The Socialist Equality Party (SEP) urges workers, young people and all who want to fight the bipartisan program of war, austerity and attacks on democratic rights, to vote for our candidates in the federal election this Saturday. Register your support for a genuine socialist alternative to the parties of big business and the banks!

In an election campaign characterised by banalities and lies, the SEP and its candidates have been alone in telling workers the truth.

We state bluntly that the election will resolve nothing for working people. Whatever the outcome on May 3, the incoming government will be one of reaction, committed to a predetermined agenda of huge cuts to social spending, wages and working conditions to make the working class pay for the budget deficit and the crisis of capitalism. It will oversee a vast increase in military spending in preparation for war, above all against China.

Behind the banalities lies a rightward shift by all major parties. Notwithstanding the sniping and snarling, there is agreement on the demands of the Australian and American ruling classes for the prosecution of war, the gutting of social spending and the assault on the conditions of the working class.

We have stressed that the decisive question is building an independent and socialist movement of the working class, directed against Labor, the Liberal-National Coalition, the Greens and the entire capitalist political establishment. That is the only means of halting the descent into a catastrophic world war, along with fascism, dictatorship and mass poverty.

Our campaign was subjected to political censorship to suppress this perspective, even before the election was called. The Australian Electoral Commission refused to register the SEP, despite meeting the onerous requirements set by Labor and the Coalition, including submitting a list of more than 1,500 members.

That means our candidates appear on the ballot without our party name. This was an attack, not only on the SEP, but on the democratic right of working people to cast an informed vote.

Our candidates are: Max Boddy and Warwick Dove for the Senate in NSW, listed as Group B. Keo Vongvixay and Taylor Hernan for the Senate in Victoria, as Group G. Mike Head for the seat of Oxley in Queensland, Robert Creech for Newcastle in NSW and Morgan Peach for Calwell in Victoria. Details of how to vote SEP are published here.

Labor and the Coalition entered the campaign mired in crisis, with both polling below even their historic lows in the 2022 election. Broad layers of working people recognise that neither of these capitalist parties has anything to offer. The exclusion of the SEP from the ballot paper is to rob those looking for an alternative.

The election campaigns of both Labor and the Coalition can only be described as damage-control exercises—saying as little as possible and putting forward as few concrete policies as they can. This has frequently descended into farce—debating Labor’s $5 a week tax cut versus the Coalition’s paltry reduction to the fuel excise, under conditions of the worst cost-of-living crisis in generations.

The central lie of the election has been the claim that Australia is exempt from the shocks unfolding internationally. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, echoed by Coalition Leader Dutton, has declared that Australia is “uniquely placed” to weather the storms associated with global economic war and upheaval.

For their part, the Greens, the myriad independents and fake-left groups like Victorian Socialists and Socialist Alliance have all acted as though the election is occurring in a bubble, sealed off from the rest of the globe.

Only the SEP has explained the real situation: the world is a house on fire, and no region or country is exempt. The reality that every other party seeks to conceal is that what is taking place in Australia is directly determined by the global breakdown of capitalism, which is returning the world to the barbarism of the 1930s, but on an even higher level.

The global economic war launched by fascistic US President Donald Trump is the end of the economic, diplomatic and geopolitical order established in the wake of World War II to preserve capitalist stability. The world is again being divided into rival trading blocs, and as was the case in the 20th century, the logic of that is war.

The world is already at war. The US and NATO are engaged in a direct conflict with Russia in Ukraine, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and poses the threat of nuclear war in Europe. The US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, involving some of the worst imperialist atrocities since the Holocaust, is already expanding into a broader war in that region. In the Indo-Pacific, the US is preparing for a conflict with China, perceived as the chief threat to the declining global dominance of American imperialism.

War abroad means war on the working class and on democracy. That is why Trump, backed by the dominant sections of the US ruling class, is trying to establish a fascistic dictatorship in America, with mass roundups of immigrants, anti-war students being snatched off the streets and the Constitution being violated daily. But it is not just Trump. Throughout Europe and internationally, the capitalist class is turning to far-right forces to suppress opposition from the working class, while carrying out massive rearmament.

Albanese and Dutton do not publicly discuss these developments because they share the same basic reactionary program of the ruling classes globally, one that is inherently unpopular.

Both have sought to avoid any mention of Trump because he is political poison. But to the extent that they have, it is to compete over who could best work with this fascist gangster, above all in the plans for war with China.

That Australia is already on the frontlines of such a war is the great unmentionable in the campaign. Over the past three years, the Albanese government, with the full backing of the Coalition, has completed Australia’s transformation into a launching pad for such a war, through the AUKUS pact to acquire nuclear-powered submarines, a plan to equip all branches of the military with strike capabilities and a vast expansion of US basing.

That has gone hand in hand with Australia’s provision of offensive weaponry to the US-puppet regime in Ukraine in the war against Russia, and full support for the genocide in Gaza.

The onslaught on social conditions is also bipartisan. Amid the global surge in inflation, Labor has inflicted the biggest reversal of working-class living standards in 80 years. It has refused to implement a single measure to address the massive social crisis, while ensuring a bonanza for the banks, the billionaires and the property developers.

As in the US, this agenda means an onslaught on democratic rights. Labor has been instrumental in the crackdown on mass opposition to the Israeli genocide, as well as other attacks, including the placement of the CFMEU construction union under quasi-dictatorial state control and the illegalisation of virtually all industrial action.

This agenda will be deepened whether Labor or the Coalition forms the next government. Every day, columnists in the financial press stridently insist that whoever is in power must undertake the biggest cuts to social services in post-war history. And it must boost military spending, already at record levels, by tens of billions of dollars a year. The discussion in ruling circles includes calls for conscription, forcing young people into disastrous wars.

The lurch to the right finds its sharpest expression in parties that once falsely claimed to be “progressive.” The Greens, a pro-capitalist party, began their election campaign by unveiling a program for missiles, drones and war. At the national level, they have dropped their opposition to the Gaza genocide and are begging for a coalition government with Labor.

The corporatised trade unions, which function as a police force for the corporations and governments, are also promoting Labor, under conditions where it is on the offensive against workers’ jobs, wages and conditions.

The pseudo-left Victorian Socialists and Socialist Alliance are also falling in line behind Labor, presenting this pro-war and pro-austerity party as a “lesser evil.” They are peddling the fraud that the next government can be pressured to introduce social reforms, when the real agenda is for massive cuts. These parties are hostile to the working class and socialism, speaking instead for a privileged layer of the upper middle class that wants to advance its own interests within capitalism.

The SEP states bluntly to workers: if you want to prevent mass poverty, world war and fascism, you must take up the fight for socialism! We are undertaking this struggle as part of the world Trotskyist movement, the International Committee of the Fourth International, which is striving to unite workers globally, based on their common class interests.

The SEP opposes all forms of nationalism, xenophobia and racism, which are used by the ruling elites to divide the working class, divert from the fight against capitalism and defend big business.

We fight for a workers’ government, where the banks and corporations would be placed under public ownership and democratic workers’ control. This would provide the resources, created by the working class, for massive public works programs to ensure decent, well-paid jobs for all and high-quality public healthcare and education.

Above all, we are raising that the world is at a turning point. Capitalism is in a terminal crisis. The alternative is to build a unified international movement of workers fighting for socialism, a society based on social need, not private profit.

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