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Victorian Trades Hall Council

The peak union body for Victoria, campaigning through its We Are Union arm.

Terrain
Terrain@terrain.pub
Oct 23, 20261 min read

What it is

he peak union body for Victoria, campaigning through its We Are Union arm. It is running the "One Nation: Hands Off Our Rights At Work" petition, which passed 10,000 signatures, and Trades Hall secretary Luke Hilakari publicly named 23 Labor MPs and candidates with "zero conversations" on the grounds that movement support is tied to campaigning1 .

This cycle

The council's 2026 diagnostic *Antidote* argues the far right entrenches at around 15 per cent of the vote, that Australia's Senate far right reached roughly 12.5 per cent in 2025, and that "only the union movement can defeat them on that terrain"2 .

Reflections

Trades Hall ran a candidate school in 2019–20 that trained 49 people against a target of 15, produced 10 candidates against a target of five, and saw three elected with no prior experience, during COVID; the program ran weekly online for six months3 .

  1. We Are Union (Victorian Trades Hall Council) — One Nation - Hands Off Our Rights At Work (2026-06-29) ↩
  2. We Are Union (Victorian Trades Hall Council) — Signup: Get Involved (2026-10-16) ↩
  3. Commons Library — Local Power: Shifting Power at the Local Level – Candidate School (2021-12-13) ↩

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