is a teacher, a gay rights advocate, a strong supporter of the so-called “Safe Schools” program and an activist with “Rainbows for refugees” a protest group of gay activists campaigning for open borders. Alex Salmon her running mate is a weird looking fellow from Fremantle.

How did they do?

1,678 Votes for 0.14%. A swing of -0.01 on their 2016 result.

In NSW Socialist Alliance ran Susan Price a very long time Marxist activist with over a quarter century of selling newspapers from fold-out tables under her belt. She’s also a Socialist Alliance national co-convenor and a Green Left Weekly editor. Her running mate Joel McAlear on the other hand is a bit of a non-entity.

The NSW Senate hopefuls did even worse than the WA ones.

4,893 Votes for 0.12%. Not even 0.0087 of a Senate quota.

Surely it can’t be long before the SA stops running in federal elections. If they weren’t semi-sociopathic brainwashed extremists who ardently wish to destroy almost everything of value in our society it would almost be embarrassing laughing at them.

But speaking of laughable insane people…

Socialist Equality Party

Most people outside the far left today wouldn’t know about the Socialist Equality Party. The reason for this is that they are really, really insane. I mean take normal levels of Trotskyist factionalism, sectarianism, cultishness, dogmatism and straight up fanaticism and turn all those knobs up to eleven. They consider all other Communist groups in Australia to not only be “pseudo left” but practically right wing. According to the SEP all other Marxist groups have betrayed Marxism and all other Trotskyist groups are wishy washy uni student lifestylists. Only the SEP is the true leader of the worldwide struggle for the triumph of the inevitable working class revolution. They hate everyone and everything except apparently Julian Assange who they’ve been campaigning on behalf of with single minded ferocity for almost a decade now.

The group was founded in 1972 as an Australian branch of the British “Socialist Labour League” which at the time was a bit of a personality cult centred on serial rapist Gerry Healy. Healy was eventually accused of raping and sexually assaulting at least 26 female activists which led to splits in his movement around the world. After quite a lot of discussion in 2010 the Australian branch changed its name to the “Socialist Equality Party” and began contesting elections.

So how did they do this time?

Oxley

In the suburban Queensland seat of Oxley the SEP stood Mike Head, a sixty six year old law lecturer at the University of Western Sydney and a member of their National Committee.

Mike didn’t do that good. 633 Votes for 0.71%. Again for contrast in the same seat Scott Moerland of Fraser Anning’s party got 1,442 votes and One Nation got 5,572 votes.

Parramatta

In the Western Sydney electorate of Parramatta the SEP stood Oscar Grenfell, a weird looking 27 year old chap who apparently joined the party in high school. Which seems an entirely normal, healthy thing to do.

Oscar didn’t do that well either. 636 votes and 0.79% of the vote.

Hunter

In the working class coal country electorate of Hunter the SEP stood Max Boddy, a 30 year old Arts graduate who majored in Aboriginal studies. Amazingly enough he didn’t win.

Boddy scored 665 Votes for 0.67%. The One Nation Candidate for Hunter Stuart Bonds made headlines before the vote when comments surfaced of him declaring that women and gays were unfit to be leaders. Stuart scored 21,277 votes or 21.56%.

Ouch Max, that’s gotta hurt.

Calwell

But surely the northern Melbourne seat of Calwell would deliver for the true leaders of the global revolution? This area has after all been staunchly left wing since drunken Irish colonists were kicked out of the more respectable parts of town and had nowhere else to go. Surely Calwell would deliver for the SEP?

Well no. Architect Peter Byrne got only 697 votes for 0.93%. By contrast the Fraser Anning candidate garnered 1,505 votes in one of the more multicultural electorates in Australia.

SEP in the Senate

In NSW the SEP ran the seventy year old former ABC employee (surprise!) Richard Phillips alongside the young uni student whippersnapper John Davis (aged twenty five).

From the entire state of NSW (the most populated state in the country) they got 1,644 votes for 0.04%. Good thing they’re fanatics, for a normal person that would be a touch humiliating.

In Victoria, the beating red heartland of Australian socialism things went a little better. The SEP ran two undergraduate Arts Students: Tessa Pietsch and Jason Wardell. Perhaps playing off the success of the better known “Victorian Socialists” group (of which more later) the SEP got a whopping 9,742 votes for a total of 0.24% in the garden state.

Which is the highest Senate result both in numbers and in percentage for an openly communist party this election! Hooray! Of course only two communist parties bothered to run Senate candidates this year. Another, far more significant left wing extremist player was more concerned with the lower house.

Which brings us to…

Victorian Socialists

In February of last year Socialist Alternative, the largest, best organised and most violent Trotskyist group in Australia decided to join together with the few tattered remains of the Victorian branch of the Socialist Alliance as well as (alleged) sex pest socialist Councillor Stephen Jolly to form an electoral alliance. Since then they’ve gained a raft of endorsements including former ABC employee and accused rapist Tom Ballard, former ABC employee and alleged comedian Corrine Grant, Van Thanh Rudd Socialist Alternative activist and nephew of the former Prime Minister, Former JJJ host and proud lesbian Marxist Helen Razer, noted American Anarchist Noam Chomsky and Guardian opinion columnist Jeff Sparrow.

Quite the galaxy of stars I am sure you will agree.

Socialist Alternative was founded in 1995 when a group of activists in Melbourne were purged from the International Socialist Organisation (ISO). Since then through the virtue of an almost laser like focus on university campuses and recruiting the group has managed to overtake all its rivals on the extreme left and now stands unrivalled as the largest far left extremist group in Australia. The Victorian Socialists was conceived as a project that could use the hundreds of mindless semi brainwashed young uni student activists as electoral foot soldiers for more established brands such as that of the Marxist Councillor Stephen Jolly who had recently left his own much smaller Marxist party due to unpleasantness surrounding allegations of sexual harassment brought against his protégé.

The plan was to catapult Councillor Jolly into an upper house seat in last year’s Victorian election, which of course they did not. But the campaign, the ability to mobilise young activists to an electoral cause and the almost $100,000 dollars in taxpayer funds they received as a result kept the project going beyond that initial setback. For this election the VicSoc targeted three seats. Two in the inner suburb hipster zone of Melbourne and one in the migrant heavy working class northern suburbs.

So how did they do?

Calwell

In the predominantly working class northern Melbourne electorate of Calwell VicSoc ran Jerome Small. Jerome Is an extremist of long standing having been with the Socialist Alterative since its foundation in 1995. He attended and helped organise the violent attacks on One Nation meetings in Melbourne in the late 90s, was fined for his involvement in the M1 riots in Melbourne in 2001, was an organiser for the Refugee Action Collective during the period when they attacked the Baxter detention centre In 2003, was questioned by police in relation to providing false documents to escaped immigration detainees in 2004, was arrested for a 2012 attack on the Israeli owned Max Brenner chocolate shop chain and in 2018 rallied outside the Broadmeadows detention centre in support of a member of the Tamil Tigers terrorist group.

Jerome is a busy boy. In addition to all this he organises the efforts of Socialist Alternative to infiltrate the union movement. In last year’s Victorian election he stood for VicSoc in Broadmeadows and received the party’s best result of 7.2%.

Jerome did quite well this year gaining 3,903 Votes for 4.8%.

Cooper

The powers that be in their wisdom have renamed the seat of Batman in Melbourne as “Cooper” instead. Apparently founding the city of Melbourne as John Batman did is no longer enough of an achievement to have an electorate in it named after you. Instead the seat is now named after an inconsequential and (until recently) rightly obscure Aboriginal activist.

Ah well. The Victorian Socialists ran Kath Larkin in the seat. Kath is probably best known for embarrassing herself by gurning like a lunatic while asking Professor Jordan Peterson a question on the ABC. Ms Larkin is a Socialist Alternative activist of some years standing who managed to get herself elected “Women’s officer” of the RTBU (an 80% male union).

In Cooper Kath got 4,060 votes for 4,27%.

Wills

Wills is a really left wing electorate, and I mean REALLY. In an election that they won the Liberals suffered an almost 4% primary vote swing against them for a total of only 17.97% and the two party preferred run off was between the Greens (who scored a 26.52% primary) and the eventual winners the ALP (who got a 44.12% primary).

So who better to run than Sue Bolton?

For those who don’t know her Sue is really, really old and has been a communist for a really, really long time. Born in Toowoomba she quickly left that wholesome city and after joining the Socialist Workers Party in Brisbane in the early 80s ended up as an organiser for them in the ACT by 1987. Eventually the SWP changed its name to the DSP and then later again to the Socialist Alliance. Sue stuck with them all the way, migrating further south to Melbourne in the early 90s specifically to organise protests against then premier Jeff Kennett, then migrating back to Sydney in the late 90s, before again heading south to Melbourne in the early 2000s.

Sue has travelled all over Australia for over three decades preaching the gospel of Karl Marx. It wasn’t until 2012 that she was finally elected as a Socialist Alliance councillor for the inner Melbourne Moreland council where she notably managed to annoy almost everyone by calling celebrating Australia Day comparable to celebrating the Holocaust.

So how did Sue do? 4,058 Votes for 4.58% which might not seem much but considering that in 2016 the Socialist Alliance only managed 648 Votes for 0.69% is a phenomenal increase.

Which is the point really. Until the rise of the Victorian Socialists last year the electoral results for openly Marxist parties were laughable and had been since the late 1940s. After their Victorian election run Stephen Jolly addressed a Socialist Alternative meeting and professed his gratitude to the Guardian Australia and to The Age for their help and favourable coverage. The Victorian Socialists have one vital element that the Socialist Alliance never had which explains the abject failure of the latter and the relatively impressive results of the former: open establishment support from within the media and academia.

People whose ultimate aim is to violently overthrow the government and institute a totalitarian state need to be opposed, not coddled. Spreading the word about how extreme these groups are is the first step in thrusting the reds back under the bed where they belong.