Politics

Australian Student Politicians Are Trying To Make The “Oh Jeremy Corbyn!” Chant A Thing Here

We're not quite sure it works...

by Osman Faruqi  6 July 2017

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Appearing on the main stage at Glastonbury, sandwiched between sets by Craig David and US hip-hop supergroup Run The Jewels, British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn read the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and was rewarded by an adoring crowd chanting his name to the tune of ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes.

This is a sentence that shouldn’t exist, but yet here we are.

One of the best, yet weirdest, things to come out of last month’s UK election was the proliferation of the “Oh Jeremy Corbyn!” chant.

‘Seven Nation Army’ has long been a football anthem, but during the UK election campaign supporters of Corbyn decided to adopt it. It started at rallies across England, moved into nightclubs in Liverpool, before absolutely taking over this year’s Glastonbury festival. Corbyn’s inherent meme-ability had peaked, with acts like Stormzy and Radiohead leading chants in his honour.

Now Australia’s student politicians are trying to import the chant to celebrate the politics of… Greens senator Lee Rhiannon.

Rhiannon and the Greens have been embroiled in a very public and bitter fight over the past couple of weeks. The NSW senator has been suspended from meetings of the federal party room until her state branch, the NSW Greens, reforms its constitution. But the battle has quickly become a proxy for a bigger debate within the Greens about what kind of party they want to be.

Rhiannon’s supporters see her as a radical politician in the same style as Jeremy Corbyn, fighting an ideological battle against the other “moderate” Greens senators. Even if Corbyn and sections of the Greens share some policy ideas, it’s a weird analogy considering he just scored more than 40 percent of the national vote, while the Greens languish around 10 percent.

Nevertheless, the comparison seems to be catching on. Yesterday Rhiannon attended a National Union of Students conference in Brisbane and the delegates treated her to a version of the Jeremy Corbyn chant:

Bizarrely most of the students singing the chant are members of the Labor party, according to sources who attended the conference. Some delegates suggested that Labor students, while appreciative of Rhiannon’s support for their education campaigns, were more into the idea of stoking Greens factional tensions than anything else.

At the same conference delegates passed a motion in support of Rhiannon, while also condemning the “right wing attack on her by the leadership of the Greens”. After passing the motion they started chanting. At the time Rhiannon was on stage with her colleague Larissa Waters, co-deputy leader of the Australian Greens.

Awkward.

Student politics, hey.

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Osman Faruqi is Junkee’s News and Politics Editor.

He has previously worked for a number of Greens MPs, including Senator Lee Rhiannon.