Pro-Palestine activist to take on Mali in Croydon
A pro-Palestine campaigner, who was arrested under the Malinauskus government’s tough anti-protest laws last year, is taking on the Premier at the state election.
Ahmed Azhar today announced he would run in the seat of Croydon at the March state election against sitting South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas.
The pro-Palestine activist and SA Socialists member is running as an independent candidate, and is making solutions for spiking rents a core focus of his platform.
Croydon is a safe seat for Labor, with Malinauskas winning it comfortably in 2022 with a 1.5 per cent swing. But Azhar said the party had “taken this area for granted”.
Azhar, who rents in Brompton, said he was uniquely placed to take the fight to the Premier, having been arrested in 2025 and charged under the state government’s anti-protest laws after participating in a pro-Palestine protest over activists delivering aid to people in Gaza.
He appeared in the Magistrates Court in October and pleaded guilty to the charges, but the case was dismissed and he was not convicted of any wrongdoing.
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The protest laws, rushed through Parliament in 2023, lifted fines for public obstruction in the wake of a traffic-stopping Extinction Rebellion protest against an oil and gas industry conference in the city of Adelaide. The act increased penalties for intentionally obstructing a public place to $50,000 or three months in jail.
“These laws were brought in initially in response to climate activists, and have now been used against activists opposing genocide,” Azhar said, adding that he was concerned about Malinauskas’ approach to “free speech” in relation to recent events over Writers’ Week.
The candidate said the Premier’s position on the dumping of Palestinian author Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from the 2026 Writers’ Week lineup was “hardly a surprise”.
“This is the same person who has brought in anti-protest laws which have been used against pro-Palestine protestors, including myself,” he said.
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Azhar said he had knocked on more than 1000 doors across Brompton, Blair Athol, Croydon and Enfield over the summer.
“What we found is that people are fed up with Labor, they don’t like the Liberals, but their rents are getting harder and harder to deal with, the wages are stagnating and the Labor party is doing nothing to help them,” he said.
“We want to actually push Labor and show there is a desire for something more left-wing.”
Azhar said he would push to implement a rent freeze if elected, noting renters were “in need of immediate relief”.
“They’re making choices between going to the doctor and getting groceries,” he said.
“We also have more long-term strategies. We think fundamentally the solution to the housing crisis is establishing a public builder to build massive volumes of public housing.”
Asked about Azhar’s Croydon bid at a press conference this morning, Malinauskas said he was “passionate about having a robust and rich and healthy liberal democracy in South Australia”.
“Laws that my government has passed have actively facilitated more people being able to participate in the political process, even ones from outside of major political parties,” he said.
“I think people in the broader Islamic community in South Australia know that I stand up for racism against them as much as anybody else, and it’s that consistency that’s informed my judgments all the way through.”
Meanwhile, Labor last week announced Rick Sarre would contest the seat of Bragg at the upcoming state election. Sarre contested Bragg in 2018 and 2022, but lost to the Liberal Party’s Vickie Chapman.
SA-Best also recently announced McNab Fisheries director Thomas McNab would run as a lower house candidate for the minor party in the seat of Flinders.
