Brief analysis of NSW Election results: SJN proud of its campaign and achievements

The Social Justice Network ran 3 candidates for the NSW state election, 2011. The candidates scored the average of 2.2 across the seats of Auburn, Lakemba and Fairfield. Despite all circumstances (which we will mention later in the release), we could score this result in the first state campaign we ever participated in.

Recently, we have been receiving phone calls from people known to us and others not known to us. The tone of the callers has a mixture of joy and gloating. What is deeply depressing for us is that these callers were having Lebanese accent, and we are sure that they are Muslims.

In the election where the Liberal party started its campaign with vicious attack on Multiculturalism and Muslim community, where we saw many Liberal shadow ministers launched Islamophobic comments, to the point of demanding ban of Muslim migration for initial period of 10 years. We were deeply shocked and depressed when we saw that many “Muslim” organizations urged Muslim NSW residents to reward the Liberal party for its Islamophobic campaigns by urging them to vote for this extreme party.

In the aftermath of this campaign we should stress that we are proud of our achievements. We also very proud that we participated in aborting the agenda of some opportunistic Muslim “leaders” to get Liberals elected in the highly multicultural seats with high Muslim presence. We also very proud that we did not compromise our principles for any reason or in return for any deal.

Maybe we did not get a lot of votes. But we got our message through in this election in the targeted areas. Not only this. We left our fingerprints on this election, especially in high multicultural seats with high Muslim presence.

Despite the following facts, we did succeed in sending strong message about the lack of real multiculturalism in Australian politics:
1- Our campaign had no budget and we operated with self-funds..
2- Our campaign was subjected to vicious dirty tricks from many rival candidates, many of them has big budget to spread lies, deception and roumers about our campaigns and our candidates. We are well aware about the house-to-house and shop-to-shop campaign to spread lies about our campaign and candidates.
3- Our campaign challenged high-profile religious and community “leaders” who sold the interests and rights of their communities for individual benefits.

Maybe we did not get many votes, but we can claim comfortably and safely the highest moral ground among rival candidates and political opponents. During the many “Meet the candidate” forums and meetings, we demonstrated that we have both real commitments to social justice, and we have clear vision how to address the injustices in the society.

In this campaign we could accumulate more knowledge about how to conduct future campaigns in more efficient way. We should stress again that this was the first time we ran candidates for state parliament. And we have learnt a lot. And we have better exposure and better networks now. We should mention here that our candidates got more votes than political forces which were established long before our group and ran tens of candidates before.

When we decided to run candidates, our aim was not to win seats. We knew very well that we will not win any seat. We wanted to send a message to different sides. We wanted to send message to mainstream political groups that it is highly unacceptable to keep ignoring the lack of multiculturalism and the lack of equal representation of new migrants in decision making bodies. We also wanted to send a message of hope to marginalised groups and give them some hints about alternative way to deal with complacency of mainstream parties in racism and Islamopbohia.

With very limited financial resources, we have achieved a lot. We did not get a lot of votes. But we affected the way voters voted in this election. We are proud that we participated in:
1- Minimizing the swing to Liberals in high multicultural seats, especially with high Muslim presence.
2- Minimizing the Greens votes, including aborting the Greens dream of wining high multicultural seat of Marrickville and minimizing the increase of Greens votes in the Legislative Council.
3- Making the low representation of Non-English speaking people in parliament an election matter.
4- We were the only political group that campaigned on true progressive platform, where progressiveness meant siding with marginalized in their fight for equality. Unlike other “progressive” groups who were preaching progressiveness but practicing regressive ideas of excluding marginalized and promote Anti-family and Anti-moral values. Such campaigns that would result in deepening marginalization by increasing socio-economic problems as a result of deteriorating social bond of families and communities, increase individualism and increase depending on substances.

Our high moral ground includes our refusal to participate in Islamophobic campaigns through high restraint in dealing with sheikh Fayez fiasco. We were more restraint in dealing with this issue (despite the fact that we do not agree with any comment or teaching Mr Fayez launched or preached) than many Muslim religious figures and Muslim radio stations, who participated in fueling these campaigns by vending fiery comments.

In the next few weeks we will take further steps to capitalize on the already achieved goals and achievements. We will announce about them in due time.

Jamal Daoud
Spokesperson, Social Justice Network