Victorian Trades Hall Council secretary Luke Hilakari wrote to 23 Labor MPs and candidates on 16 June 2026, warning them to lift their campaign efforts immediately or face the withdrawal of union support, The Guardian reports.

The letter, which has drawn public attention after Hilakari chose to defend it openly, accused the named MPs of complacency — specifically of failing to engage voters at the ground level. Hilakari's language was blunt. Candidates must "work their ass off," he told them, or risk losing seats to One Nation. The threat of withdrawn union backing is not a procedural formality in Victorian Labor politics; Trades Hall affiliates supply substantial campaign infrastructure, including canvassing networks, phone banking operations, and voter-contact funding.

The Australian reported that Hilakari's critique centred on MPs who had failed to run adequate campaigns for the Allan government. The AFR noted that the warning was dispatched on Tuesday, with Hilakari framing it as a corrective to complacency rather than a factional attack.

The public defence of the naming-and-shaming tactic is the sharper political move. Internal pressure letters from union officials to sitting MPs are not unusual in the lead-up to Victorian state elections; going on record to justify the tactic escalates it into a public accountability exercise. Hilakari's willingness to attach his name to the criticism — and to defend it through media — signals that Trades Hall is treating underperformance as an existential risk, not an internal management issue to be resolved quietly.

The One Nation dimension matters here. The party has been making sustained efforts to convert cost-of-living and anti-establishment discontent in outer-suburban and regional Victoria into first-preference votes. In a preferential system, One Nation gains at the primary vote level can complicate Labor's path to victory even where two-candidate-preferred flows remain favourable — the arithmetic depends heavily on how well-directed those preferences are. Hilakari's invocation of One Nation is a signal to MPs that the threat is being mapped at the seat level, not just tracked in statewide polling aggregates.

The framing also reveals something about the internal tension within Victorian Labor. A union secretary publicly cataloguing MPs who have had "zero conversations with voters" — as the Guardian's headline characterises it — is a direct challenge to incumbency complacency, the tendency of sitting MPs in nominally safe seats to treat campaign mobilisation as optional. The fact that 23 names reportedly appear in the letter suggests the problem is not isolated to a handful of marginal-seat holders.

Hilakari was re-elected as Trades Hall secretary in June 2025, giving him a fresh mandate and no obvious incentive to soften his posture heading into an election cycle. His public confrontation with MPs reflects a broader pattern in Australian state politics where union peak bodies, when they judge the electoral stakes to be high enough, shift from being a quiet backstop to becoming an active pressure mechanism — operating in public view rather than through backroom channels.

Whether the intervention produces the campaign activity it demands will be visible in the weeks ahead, both through candidate visibility on the ground and through the allocation of union campaign resources. The MPs named in the letter now face a choice with concrete material consequences attached.