Party Games 34 &35/55 Online Direct Democracy & VoteFlux

I'm combining my write up of Online Direct Democracy - (Empowering the People!) and VOTEFLUX.ORG | Upgrade Democracy because both are making a very similar pitch. Instead of having an elected senator make decisions on how they will vote, their senators will vote according to the public will as determined through online voting. Given the recent brexit vote, I'm not sure how sold I am on direct democracy for everything.

Both parties are promising to have their system up and running in time for their candidates to take office if elected, but neither are fully operational at the moment. Neither provide much reassurance as to how they will get people to become involved, and how they will ensure that those involved do constitute an accurate representation of Australia as a whole. I suspect they'll tend to attract the young, tech savvy demographic but ignore the older non-tech savvy generations (I can't see my grandmother who still has dial up getting involved with either).

Both will allow you to delegate your votes to someone else, so I'm also curious what would happen if another party did a big push to get their members to register and then just delegate their votes for everything to a party representative. VoteFlux has another feature that I'm not quite sold on yet. They plan to allow you to trade away votes on things you don't care about so that you can have more votes on an issue you care about.

Finally, I'm concerned about the security & privacy implications of their systems. To be as auditable and reliable as they say they will be with systems that are not yet implemented and tested, I'm worried it will be possible to see people's voting history, and that the systems won't be as secure as they claim.

Party Games 33/55 Non Custodial Parents Party (Equal Parenting)

The Non Custodial Parents Party (Equal Parenting) have pretty much kept the same set of policies they had last election. Reform to the child support and custody laws currently in place is their main area of focus. They do have some policies in other areas, but it all comes back to child support and custody. For example they say that a major part of the increase in prison population since the mid 70s is due to the current Family Law act. Their main focus in terms of unemployment is the apparent high rate of unemployment among parents paying child support.

They also have not taken my advice from last time to get some lessons in web design. I don't think the line right at the very bottom of their page reading "var sc_project=6270014; var sc_invisible=1; var sc_security="f391aee4"; var sc_https=1; var scJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://secure." : "http://www."); document.write("");" is meant to be visible.

Party Games 32/55 Nick Xenophon Team

Since last election the Nick Xenophon Team has expanded, and this election will be running senate candidates in all six states. With the double dissolution and Nick's strong support in South Australia, it looks likely there will be at least two team members in the new Senate, if not more. So where does the team stand?

Most of their policies I can agree with. Restrictions on gambling is a good idea, as is increasing foreign aid. They support marriage equality, better treatment of asylum seekers, a national ant-corruption body, better mental health care, and better education funding are also good ideas.

I am curious about the suggestion that utility prices should be tied to the CPI. Since utility prices are included when calculating the CPI, this would require some clarification on how they want this to work. Their policy on GMOs seems a bit alarmist as well.

Overall, I won't be too concerned if the remain an important part of the senate cross bench, but I'm don't think they'll pick up any seats outside of SA.

Party Games 31/55 Mature Australia Party

I don't have a lot to say about the Mature Australia Party. What little they have in the way of policy can be boiled down to 1) better pensions, 2) better health care for the elderly, 3) less government spending, and 4) an immigration policy rather reminiscent of some of the more xenophobic parties out there. As a party initially formed by a bunch of oldies concerned about conditions in quasi-retirement villages this may not be too surprising.

Some of their concerns suggest that they haven't quite kept up with the times. Their plan for pensions is that all pensions should be tied to pensions for politicians. Now since 2004, all new members of parliament don't get a fixed pension, they get a contribution to their super plan, just like everyone else. There's still a lot of parliamentarians under previous schemes from before super was a thing who will get pensions, but the changes have already been made. This is something I found out through a simple Google search. Again, this is a party of oldies.

Party Games 30/55 Liberal Democratic Party

The Liberal Democratic Party keeps up its position of being strongly small government. I've seen no changes in policy from last time around, so that means they still want a government with zero net assets, a foreign legion organisation, no taxation, minimal foreign aid, abolishing the minimum wage and employment standards, that the ideal inflation rate is zero, hoping that charities rather than the government will supply a safety net for the unfortunate, and that motorcyclists shouldn't have to wear helmets. On that last item, if you're stupid enough to think you'll be ok riding a motorbike without a helmet, I think you're stupid enough that you should be made to do so.

The LDP fail to grasp that there can be benefits to collective action effected through government, that not every human endeavour is best suited to a free market, and indeed that a free market can have positive and negative outcomes. This become especially clear in their position on climate change, which boils down to we'll be right, the free market will sort it out. This is the free market with oil companies that have been aware of the impact of climate change since the late 70s but have been arguing since then that a) it wasn't happening, b) its is happening but not caused by humans, c) ok it is happening and is caused by humans, but it won't be that bad, d) that yes it will be that bad but it'll be too expensive too stop and we'll be able to adjust. Forgive me for not wanting someone in it just for a buck making the decisions there.

The LDP is a party with a "No government" hammer seeing everything as a nail, despite reality not being that way.

Party Games 29/55 Katter's Australia Party

Katter's Australia Party is a rather interesting case. When I started reading through their policies I got the feeling I had read them before, and not just at the last election. Indeed, when I went back and reviewed the policies of CountryMinded, there were large chunks of the policies that were word for word identical.

I asked both parties about this on twitter and got an answer that exposed some of the behind the scenes action between the two. As it turns out, the founder and lead candidate for CountryMinded was formerly a candidate for Katter's Australia Party and was the main person who wrote up the policies for Katter's Australia Party. Since last election there's been a falling out and thus CountryMinded was born. And apparently neither group has felt they should abandon the policy documents as they are. Thus in terms of policy, I don't have much to say about them beyond what I said previously about CountryMinded.

I'm not sure I agree with the CountryMinded folk that they can just use the exact same policies with just a few minor cosmetic changes when they left, because just as I can't take my employers intellectual property with me when I leave to a new job, you can't take a set of policies you wrote for one party with you to another.

Party Games 28/55 John Madigan's Manufacturing and Farming Party

With one of the longest names and least creative logos, John Madigan's Manufacturing and Farming Party is John Madigan's plan to stay in the senate after leaving the Democratic Labour Party. Much like the former PUPs, John Madigan quit his party and was serving out his term as an independent.

The party has a similar set of policies to the DLP, being socially conservative. The main difference comes in the form of greater support for business in the form of tax cuts and protectionist trade policies. There's also greater subsidies for farmers and opposition to foreign land owners.

For me I think the biggest draw was their fund raising raffle with a thermomix as the prize.

Party Games 27/55 Jacqui Lambie Network

Jacqui Lambie was the first of the PUP senators to go rogue and split from the party, and now she's leading her own party. As a Tasmanian she has a bit of an advantage over Glenn Lazarus in keeping her senate spot due to Tasmania's lower population. She has also put forward a different mix of policies.

The Jacqui Lambie Network takes a series of right-wing positons, starting with joining the anti-halal brigade with the likes of Cory Bernardi, strong support for the military (not surprising for an former member of the armed services), cutting foreign aid, and opposing renewable energy because it costs more.

I agree with their support for nuclear energy, but that's about it.

Lambie also has a habit of including tables with information that doesn't actually say much about the relevant policies. For example, on the taxation page she has a table of how many people in each state have negatively geared properties and the percentage of all such people each state has. Unfortunately all this table tells us is that the distribution of such people matches the distribution of people around Australia. So NSW has about 30% of the population and 30% of all the people who own negatively geared properties. A more useful table might tell us what proportion of the population owns a negatively geared property (around 5%).

Party Games 26/55 Help End Marijuana Prohibiton (HEMP)

Help End Marijuana Prohibition (HEMP), or to use their shorter name, the Marijuana (HEMP) Party, is another single issue party. The want marijuana legalised. That's pretty much it. No comment on other drugs. No comment on other issues. The only really interesting point they have going for them is that they will be running on a joint ticket with the Australian Sex Party, so I guess that means they have similar enough views on other matters, but it would be good to see that made clear.

Party Games 25/55 Health Australia Party

The Health Australia Party presents a pleasant picture of itself. Its 5 points of Healthy People, Healthy Economy, Healthy Environment, Healthy Democracy, and Healthy Society sounds nice in a wishy washy sort of way, but when you get into the details you find that their view of these things aren't quite what they seem.

Well start at the start with Healthy People, which I'll start out by admitting pushes a few of my buttons. Despite their policy, natural medicine (things like homeopathy, accupuncture, chiropractic) is not on an equal footing to conventional medicine. Where there has been any testing, it has been shown not to work, and indeed even counterproductive at times. They question why natural medicine has received only a tiny amount of funding from Australia's medical research funding providers. The answer is not that the funding bodies are in the pocket of big pharma, the answer is that no serious and viable research proposals have been put forward. They question how effective GPs when they can only spend minutes with a patient rather than an hour as some natural practitioners do. You know why GPs have such little time? Because they have so many patients. Because people trust doctors. I'd like to see a natural practitioner see as many patients as a GP does on a daily basis.

On a similar note, vaccinations are not something of dubious merit that should be a choice of parents similar to what colour clothes they'll buy their kids. Vaccinations have taken what used to be a number of serious and common diseases and made them things of the past.

Hospitals used to have wards of people with polio in iron lungs. These are now seen as relics of a bygone age thanks to vaccination. In recent years we've seen outbreaks of diseases we thought near gone because people felt that their children didn't need to be vaccinated.

Finally, flouridating water is not poisoning people. Flouride is found naturally in various concentrations in every water supply in the world. Bumping it up to a level where it can have a significant positive effect on people's oral health (while still within the naturally occuring range of concentrations) is a hugely cost effective public health measure. The people who object to water flouridation don't object to the use of chlorine to kill water bourne diseases in the water supply, or would they prefer a more natural drinking experience?

The outlook of the party on these issues is less surprising once you read the bios of the party executive and their candidates. Homeopaths, chiropractors, herbalists, and so on.

Since I try to find some positives for every party, I will point out that the Health Australia Party supports marriage equality, stronger protection for whistleblowers, and better public transport. However that's not enough for me to hope that getting the number 1 spot on the NSW senate ballot paper won't be enough for them to repeat the LDP's performance last election.

Party Games 24/55 Glenn Lazarus Team

The Glenn Lazarus Team is a spin off of the Palmer United Party. Glenn Lazarus followed fellow PUP senator Jacqui Lambie's footsteps and started his own party after quitting PUP. Lazarus' team has a different set of priorities which shows in its policy mix.

I like most of the policies they have put forward. Their environment policy has a strong push for better renewable energy targets, removing and limiting subsidies for fossil fuels, dealing with invasive species, and protecting world heritage areas. On health they say they want to make sure that GP visits are free, but don't say if this will be by increasing medicare payments or restricting doctors from charging co-payments (I'd be kind of ok with the latter if it came with the former.) Their stance on marriage equality is to legalise it so that the $160 million the coalition plans to spend on a plebiscite can be allocated to services supporting at risk LGBT youth such as mental healthcare and suicide prevention.

I do feel that their proposal for a US Jones Act type law to restrict maritime shipping around Australia to Australian owned and operated vessels to be a bit too nationalistic and protectionist, as are their Australian labelling proposals. I'm also not sure I agree with the family home being excluded from asset tests to receive a pension, mainly because I'm not sure I agree with someone owning a multimillion dollar house receiving a pension. Excluding up to a certain value of the family home I could support, but not the whole value.

Overall, not bad for a former footballer known as "the brick with eyes."

Party Games 23/55 Family First

First up, Family First have for some reason decided not to put their policies on their national party website, but to leave that to the state parties to do on their web sites. I haven't reviewed every bit of every state parties list of policies, but I have seen enough to see that they're all singing from the same hymn book.

Their policies are pretty much what you'd expect from a religious party with a bit of free market libertarianism thrown in for good measure. On the religious side you get opposition to marriage equality, opposition to abortion, an insistence that a family should only be mum, dad, and the kids, support for home schooling, and . On the libertarian side you get deregulation of workers rights, no more restrictions on development, an emphasis on property rights over all else (with a possible exception of God), and a gung ho militarism. They very much remind me of the American right wing, which is not reassuring. And I'm not the only one who doesn't like them. Barnaby Joyce once called them "the lunatic right" 

Overall, not much change from last election.

Party Games 22/55 Drug Law Reform Party

The Drug Law Reform Party are another of the single issue partys. Their cause is the decriminalisation of drug usage and treating addiction as a health issue rather than a criminal one. They look to examples such as Colorado, Portugal, and other places that have brought in such changes as a positive example to follow. These seem like good examples. While my own personal experience in Portugal was just a skeevy guy on the street trying to sell me pot, their decriminalisation had good results for them. And Colorado made $53 million in taxes on pot in the first year (although it was less than the $70 million they were expecting).

They've also acknowledged that there would be more to being in parliament than just drug law reform. Their answer is to let their elected members have a conscience vote on other matters, with the caveat that they wouldn't vote block supply. That they've considered the issue puts them ahead of most single issue parties, but it makes the views of the individual candidates more important to take into consideration when voting.

Finally, a point of trivia. The party's founder Greg Chipp is the son of the founder of the Australian Democrats, Don Chipp.

Party Games 21/55 Derryn Hinch's Justice Party

Derryn Hinch's Justice Party is another new party this election. Hopefully it will be better than some other parties that have included the founders name in the party name.

As the name suggests, the founder is Derryn Hinch and the party's main aims are focused on changes to the justice system. These changes can be summarised as they want it to be tougher. Tougher sentences, tougher to get bail, tougher to get parole, and a publicly accessible register of sex offenders. They use some extremely tragic events as their reason for wanting these changes, but I get the impression that just as we have a tendency to overreact to rare acts of terrorism, here we have a case of overreaction to rare and tragic violent crimes. I suspect I've read too much Bruce Schneier not to see the parallels and immediately start looking to see what is cosmetic toughness and what might be effective, and mainly seeing the former.

They say that the justice system is too easy on criminals in general, sentences are too short, and so on. As a counterpoint to this I would offer a study by the Australian Institute of Criminology of juror that found that generally jurors overestimated crime levels and suggested sentences less severe than those imposed by the judges in the cases they were involved in, which would suggest that judges aren't more lenient than society in general. I do find merit in their calls for stricter enforcement of parole and bail conditions while the person is out on parole/bail.

I was pleasantly surprised that part of their common sense platform was support for marriage equality including prefering a parliamentry vote to a plebiscite, and support for euthanasia. These don't usually pair with the tough on crime crowd.

Party Games 20/55 Democratic Labour Party

The Democratic Labour Party with its convoluted history is an odd beast. A socially conservative, pro worker party with its stronghold in Victoria, it lost its only federal Senator in 2014 when John Madigan quit the party on less than good terms. And while John has his own party now, the DLP are hoping they can get his seat back for someone still on the team.

Policy wise they're still strongly pro-life and against marriage equality, a result of their Catholic origins (even if their twitter tried to deny this to me last election). They're still pretty good on worker rights, a result of their ALP origins. They still support fusion power. Miscellanious policies that appealled to me are setting up centrelink counters at universities, reestablishing an upper house in QLD, a sensible bushfire plan, and their support for fusion power. Things that make me concerned they've not thought things through is having leave entitlements transfer to new employers (will the old employer give a bunch of cash to the new employer?, will all the leave be paid at the new pay rate (for good or bad)? Will everyone be entitled to long service leave just for working 10 years? (that last one might not be such a bad thing)), their plan for a development bank that gets it's money from ..., and their support of fusion power.

Another interesting point to note is that their policy page on asylum seekers currently has in bright red at the top This policy is currently under review. Given that the timing of this election isn't that much of a surprise (it had to happen some time this year), I'd have thought some time before now would have been a good time to finalise the current iteration of policy development. But that's just me.

Party Games 19/55 CountryMinded

CountryMinded are another party trying to fill the niche of being a better rural party than the Nationals. Not being part of the Coalition does allow them to take a few policy stances that are an almost equal mix between rational & sensible and overly protectionist of rural Australia. Among the former are an acceptance of climate change and the accompanying support for carbon pricing and more renewable energy as well as strong support for mental health services. The latter include wanting payroll tax eliminated with no suggestion as to how states will replace this revenue, protectionist trade policies, and that native vegetation is best managed by letting farmers farm as they see fit.

This last item highlights a trend that becomes apparent after a thorough read of the policies. They can all be boiled down to farmers come first. Why do they want small business to have better support? Because 90% of farms are small businesses. Who's best able to plan sustainable land management? Farmers. Who deserves more support from government in times of disaster? Farmers. Who don't we have policies for? Cityfolk.

Now this is not to deny that agriculture is an important industry, nor to suggest that farmers deserve no help from the society and the government. But, one of humanities greatest achievements is having over the last 10,000 years gone from having 100% of the population involved in hopefully producing the food needed for everyone to only 2% or so feeding everyone. And while the huge gains in productivity of food producers over that time is a foundation block of modern society, it's not the only one and to treat it as such risks neglecting other factors important for society. Without engineers developing refrigeration, all that food goes to waste. Without transportation, all that food goes to waste. Without pest controls developed by chemists, all that food goes to waste. Without environmental scientists studying climate change, all that food might stop growing. The list goes on. "Is it good for farmers?" can be an important question for judging policy, but it shouldn't be the only one.

So farmers and assorted country folk will like these guys, but this city slicker is not of their target demographic.

Party Games 18/55 Consumer Rights & No Tolls

The Consumer Rights & No Tolls party has just a few policies, and their site makes it look more like their upset about being stung with a fine for not paying their tolls one time too many than a serious attempt at policy formulation. This impression is not improved when their sole health related policy is that people who choose not to vaccinate their children should not be demonised and that there is no scientific consensus on the matter. Another of their thought bubbles is more referendums to encourage democracy, but this suggests that they don't quite grasp that a referendum is a vote to amend the constitution (and hence why the proposed vote on gay marriage is a plebiscite, not a referendum) and that Australia has historically not voted positively for matters put to referendum.

Unfortunately these are not balanced out by their other policies are things I like. No cuts to the ABC and SBS, encouraging more motorbike and public transport use, and not selling off public assets are good ideas, but not enough to make me inclined to vote for them.

Party Games 17/55 Citizens Electoral Council of Australia

The Citizen's Electoral Council of Australia brings to the fore one of the challenges of going through all the parties again this election, which is that the parties haven't changed much over the last 3 years. In this case, the CEC continue to be economic nutjobs who haven't noticed that Australia made it through the global financial crisis reasonably well, that climate change is an actual thing, and that if Prince Charles is secretly controlling the world, he's a better actor than Leonardo DiCaprio, Judy Dench, Gary Oldman, and Patrick Stewart combined.

There's no new policies (indeed one even says to contact the treasurer Wayne Swan to encourage him to implement the policy) although I did find one section I hadn't read through last time extolling the evils of video games, so I guess I now have even less reason to vote for them.

Party Games 16/55 Christian Democratic Party

The Christian Democratic Party continue to be own of the stronger Christian parties out there, with a very strict and dogmatic approach to policy. They feel that government should be under the authority of God and to serve his purposes. This is something I disagree with.

As a strongly Christian party, there's not many surprises policy wise. They want more God in government, they want no changes to the definition of marriage, mandatory internet filtering, funding for Christian universities, harsher penalties for crime, zero-tolerance for drugs, anti-abortion. Their view on the environment is that God gave it to us so it can't get that bad. They have also joined the anti-halal bandwagon and the anti-ABC bandwagon.

While that's more than enough for them to lose my vote, there are a few things they want that I agree with. They want limits on gambling and poker machines, protecting penalty rates, and giving farmers tax benefits for investing in drought preparedness.

Party Games 15/55 Bullet Train for Australia

Bullet Train for Australia continues to advocate for a fast train system between Brisbane and Melbourne for Australia, which I feel is a good thing having experienced fast trains in Japan and Korea, but in the days of sub $100 flights it's going to face an uphill battle.

They have moved on slightly from their former commitment of abstaining on non fast train matters with a candidates pledge to also support campaign finance reform, action on climate change, support for marriage equality, support for euthanasia, and limiting poker machines. They haven't quite committed to calling these policies though, more just things our guys will vote on.