Victorian teachers are caught in a turf war. It’s Pythonesque but no laughing matter

June 25, 2026 — 5:00am

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My local Coles isn’t normally a place for political discussion. A good trip is when I enter and exit without running into anyone I know, to avoid being seen in tracky dacks which no man my age, at least none with any dignity, should wear outside the house.

So I was curious when, a couple of weeks ago, a young, earnest-looking fellow was standing outside the sliding doors of the supermarket handing out pamphlets about the state government’s pay offer for teachers.

The pamphlet, produced by the prosaically titled Committee For Public Education, decried the offer for a four-year wage increase of between 28 and 32 per cent as a “sell-out deal between the Australian Education Union and the Victorian state Labor government” and part of a “co-ordinated assault by federal and state Labor governments on the entire working class”.

Evidently, this young fellow and his banal sounding committee were less interested in getting more money into the pockets of underpaid school teachers than doing their bit to foment the conditions for Leon Trotsky’s global revolution.

Not content with voting down the pay deal, they want to tear down the AEU and the entire enterprise bargaining system. “The fight for decent wages and conditions in public schools is inseparable from the broader political struggle against the dictates of the capitalist profit system,” the pamphlet thundered.

It went on to rail against the “criminal US-Israeli war on Iran,” the federal government’s proposed cuts to the NDIS and, hilariously, “pseudo-left........

© The Age