Left Alliance | |
|---|---|
| Abbreviation | LA |
| Founded | 1983 |
| Dissolved | c. 1998 |
TheLeft Alliance was an Australian organisation of socialist, feminist, and progressive students that flourished in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Left Alliance was formed in 1983 between students aligned to theCommunist Party of Australia and the Socialist Caucus in theAustralian Union of Students. The Left Alliance was intended to be a pluralistic socialist organisation designed to intervene in the Australian Union of Students and the student movement more broadly. However, the Australian Union of Students collapsed in 1984.[1]
By 1987, the Left Alliance consisted of theYoung Socialist League (the youth wing of the CPA), andResistance, the youth wing of theDemocratic Socialist Party, as well as independent activists. Resistance and the DSP opposed participation in theNational Union of Students, which had been formed in 1987, on the grounds that it was dominated by theAustralian Labor Party, and in December 1988, Resistance left the Left Alliance.[2]
In the 1990s, the Left Alliance became a distinct faction in the student left, rather than the grand alliance envisaged in the 1980s.[3] For much of the 1990s, the Left Alliance dominated theUniversity of Sydney Students' Representative Council; one of its members, Heidi Norman, became the first indigenous SRC President in 1994.[4] In 1995, the Left Alliance at the University of Sydney producedRacism sux: an anti-racist handbook.[5]
By the end of 1997, the Left Alliance was disintegrating. By 1998, it had collapsed in NSW and was nearly gone in Victoria. In Queensland it consisted of a small group. In 1999, the National Broad Left was formed as a new regroupment in the National Union of Students.[6]
Adam Bandt, who was a Left Alliance member atMurdoch University, later became an MP and leader of theAustralian Greens.[7]