Our challenge was motivated by what many of us regarded as a pretty terrible enterprise bargaining agreement (EBA), that we signed in 2024. As the cost-of-living crisis set in, the government imposed a 3 percent wage cap. Meanwhile, we stood by and watched the EBA negotiations occur without member participation. Many of us spoke to our organizers, but it really seemed like the union’s leadership wasn’t interested in having members involved in the EBA.

We begged and hassled the union to organize meetings, and eventually they did. At those meetings, a lot of people talked about challenging the 3 percent wage cap, but the union insisted that it wasn’t possible.

Going into the 2024 negotiations, we were just a bunch of individuals — we didn’t know each other very well, and we didn’t have a lot of strength. So, after the EBA was concluded, we got some people together and said “Okay, what we need to do is build a rank-and-file group that, in four years’ time, is strong enough and big enough to pressure the leadership to listen to what we have to say about EBA negotiations.”

A year later, I think it’s true that a lot of Australian unionists are talking about our campaign. That’s because it’s one of the most authentic and organic rank-and-file movements to emerge in the labor movement in a really, really long time. And you can see that in the diversity of our group. It’s not made up of your typical internal agitators. We’ve got socialists, Greens members, Labor Party people, and people who vote for the conservatives. That diversity reflects the range of perspectives across the public service and indicates that it’s a really broad rank-and-file campaign. I think that’s why it’s special and has got people talking.

That’s right — basically, one EBA wiped out ten years of gains. That is the grievance.

The union leadership is saying that the 2024 EBA was a huge success, and that they negotiated a 22 percent wage increase across the board. But the figures just don’t check out. In fact, their total includes all manner of bribes — for example, one-off cash bonuses paid to existing workers — and that’s just misleading, in our opinion.

It also flies in the face of lived experience. Even though lots of public servants have trouble articulating the exact amount they’ve lost, they know they’re worse off because they experience it. They experience it when they’re at the checkout. They experience it when they’re trying to cover rent or mortgage payments or insurance. It’s hard to persuade someone in that situation that they’ve actually won a significant pay rise.

It’s not just the union’s response to the latest round of job cuts — it’s about the union’s response to job cuts across the board, whether under the current Labor premier, Jacinta Allen, or her predecessor, Daniel Andrews. Year after year, Labor state governments make cuts.

I’ve been in the public service for ten years, and in that time, I’ve survived four rounds of redundancies. And that’s such a common experience that most of us are experiencing fatigue from round after round of “consultation” on restructures and redundancies. Every couple of years, you’re back in a discussion about why your job is necessary, trying to explain why they shouldn’t cut you, and knowing that even if you’re safe, maybe they’ll cut the other guy sitting next to you. It’s demoralizing and exhausting, and the union’s response is weak. The union leadership claims there’s nothing we can do about it. Well, we disagree with that. We think there is something you can do about it — we believe in fighting back.

When you think about it, the current union leadership has spent the last thirty-two years watching round after round of cuts. And we think that’s one of the reasons they’re failing — it’s not surprising that after that long they’d run out of ideas and become complacent. But that’s exactly why we’re saying that these guys are done, it’s time for change. It’s time to rejuvenate the union.

The Gold Review is a response to the “Silver Review,” which was initiated by the Victorian government with a view to identifying $2.5 billion worth of budget savings, including ones made through job cuts.

The Silver Review was put together without any public or open consultation, so the first point of the Gold Review was to provide the kind of timely, fearless, and fair advice to government that public servants are known for. A Voice for Members recognizes that the Victorian state government has a genuine challenge before it, in balancing the budget and strengthening the state’s fiscal position. So, the Gold Review offers a reasoned and responsible response to that challenge and shows that when you ask public servants how to fix a problem, we will provide a solution.

And, just as importantly, the Gold Review demonstrates that it’s possible to realize budgetary recovery without cutting jobs. It identifies $13 billion worth of savings that could be funded without a single redundancy. And that’s a powerful argument. Even by implementing a small percentage of what we’ve proposed, the government could repair the budget to a significantly greater extent than what’s provided for by the Sliver Review.

Public servants have a very broad range of skills and capabilities. Some of us are program staff, some of us are frontline service workers, and, yes, some of us are policy wonks. But the beauty of our campaign — and perhaps what makes it unique — is that we have attracted a diversity of people from across the public service who are contributing heart and soul. That’s what has allowed us to develop such a multifaceted strategy for the campaign to save jobs and public services that includes both marching on the streets and balancing spreadsheets.

That’s also what we want to bring to union leadership — the skills and creativity of members are powering this campaign and we think this kind of rank-and-file-centered approach could help to revitalize the Australian union movement as a whole.

I love this question. To give you an example, members often complain to us that they don’t know who their delegates are. That’s because delegate structures have atrophied. But we think that delegates — elected by union members they work alongside — are the backbone of the union. So, one of the first things we’re going to do is restore the delegate structure. We’ve got to ensure that there are delegates in every workplace, and we’ve got to provide them with ongoing training and development.

We’re also going to introduce more frequent members’ meetings. In the entire ten years I’ve spent in the public service, I’ve never been invited to a members’ meeting. Similarly, we don’t have delegates’ conferences, which means that delegates from across the Victorian public service don’t have the opportunity to meet each other. So, we don’t have the opportunity to learn directly from fellow union members about similar struggles being waged in other areas. We will change that.

Basically, we want to establish structures that allow people to talk and get to know one another. Yes, if we win, and we establish democratic union structures, members could use those structures to campaign against us if we represent them poorly or if they disagree with the strategy we’re standing for. But if that means more workers deciding to put themselves forward in the next union election, then we celebrate that.

I find it flabbergasting that some people have portrayed our campaign as a “hostile takeover.” Imagine describing the opposition campaign, during a state or federal election in those terms; it’s mind-boggling. But we have a very different standard of democracy — we aren’t scared of union elections. We are absolutely committed to union democracy, even if it means we lose office next time around.

We have around two hundred fifty activists campaigning with us and thirty-eight candidates standing for office, and the idea of member-led unionism is what motivates us. Our campaign was born of frustration with the EBA negotiation process and the fact that the union wasn’t allowing people to organize in their own workplaces.

This was reinforced when we started talking to members — we were inundated with a barrage of complaints, disappointments, and stories of heartbreak that resulted from trying to deal with the union. The most common complaint was that the union leadership had thwarted members’ efforts to organize in their own workplace. For many, that was really perplexing — why would a union try to shut down workplace organizing? Experiences like that are why A Voice for Members activists are up for handing out flyers on the street or knocking on members’ doors.

It’s also why democracy and participation matter — they give members a real stake in the project. When we started A Voice for Members, we wanted to design a campaign that could serve as a model for our plan to rebuild a democratic, rank-and-file-powered union. To give you an example, before settling on our platform, we opened up policy submissions for two weeks. Then we put all the proposals to a general meeting where we encouraged debate and discussion. Thanks to that process, we have a policy platform that genuinely reflects what members believe in — and thanks to that experience, members are much more confident to advocate for our ticket.

On a broader level, we are very committed to being a grassroots campaign of people who are currently and actively involved in the Victorian public service. So our candidates range from housing workers, all the way through to prison officers, frontline workers, policy officers, and gallery and museum curators. We’re workers from both Melbourne and regional areas.

The first thing is, we absolutely respect members’ right to vote for whoever they think is going to represent them well. If members are persuaded by the current leadership, then they should absolutely vote for them.

But I would also ask the question, “Where have those steady hands guided us to date?” So far, they’ve guided us to an EBA with pay increases below inflation and a refusal to challenge the government’s 3 percent wage cap. The same steady hands refused to fight against job cuts until we lit a firecracker under their bums by challenging them in the union elections.

So my response would be to say that I don’t think the current leadership’s “steady hands” have guided the union in the best interests of Victorian public servants or, for that matter, the Victorian community.

When we took on this campaign, everybody told us that rank-and-file tickets never succeed. And yes, we’ve learned that the odds really are stacked against you. The incumbents have a lot of advantages. They have name recognition, they’re able to say that they understand the challenges of running the union and they have access to the resources and the infrastructure of the Victorian labor movement including personal connections and friendships.

They’ve also got access to big donors and even lawyers. To give you a sense of it, when we started, we phoned around a list of industrial lawyers to see if any would provide pro bono support for the campaign. Some told us that while they would have liked to help, they were worried that if they did so, they’d lose the support of other unions — or even the incumbents.

So many people told me some version of “you will never, ever win, this is a suicide mission, you’ll get the entire union movement off-side.” And yes, the pressure has definitely been intense — especially the smear campaigns against myself and our other candidates — and this pressure is part of why rank-and-file tickets often don’t succeed. But despite that, I deeply believe that optimism is a political act.

The hope of our campaign is that it sends a message — to the labor movement, to our comrades in the rank and file, and to the union’s leadership — that union elections are not something to be feared. No one is entitled to union leadership positions. They are not jobs for life. So, from the beginning, our motto has been “win, lose or draw, we’re in it for the long haul.” Yes, we want to win this election. But more than that, we are a rank-and-file group and we aren’t going anywhere. After the election — whether we win, lose, or draw — we will continue to be a force within the union, fighting for all public servants.