For Workers

For A Republic

A logo for the Republican Workers Party features a hammer with a wooden handle, surrounded by a branch of yellow flowers and green leaves. The logo has a circular border with the words "REPUBLICAN WORKERS PARTY" in yellow uppercase letters on a dark green background, with orange stars around the circle.

Australia is one of the wealthiest countries on earth. Most of us will never see that wealth. We work the jobs, build the infrastructure, raise the kids, and keep the country running, while a small group of private interests makes the decisions that shape our lives. We formed to change this.

Get involved
Quote about treating people as active partners in building power, from RWP Program 2026 Special Congress.

The Problem isn’t Complicated.

Rents are rising. Jobs are insecure.

Housing, energy, transport, aged care, essential services have been privatised and handed to for-profit companies. The result is higher costs, worse services, and less accountability.

Wages stagnate. Rights are wound back.

Rights to organise, rally, and strike have been restricted. Workplace safety standards weakened or ignored. Both major parties have backed this system.

Divisions are manufactured.

Working people are pitted against each other using race, religion, and background. These distractions serve those who benefit from keeping us divided. Our answer is unity through shared interests.

Our Core Commitments

  • A Workers' Republic — democratic control over the economy, run for public benefit not private profit

  • An independent union movement led by rank-and-file members, free from party control

  • Solidarity with First Nations peoples in their struggle against ongoing dispossession and exploitation

  • Organising in workplaces and communities, not just online campaigns or electoral politics

  • Rejection of division based on race, religion, gender, or background

  • International solidarity with workers and communities facing the same challenges everywhere

Several gold and white outlined starburst shapes scattered across the image to make the southern cross.

The Toscin

The Toscin
The Labor Question

The case for building outside Labor does not rest on the idea that Labor has drifted, or sold out, or lost its way, or fallen into the wrong hands. All of those stories imply there was once a golden age, a true Labor Party that could be restored by better people with better values. The history does not support that. The claim made here is harder and more useful, from its first decade, the Labor Party's actual function has been to take the energy of the organised working class and channel it into forms the existing system can absorb. It does not fail at representing workers. It succeeds at managing them. Once you see this, a century of apparent betrayals stops looking like a series of accidents and starts looking like a machine doing its job.

Read more →
What Republicanism Means to us

Ask most Australians what a Republic means and they will tell you it means getting rid of the King. That is part of it, but it is the smallest part. If that was all a republic meant, it would barely be worth the effort. Swapping a king for a president and changing the letterhead on government buildings would not change a single thing about how this country actually works, who owns it, or who gets a say in running it.

Read more →