Luke Hilakari runs the Victorian Trades Hall Council, a major union organization. On 16 June 2026, he sent a letter to 23 Labor politicians and candidates with a blunt message: work harder on your campaigns, or the union will stop backing you. The Guardian reports that Hilakari later defended the letter publicly.

Hilakari accused these politicians of being lazy. They weren't talking to voters face-to-face, he said. He told them to "work their ass off" or risk losing their seats to One Nation, a rival party. Why does this threat matter? Trades Hall doesn't just donate money. It runs the nuts and bolts of campaigning: teams of people knocking on doors, volunteers making phone calls, and funding for reaching voters.

The Australian reported that Hilakari was frustrated about MPs not campaigning hard enough for the Allan government. The AFR said the letter arrived on Tuesday, framed as a wake-up call rather than a political attack.

Hilakari could have handled this quietly, behind closed doors. Instead, he went public. He defended his decision to name and shame these politicians in front of journalists. That's the significant move. It turns what is usually a private conversation into a public statement: the union is telling voters that these MPs aren't pulling their weight.

One Nation matters in this story. That party has been gaining ground in suburbs and rural areas by talking about cost-of-living struggles and anger at politics as usual. In Australia's voting system, even if most voters eventually prefer Labor, One Nation's first-preference votes can cause problems if those votes don't flow back to Labor the way the party expects. Hilakari's mention of One Nation is his way of saying: we're watching which seats could flip.

There's something worth paying attention to here about how Labor operates internally. When a union leader publicly says that 23 sitting MPs have had "zero conversations with voters," that points to a real problem. Politicians who hold safe seats sometimes assume they don't need to campaign hard—they think they'll win anyway. The fact that this problem involves 23 people, not just one or two, suggests it's widespread.

Hilakari was elected to his role last year with a fresh mandate. He has nothing to lose by being tough. His public move fits a pattern across Australian state politics: when union leaders think an election matters enough, they stop working behind the scenes and start calling out politicians in public.

In the weeks ahead, we'll see whether this warning works. Watch how visible these 23 candidates become on the ground, and watch how the union spends its campaign money. These politicians now have a real problem: the union could abandon them when they need help most.