Newcastle and Charlestown seats have been vacated today by Tim Owen and Andrew Cornwell respectively. I’m thinking that these will go to a by-election for each seat now? Hmmm.
http://www.afr.com/p/national/two_mps_quit_over_icac_revelations_yM8PYGfPmYv1P7RO6xJGkL
Premier Mike Baird says Newcastle and Charlestown will get by-elections.
Is PPAU registered in NSW yet?
Not yet no, alas.
Unfortunately the requirements for registering in NSW are rather onerous and require 750 AEC registered members in NSW, but not only that, the process also requires an actual paper based ‘declaration of party membership’ form be signed. So we’ll need to 750 members, make sure they are on the electoral roll, and have them sign a piece of paper to state they are indeed a member of PPAU NSW. (+ it also costs $2000 in fees)
That said however, we will aim to achieve this as soon as we can. But I do not forsee it being manageable before these by-elections however. 
We do seem to only need 100 members to contest local elections (ie council level), so that is something we should be able to sort out before the next round of local elections should we decide to run in them.
Who wants to run for Lord Mayor of Newcastle? 
Hi
New member just reading through some of the recent posts, may come back and comment on a couple of others this afternoon but just a comment on this one for now.
Firstly, in NSW we have to be registered for 12 months before we can nominate candidates as a registered party, and my understanding is that applies to by-elections as well as general elections, and I believe it is the same for local government registration.
It is possible of course to run candidates as ‘unendorsed’ candidates. They can still be promoted as Pirate Party candidates, but they’ll just have a blank space under their name on the ballot paper instead of the party name, and their nomination form has to be signed by 15 people enrolled in the relevant electorate rather than the party’s registered officer.
I assume you’ve probably had some discussions about this in the past. Certainly on the one hand even running as unendorsed candidates should still provide some value in profile-building and growing membership and supporters, and if it’s something that’s never been considered as an option, I’d personally think it is worth considering as a potential option in some circumstances.
However, obviously I don’t think you’d bother running unendorsed candidates just because there’s an election on and you can. I’d think you’d only do it if a) you had a suitable prospective candidate or candidates, and b) you had sufficient resources both in finances and volunteers to run a basic campaign.
There’s still a month until nominations close for these two by-elections so there’s plenty of time to decide if people think contesting one or both ot them is feasible, but I’m under the impression we should probably work on some more state-specific policies before getting into a NSW by-election???
I’m not sure what work you’ve done on potentially favourable demographics, but I would imagine Newcastle may be amongst the potentially more favourable state seats in NSW, so in the future it is the kind of seat I’d imagine we may be contesting.
Interestingly we have quite a strong base of supporters in Newcastle, so it’s something we could consider pursuing in the future. 
Right now we have no state-specific interpretation of the platform that we can build off, but that’s a project I’d like to begin in the next couple of months once the administrative stuff is out of the way.
Speaking of politically interesting parts of NSW and upcoming by-elections there’s also two council by-elections in the upper Blue Mountains after a Greens councillor and an independent councillor bizarrely quit in a protest over the council’s financial management.
One of the interesting things about that area is that Blue Mountains Ward 1, which covers Katoomba, Leura, Blackheath & other western parts of the mountains) has had a history of being one of the most progressive voting constituencies in the state. The Greens have regularly polled 30% or more in some booths in state and federal elections, and in the 2008 local government elections the ward’s 3 seats were won by a Green and two progressive independents, with the Labor and Liberal candidates finishing fourth anf fifth. This didn’t hold in 2012 when Labor and Liberal each won a seat, but it still shows it to be a quite interesting area.
Unlike Newcastle I would guess though that this is probably not as potentially strong a future target area for us. It’s an area where I believe the Greens are underperforming and that there’s a larger untapped progressive vote (eg the 2008 council votes). It’s an area the Greens don’t target as a high priority, where they have a high turnover of membership, and IIUC have had a number of issues with their councillors, which has seen them drop from having won 3 seats and got the highest vote share across the LGA in 2008 to now having no councillors after this resignation. On that basis it would seem to be a promising area for other progressive parties, but I would imagine this is more of the tree-changer demographic, which I would think is probably not as favourable for the Pirates.
I’m interested in helping identify and plan for what areas we might want to try and target in the 2016 local government elections, so I’d be interested to know what you guys think about what kinds of areas you think may be most favourable. Obivously simply based on the maths I’d suggest targeting councils that are elected at large where the quota to win a seat is lower (eg Campbelltown, which has 15 councillors and you can get elected with only about 4%), but there are other factors too.