Thursday, June 16, 2016

Party Games 5/55 Australian Antipaedophile Party

Edit: So it turns out that they've just moved their site. I just wrote down their old site when I was compiling my list of parties a few weeks ago.

As the Australian Antipaedophile Party's name would suggest, they are against paedophiles/child sex abusers (the party uses the terms interchangably, but the Australian Institute of Criminology makes a distinction between the two). They say the problem is much larger than people realise, citing different figures in different places, the highest of which is that one in three child experiences sexual abuse. They don't cite sources for these figures, but some rather unpleasant reading online suggests that this is an upper figure and there is a fair range of uncertainty (this summary from the Australian Insititute of Criminology gives ranges of 3-29% of boys and 7-36% of girls which even at the low end is higher than I would have thought or am comfortable with). Their proposals to deal with this issue are longer sentences for convicted offenders with less flexibility for judges in sentencing and making prosecution of offenders easier (there's not much detail on how they would achieve this though). An acknowledgement of the uncertainty in these statistics would make me feel more like they've done their research rather than trying to scare people, and make it less confusing when they seem to contradict themselves on figures.

They also feel that the Family Courts are protecting sexual abusers and helping them avoid prosecution (I'm not sure how since Family Courts are not criminal courts) and the party feels that everyone involved in the family court system are letting children down, from judges, to lawyers, to court reporters, and others and want a royal commission into the system.

They straight up say that they haven't planned any positions on matters outside of their focus area, so it's hard to say which way they'd lean on other matters, and makes voting for them a bit of a coin toss.

Trying to verify some of the claims they make in terms of statistics and such did lead me to some rather less than pleasant reading.


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