2 hours ago
5
June 25, 2026 — 5:00am
My local Coles isn’t normally a place for political discussion. A good trip is when I enter and exit without running into anyone I know, to avoid being seen in tracky dacks which no man my age, at least none with any dignity, should wear outside the house.
So I was curious when, a couple of weeks ago, a young, earnest-looking fellow was standing outside the sliding doors of the supermarket handing out pamphlets about the state government’s pay offer for teachers.
The pamphlet, produced by the prosaically titled Committee For Public Education, decried the offer for a four-year wage increase of between 28 and 32 per cent as a “sell-out deal between the Australian Education Union and the Victorian state Labor government” and part of a “co-ordinated assault by federal and state Labor governments on the entire working class”.
Evidently, this young fellow and his banal sounding committee were less interested in getting more money into the pockets of underpaid school teachers than doing their bit to foment the conditions for Leon Trotsky’s global revolution.
Not content with voting down the pay deal, they want to tear down the AEU and the entire enterprise bargaining system. “The fight for decent wages and conditions in public schools is inseparable from the broader political struggle against the dictates of the capitalist profit system,” the pamphlet thundered.
It went on to rail against the “criminal US-Israeli war on Iran,” the federal government’s proposed cuts to the NDIS and, hilariously, “pseudo-left organisations like Socialists in Schools”, a rival faction of Trots who also campaigned against the pay offer.
Having popped out for some milk and eggs, I’d stumbled into a Monthy Pythonesque turf war between the Judean People’s Front and People’s Front of Judea.
Splitters!
It was funny at the time but less so now that a majority of AEU members voted against a generous pay rise for teachers desperately in need of one and for ongoing industrial action that will disrupt schools, inconvenience parents and most likely, harden public opinion against one of our most underappreciated professions.
The Committee For Public Education is one of three hard-left groups active within the AEU which, throughout a protracted pay dispute between the union and the government, have tried to out-Bolshie the other in pushing teachers towards the barricades.
The others are Socialists in Schools – a collective of activist teachers aligned with the Socialist Alternative, a registered political party that promotes itself as a “radical alternative to Labor” and stands candidates in federal and state elections in Victoria – and Fight the Crisis, a militant AEU faction that objected to putting the corruption-ridden CFMEU into administration.
After Friday’s extraordinary revolt by AEU members, when 58 per cent voted against a proposed enterprise agreement endorsed by the AEU leadership, Robert Corr, a teacher at the selective entry Mac.Robertson Girl’s High School, put the case in these pages against the pay offer and the union’s handling of negotiations. He is a prominent voice on the Instagram page of Socialists in Schools, where he blames “warmongers profiting from crimes against humanity in Gaza and Iran” and price-gouging corporates for the higher-than-forecast inflation that has hit the household finances of teachers, along with everyone else.
Fight the Crisis and its organiser Lucy Honan then featured in a piece in this masthead exploring the campaign behind the No vote.
Honan, in a separate interview with Solidarity.net.au, provided further insight into who and what is driving her group. “The huge burst of energy and leadership has been people involved in Teachers and School Staff for Palestine,” she said. “They brought the experience of intransigent rank-and-file activity.”
The campaign against the government offer tapped into genuine anger and frustration felt by overworked teachers towards Victoria’s long-serving Labor government and their own union leadership. It also promulgated a false claim that the government’s bottom line – wage increases at nearly twice the current rate of inflation – represented a real wage cut.
This argument, one repeatedly made by those opposed to the offer, fails the most basic NAPLAN test of numeracy. It is based, not on what is contained in the government’s offer, but what teachers accepted four years ago in their previous EA negotiated as Victoria was emerging from its COVID winter but before the post-pandemic spike in global inflation.
The agreement approved in 2022 by the AEU leadership turned out to be a bad deal because it baked in pay rises well below inflation. This is a poor reason for refusing to accept a good deal now.
It is hardly breaking news for a union to have hard-core socialists in its ranks. It becomes a problem when people more interested in the fight than a fix hold sway over a union membership. This is what we saw in last Friday’s vote.
The Committee for Public Education traces its ideological roots to the Fourth International, the global socialist organisation Trotsky founded in 1938, two years before Stalin’s assassin caught up with him in Mexico City. Trotsky ascribed to the idea of permanent revolution and rejected alliances with the bourgeoisie – a position which makes it difficult to negotiate in good faith with government officials about pay and conditions for teachers.
The desire to blow up the system rather than reach agreement through constructive bargaining is an expression of industrial Hansonism which, in the case of teachers struggling to meet rent and mortgage payments on moderate incomes, serves only to aggravate grievance.
Victorian teachers are Australia’s worst paid. This is a serious problem. The obvious solution, one the AEU leadership and government thought they had settled on, was to give them substantially more pay.
Had a majority of AEU members voted to accept the offer, all government school teachers would have been back-paid higher salaries from May 15 once the agreement was finalised. Instead, teachers will remain no better off for as long as this dispute drags on.
If the Trots have their way, it will never end.
Chip Le Grand is state political editor.
The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.
