Socialist Alliance response to the Socialist Party's proposal for unity

Presented below is the Socialist Alliance National Executive's response to the Socialist Party (SP) proposal for the Socialist Alliance to become a faction within their electoral project, which was sent to the Socialist Alliance on November 17, and can be read here.

To comrades in the Socialist Party National Executive

Socialist Alliance takes unity proposals seriously and we will take the proposals you raised in your correspondence to Socialist Alliance on November 17 to our January 2026 members’ decision-making conference.

We do agree that now is a critical time both here and internationally for working class people. Our unions are being smashed, the environment trashed, trans people are under constant attack while First Nations and people of colour are vilified and scapegoated for the cost-of-living crisis by the racist right and governments as a convenient deflection for system failure. Meanwhile the Palestinian genocide continues and Trump uses military intimidation and threats of intervention in Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico. Yet socialists are winning significant victories in New York, Seattle and Copenhagen.

Since our formation in 2001, Socialist Alliance has understood that in a rich capitalist country such as Australia, elections provide a space for socialists to win broader support for anti-capitalist solutions. We have run in local, state and federal elections since our inception. This has included a number of successes at the local level, where we averaged 16.9% in the 11 wards we contested for the most recent Victorian, NSW and Queensland council elections.

However, we are also aware that there are still huge illusions in the power of representative democracy, which means we have always combined our electoral work with joining campaigns, alongside others, to win reforms. We know that action and struggle changes people’s consciousness and political outlook.

In addition to motivating members to join political struggles in the labour movement, at a community and national level, as well as undertaking international solidarity with struggles, including in Palestine, Rojava, Indonesia and West Papua and Latin America, we continue to devote significant resources to ensuring Green Left — the media project reporting on the myriad of struggles here and internationally — continues to thrive.

Socialist Alliance takes its electoral work seriously which is why we originally registered in most states and have maintained our federal and NSW registrations.

We had hoped that the launch of Victorian Socialists in 2018 would lead to greater unity on the left, which is why Socialist Alliance allowed our registration in Victoria to lapse in favour of VS. However, we left VS after two years as we felt that any chance of unity and regroupment was being stifled and we were not, in reality, able to have an input into shaping the direction of VS.

We read the Socialist Party’s November 17 letter as a request for us to get out of the way after the Australian Electoral Commission and the NSW Electoral Commission rejected the Socialist Party’s preferred registered names. This letter suggested that we give up our electoral registrations or change our names to ones which do not include the word "socialist".

We reject all undemocratic registration laws that give any party a monopoly over the use of the word "socialist" in party names, and we have written to the electoral authorities to make this clear.

Consistent with this belief, the Socialist Alliance has not blocked the registration of either the Socialist Party or the Socialist Equality Party. We will do the same with the attempt to register "Australian Socialist Party".

We hope that the SP would take the same principled democratic approach.

After consulting with our state branches, we are not going to put our state electoral re-registration efforts on hold, as several are nearing completion and more socialists are committing to our project.

A socialist election campaign needs to be embedded in an understanding that real change requires the self-organisation of the working class and oppressed in struggle. While the immediate polices and demands we raise in our recent electoral material are very largely similar, there are some critical differences in conception about the relationship between a socialist party and the movements.

These were revealed in the course of serious unity talks we held with Socialist Alternative in 2013 until they were unilaterally terminated by Socialist Alternative. None of this excludes the opportunity for greater cooperation and united work, but we think that is best done through steps that build confidence and shared experience.

We do wish to discuss non-aggression pacts and the possibility, in some states, of joint tickets.  At the moment, our state convenors believe that practical progress on these aspects would set the basis for talking about the next steps for unity.

Corey Oakley, Victorian Socialists secretary, suggested to us in May that there needed to be “a period of cooperation and collaboration”.

We agreed at the time and still do. Trust building comes from working together in a practical way.

That is why we are concerned that SP may have backtracked on collaboration in terms of non-aggression pacts and threatening in early November to break off cooperation by running against Socialist Alliance candidates. We think it is vital to return to this agreed upon path.

We reaffirm that while we do not want to see socialist candidates running against each other, we also do not see multiple socialist electoral formations as a problem at this point in our efforts to build a mass base for socialism; they can help popularise socialist and anti-capitalist solutions and win people away from the major parties’ neoliberal divide-and-rule politics.

In Solidarity,
Socialist Alliance National Executive