The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) is standing candidates for the House of Representatives and the Senate in the May 3 Australian federal election.

The SEP candidates are alone in telling the working class the truth: that the election will resolve nothing, and that the incoming government, whichever party leads it, will deepen the bipartisan agenda of austerity and war. The SEP is not directing its campaign to the political and media establishment, as is every other party, but to the development of an independent movement of the working class, based on a socialist and internationalist perspective.

The development of such a movement is urgent amid the breakdown of capitalism globally, expressed in rising geopolitical tensions, war, the threat of fascism and an assault on democratic rights. The ascension of the fascist Donald Trump to the US presidency and his unprecedented onslaught on the American Constitution is only the sharpest expression of the fact that capitalism offers a future only of barbarism and misery.

The SEP’s candidates will counter the lie that Australia is an exception to these processes. In reality, it is on the frontlines of US-led wars globally, particularly the preparations for a catastrophic conflict with China. Over recent years, the working class has been hit with some of the deepest social attacks across any of the advanced economies. And amid a collapse of the old mechanisms of capitalist rule, expressed in the crisis of Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition, Australian governments have turned to increasingly authoritarian measures.

That is expressed in the refusal of the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) to register the SEP, despite it having met all of the onerous requirements. The AEC’s edict expresses fear in the ruling elite that under the present conditions of war and austerity, a socialist perspective can win widespread support. The ruling means that the SEP candidates will appear on the ballot without any mention of their party affiliation. We appeal to you to promote the SEP’s campaign as widely as possible, to defeat this censorship and to take forward the fight for socialism.

We are proud to announce the SEP’s seven candidates listed below. Among them are longer-standing members of the party who have been candidates for the SEP before, as well as three members who have not stood in an election before.

SEP candidates for the Senate in New South Wales

Max Boddy

Max Boddy, 35, is Assistant National Secretary of the SEP, playing a leading role in its interventions among workers, students and youth across the country. He met the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE), the SEP’s youth movement, while a student in Newcastle, where he grew up. 

The experience of the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments had a major impact on his political development. Having come to power in 2007 on the back of widespread hostility to the Liberal-National government of John Howard, they continued and deepened Australian involvement in US-led wars while carrying out sweeping pro-business restructuring of health, education and disability services. 

Boddy encountered the pseudo-left while at university, but was repelled by their superficial protest politics, always directed at appeals to the powers-that-be. In the SEP and the IYSSE, he found a cohesive explanation that the various issues confronting the working class were a product of the capitalist system and a genuine socialist perspective to fight for its abolition. That included the horrendous social plight of Indigenous people, which had troubled Boddy greatly. The SEP explained that this was a class issue, that ordinary Aboriginal people constituted the most oppressed section of the working class and that their situation could only be addressed through a unified movement of the working class.

Boddy completed a Bachelor of Arts, focusing on Aboriginal studies, before working in disability support and youth homelessness.

Having joined the SEP in 2011, he was elected to its National Committee in 2014 and became the Newcastle branch secretary. In addition to being the party’s Assistant National Secretary, a position to which he was elected in 2020, he is now the secretary of the SEP Sydney branch. 

Warwick Dove

Warwick Dove, 68 years old, is a retired metal worker who grew up in a working-class household in Sydney’s outer southwest. Dove joined the Socialist Labour League (SLL), the predecessor of the SEP, shortly after his involvement in the 1983 struggle by metal workers at Comeng against redundancies and attacks on working conditions. He was attracted to the SLL’s perspective of unifying and broadening the developing struggles of the working class and its exposures of the perfidy of the union bureaucracy.

Dove then worked in machine maintenance at a Kellogg’s factory, where he became a union delegate, having stood openly as a member of the SLL advancing a socialist program. The SLL politically led the struggle against the Accords, the tripartite offensive of the Hawke-Keating Labor governments, the corporations and the bureaucracy, which deregulated the economy, smashed up whole sections of industry and destroyed hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Having worked several industrial jobs after being made redundant at Kellogg’s as part of the mass sackings of maintenance and other staff in 1995, against which Dove and the SLL fought,  he retired last year. He is a member of the SEP’s National Committee and plays a leading role in its fight to build independent rank-and-file committees as the only means of uniting workers, developing a democratic discussion among them and preparing industrial and political action in opposition to the thoroughly corporatised union apparatuses.

SEP candidates for the Senate in Victoria

Keo Vongvixay

Keo Vongvixay is a 55-year-old health worker in regional Victoria. His family emigrated to Australia in 1981 as refugees from Laos, which had been devastated by massive US bombardment over the previous decade. Vongvixay grew up in public housing in Melbourne.

Vongvixay was attracted to the SEP’s internationalist and anti-war perspective during the 1996 federal election, and joined the party in 1998. He has been active as a working-class socialist for almost three decades, participating in the SEP’s interventions at factories, workplaces and in working-class neighbourhoods. 

Vongvixay is a founding member of the Pathology Workers Rank-and-File Committee. It was established by rank-and-file workers, with the assistance of the SEP, to begin an independent struggle against the increasingly dire conditions in the sector, which has been on the frontlines of the COVID-19-pandemic. In addition to being exposed to the virus as a result of the official “let it rip” COVID policies and a lack of adequate safety measures, this section of workers has faced attacks on pay and conditions, all with the complicity of the health unions.

Taylor Hernan

Taylor Hernan, 26 years old, is a health sciences student at Melbourne’s La Trobe University and is also an environmental worker involved in habitat rehabilitation. He grew up in a working-class family on the outskirts of Geelong, Victoria’s second largest city. Hernan’s parents had instilled in him an opposition to war and inequality from a young age, but it was when he met the IYSSE’s club at Victoria University in Melbourne that he found an explanation of their source in capitalism and a perspective to fight against them.

At the time, Hernan was struck by the increasingly difficult social conditions facing his peers, including the housing crisis and the prevalence of precarious work. He joined the SEP in 2020 amid the criminal response of governments globally to the pandemic, prioritising profits over health and lives and in the aftermath of the 2019-20 bushfire crisis, during which the Australian government did nothing as large swathes of the country burned and thousands were devastated.

House of Representatives candidates

Mike Head, candidate for the Oxley electorate in Queensland

Mike Head, 72, regularly writes for the World Socialist Web Site and is the secretary of the party’s Brisbane branch. He is standing in the Oxley electorate in Brisbane’s western suburbs where social issues such as unemployment and homelessness are rife.

He grew up in Melbourne’s working-class Dandenong area. He is a law educator at Western Sydney University, is married and has three adult children. He has led the party’s work in Brisbane and northern NSW, including developing the SEP’s relationship with workers and youth in regions devastated by recent flooding. 

Head joined the SEP’s forerunner the Socialist Labour League in 1975 after the Labor government under Gough Whitlam dropped its reformist façade in its anti-working-class budget of 1974. At the time, Head was a student at Monash University researching legal aid. He then went to Columbia University in New York where he worked with the SLL’s sister party, then called the Workers League, in the US. Head was the editor of the Australian section’s newspaper, Workers News, from 1985 until the establishment of the World Socialist Web Site in 1998. 

Morgan Peach, candidate for the Calwell electorate in Victoria

Morgan Peach, 29 years old, is the president of the IYSSE club at the University of Melbourne, where he is studying to become a secondary school teacher specialising in English and History.

He is standing in Calwell in Melbourne’s north. The working-class area has been devastated by the assault on manufacturing, including the closure of the Ford plant in Broadmeadows as part of the shutdown of the Australian car industry. It is home to a large number of immigrants, including from North Africa and the Middle East, and there is widespread hostility to US-led wars, including the Israeli genocide in Gaza, backed by all the major powers, including Australia.

Peach was attracted to the SEP’s defence of Julian Assange, a courageous journalist who was being persecuted for WikiLeaks’ exposures of war crimes, including in Iraq and Afghanistan. The assault on Assange was facilitated by the Australian political and media establishment, including successive Labor governments. He was also struck by the SEP’s emphasis on historical issues, including the contemporary significance of the Russian Revolution, the first time the working class took political power, and the struggle led by Leon Trotsky against its bureaucratic degeneration.

Peach became a member of the SEP in 2019. In addition to leading the IYSSE’s work at the University of Melbourne, he writes for the WSWS on Southeast Asian social and political issues.

Robert Creech, candidate for the Newcastle electorate in New South Wales

Robert Creech is a traffic surveyor living in Newcastle, a key working-class city in the Hunter Valley, where he has lived his whole life. The region has been decimated by the destruction of the Australian manufacturing and mining industries, leading to social crises confronting growing numbers of working-class families and youth. 

Creech met the IYSSE club at the University of Newcastle where he was studying in 2014. Since then, he has played an active role in building the IYSSE’s club at the University of Newcastle and is a leading member of the IYSSE nationally. 

Creech was politicised by the experiences of the attacks on democratic rights during the “war on terror” and the massive transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich following the 2008 global financial crisis. While generally regarding governments around the world as corrupt and criminal, the US proxy war against Syria and the SEP’s explanation of the origins of war and poverty in the capitalist system led Creech to become a member of the party in 2016 to fight for an independent movement of the working class. He writes regularly on the WSWS.

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Attend the SEP’s upcoming election launch meeting to be held on Thursday, April 10 at 7 p.m. (AEST) to find out more about the SEP’s program and how you can assist in our campaign. Register today!

We urge all supporters and readers of the World Socialist Web Site to give their full support to the SEP’s election campaign by distributing our election statements, donating to our election fund, voting for our candidates and, above all, by joining and building the SEP as the new socialist and internationalist party of the working class.

Authorised by Cheryl Crisp for the Socialist Equality Party, Level 1/457-459 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills, NSW, 2010, Australia.