Vote Palestine Wills – sponsored by Free Palestine Melbourne – launched its 2025 election campaign on Saturday 7 November 2024 in Coburg, Melbourne, Victoria.
Vote Palestine Wills is not aligned with any political party. What we want is a Federal Member of Parliament (MP) who will represent the Wills community’s deep sympathy for and solidarity with the Palestinians.
The decision to run a community-based election campaign was taken following recent comments by Peter Khalil, the Labor Member for Wills, disparaging the Palestine solidarity movement in the Australian Financial Review, and his refusal to attend a public forum hosted by Free Palestine Melbourne on Justice for Palestine and Australian Foreign Policy in September 2024.
Wills is one of the most progressive, multicultural and pro-Palestinian electorates in Australia and yet we have an MP who has consistently flaunted his contempt for the community by vilifying Palestine activists in the corporate media, refusing to address the public on the issue of Palestine, and even downplaying the Gaza genocide by falsely claiming that photos of wounded children are manipulated.
One of the targets of the campaign will be Wills’ large Muslim community, who make up 10.3% of its population.
Most Muslims in Wills don’t realise that Mr Khalil has made a career out of supporting and working for pro-Israeli institutions and interests for the past twenty years. The purpose of Vote Palestine Wills will be to educate the voters of Wills so that they understand where their candidates really stand on the issue of Palestine.
In 2022, Labor won Wills with 58.6% of the two-party preferred vote. Vote Palestine Wills believes that it can reduce this margin through a program of community engagement and education.
This is how democracy is supposed to work. People disengage from the electoral process when politicians fail to represent or engage with them. We want to empower our communities so that they will elect an MP who will stand with the Palestinians in Canberra.