High school and university students in 8 cities will walk out of class on Thursday 13 August to protest against Pauline Hanson and One Nation, in a national day of action organised by the National Union of Students and fronted by its education officer, Yasmine Johnson, a member of Socialist Alternative.
The walkout runs on Thursday 13 August under the banner "Students Say No to Hanson". Sydney students gather at 12pm on Eastern Avenue at the University of Sydney before a 1pm rally at Town Hall. Melbourne meets at 2pm at the State Library, which means secondary students there miss at least an hour of class. Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth all start at 1pm, outside Parliament House, at King George Square and at Forrest Place. Canberra, Wollongong and Newcastle are on the list too.
The Herald Sun has named 10 Victorian schools whose students are expected to attend, among them Methodist Ladies' College, Northcote High School, University High School and Strathmore Secondary College. In South Australia, The Advertiser lists Adelaide High School, Adelaide Botanic High School and University Senior College.
Less prominent in that coverage is who's calling the day, and what the organisers have said they want out of it.
Yasmine Johnson won the NUS education job campaigning in Socialist Alternative's paper
Johnson's name sits on the promotional material for the walkout. She's the 2026 education officer at the National Union of Students, the peak body for campus student associations, whose office bearers are elected by delegates at a national conference rather than by students at large. The role carries no authority over any school: she can't approve or excuse a single absence, and no principal has to agree to anything. What it gives her is a national title and a network of affiliated campus unions. Johnson is also one of the national convenors of Students for Palestine, and a Socialist Alternative member at the University of Technology Sydney, identified as such by the student newspapers Vertigo and Woroni when she ran for the position in December 2025.
She campaigned for the job in Red Flag, Socialist Alternative's own newspaper, under her own byline. The headline was "We need a socialist NUS education officer who'll stand up for Palestine".
Johnson, who describes herself as a Jewish socialist, gave evidence to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion on 13 July. Asked about resistance to colonisation, she told the commission it "has always involved elements of both mass non-violence and also violent resistance", as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald and news.com.au.
In Adelaide, the organiser who spoke to The Advertiser was Jordan Armstrong, described by the paper as a Socialist Alternative protest organiser. Armstrong said Hanson had "been normalised by every existing political institution, whether it be the media or parties like the Labor Party".
The groups backing the day are listed openly on their own accounts and in the reporting: Monash Socialist Alternative, Uni Melb Socialists, Deakin Socialists, UNSW Socialists, Curtin Socialists, Socialist Alternative branches at Adelaide University and Flinders University, RMIT Students for Palestine, the RMIT Socialist Club, Students for Palestine WA, the University of Sydney student representative council and its collectives, the QUT Guild and a set of "High School Anti-Capitalists" accounts.
That contest is on film. Students for Palestine Sydney Uni posted footage from day two of the NUS national conference on 8 December 2025, showing Johnson confronting Labor students over the lockout. Its caption says Labor students were blocking pro Palestine activists from student union positions, and that Johnson was shouted down.
Socialist Alternative set the blueprint out at its own conference in April
None of this was improvised in the past fortnight. Socialist Alternative runs an annual conference called Marxism, held this year in Melbourne from 2 to 5 April. Its published program reads like a plan for exactly what's now happening.
The Saturday afternoon slot at 1:25pm carried two sessions: "Meet the high school anti-capitalists" and "Organise the party: workshop with Socialist Party comrades from your city or district". Elsewhere on the program were "Resisting Hanson's One Nation in the 1990s", "Explaining and resisting the One Nation surge", "How can the far right be stopped?", a Students for Palestine workshop, and a session titled "How to get involved with Socialist Alternative".
Red Flag reported in April that the High School Anti-Capitalists ran one of their inaugural collective meetings at the conference.
The same faction operates on the other side of the classroom. A campaign called Socialists in Schools has spent 2026 pushing for strike action inside the Australian Education Union in Victoria, where more than 30,000 educators walked out in March and tens of thousands again on 23 July. The World Socialist Web Site, a rival left outlet, identifies Socialists in Schools as Socialist Alternative's operation.
Red Flag says the point is recruiting socialists, and it put a number on it
The clearest statement of what the protests are for was published by Red Flag on 21 June, in a piece by Nick Everett defending street mobilisations against Hanson.
"We have to orient to the people repulsed by the far right, to the subset of them who want to do something about its rise, and to those among them who can be organised into a larger socialist movement."
Everett then set out the arithmetic behind that sentence. "One Nation has grown to around 60,000 members. The Socialist Party has around 6,000. We need to recruit more socialists so that we can engage in more sustained on-the-ground organising in more suburbs and cities across the country."
He was just as direct about what he thinks the 1998 walkouts achieved, quoting Green Left Weekly writer Alison Dellit approvingly: when students walked out, "the Liberals announced a preference swap deal that amounted to an electoral lockout to 'destroy' One Nation".
That's the model being copied. The stated aim is to push the Liberals into a preference decision, and it's being run three months out from a Victorian election where One Nation is contesting almost every seat.
The 1998 walkout the organisers keep invoking was about 10,000 students, not 14,000
Everett's article claims Resistance, the youth wing of the old Democratic Socialist Party, "initiated a 14,000-strong national high school student walkout in July 1998".
The reports written at the time don't support that figure. Green Left, which was aligned with the organisers, reported on 29 July 1998 that "ten thousand young people from hundreds of schools across the country walked out". The Militant put it at "as many as 10,000", and the World Socialist Web Site at "an estimated 10,000".
That's a founding story overstated by about 40%, and it's the version now being sold to 15 year olds.
Lucy Hood left it to parents and Victoria's department wouldn't say no
Neither South Australia's nor Victoria's education department has moved to stop it.
South Australia's Education Minister Lucy Hood said on 5 August that attending was "always up to an individual parent", adding that school "is the best place for a child to be during the school week, learning and participating and engaging with their friends, but really that is a matter for an individual parent to decide".
Victoria's Department of Education was even less committal. A spokesman said "normal student attendance expectations will apply in relation to any proposed future protests, and schools will manage any non-compliance consistent with their usual practice".
Neither answer tells a parent whether their child will be marked absent, or who organised the day their child is being asked to join. That gap matters here, because Hanson has campaigned on what happens inside classrooms, including a plan to teach patriotism in schools.
Protest isn't on Victoria's list of approved absences, and most of the school students can't vote
Most of the high school students walking out on 13 August can't vote. The voting age is 18, and while 16 and 17 year olds can enrol early, they can't cast a ballot until they turn 18. Most of the university students taking part can.
Victoria's Department of Education publishes what counts as an approved absence. The list runs to medical and dental appointments where out of hours isn't viable, bereavement or funerals, school refusal where there's a management plan, cultural observance with advance notice, and family holidays with notice and a student absence learning plan. Political protest isn't on it.
The Education and Training Reform Act 2006 lets principals approve an absence "whenever the parent provides an explanation that the principal considers reasonable", and that's the gap a parent's note goes through. Where it isn't approved, the department says the parent "must be informed that this means they may not have met their obligations" under that Act. An accumulation "could lead to a School Attendance Notice from a School Attendance Officer", and failing to comply with that "may result in the issue of an Infringement Notice".
South Australia puts it on parents more bluntly. Under the Education and Children's Services Act 2019 a parent must take reasonable steps to make sure their child attends, and the department says the maximum penalty for failing to is $5,000. A principal must escalate to the Chief Executive once a student has been absent without reasonable excuse for 10 or more days in a term. One Thursday won't reach that, which is why a single day walkout is the format.
Hanson has already made what happens in classrooms a One Nation issue, campaigning to teach patriotism in schools and to scrap Welcome to Country.
Carlos Quaremba says the students just aren't interested in debating
One Nation's South Australian leader is the former Liberal senator Cory Bernardi. The Advertiser reported that two One Nation staff members tried to sit in on an organising meeting in Adelaide on 4 August, and were chased out once the organisers recognised them.
One Nation's South Australian president Carlos Quaremba took a softer line, saying Australia is a free country and students were "more than welcome" to protest, but that "they're not interested in debating, they are just interested in believing their ideology".
The stated trigger for the walkout is Pauline Hanson's National Press Club address on 16 June, where she said Australia "cannot be a multicultural society" and "must be monocultural". She's since told the ABC that the Socceroos are the model, describing "people from different background and cultures and nations all wearing" the one jersey. We've set out what she actually meant by that before.
Organisers have also pointed to her July meeting with Tommy Robinson in Luton and to Gina Rinehart part funding her trip to Europe.
The organisers picked the date themselves, three months out from the Victorian election
High School Anticapitalists, one of the groups calling students out, has been explicit about why now. In promotional material reported by the Daily Mail, it said One Nation "is now polling at around 30%, and is rapidly cohering a large following of bigots and sickos", and that "for that reason, we are calling a nationwide high school and university student walkout on August the 13th, three months before the state election". The polling behind that is real. In South Australia in March the final count gave One Nation seven seats, 4 of the 47 House of Assembly seats on a 22.9% primary vote and 3 of the 11 Legislative Council seats on 24.4%, one more upper house seat than the Liberals managed.
Federally the party has spent the past fortnight trading the lead with Labor. RedBridge this week had One Nation on 31% of the primary vote to Labor's 30% and the Coalition's 18%. DemosAU's poll of 9,343 voters put One Nation on 30% to Labor's 26% and projected it winning up to 66 seats. Our poll tracker has the full run.
In Victoria, a Freshwater Strategy poll for the Herald Sun taken after Ben Carroll replaced Jacinta Allan as premier had One Nation on 22%, behind the Coalition on 30% and ahead of Labor's 25%.
A Melbourne school student organiser told the Herald Sun the students were "appalled by her meteoric rise, her normalisation by the mainstream", and that "we refuse to sit back and watch Australia turn into Trump's America". On the organisers' own figure, the following they're describing as bigots and sickos is close to a third of the country. Victorians vote in November.
