Pirate Party "Right Wing" ideas thread

Alllllllrighty then!

What do you want to cover?

All of it. That is to focus on the whole then break it down into domains. Most of us talk about single topics/issues but rarely in context of the whole.

My first question is to try and get the right wing into domains then the historical views versus contemporary. Domains such as Economics, Social, Environment/Resources, what ever else to create a frame work for analysing the right wing.

I find it funny how people say our system is broken… I say it works perfectly as planed and developed.

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I hoped that we would be above the “left/right dichotomy.” That being said I do think a broad policy platform is a good thing for the party.

Industries traditionally left to the conservative parties to defend such as agriculture and forestry could be areas the party could develop policy for, in line with the party’s philosophy and objectives of course. The Greens and Labor tend to not care about the working class people employed (directly and indirectly) by these industries, which we could use to our advantage for more widespread support.

I think overall the party should be above a left/right view - as many of our positions are a mix of what is traditionally firmly one or the other.

That said, many people especially new to the party are firmly mentally locked in that model, so we will have to at times see and communicate in that framework even though it is not accurate or cater for how we see the world.

I reckon there is a big gap here. We attract a disproportionate number of farmers already. I think it comes down to a mix of egalitarianism, civil libertarianism, a focus on evidence based policy and a good communications policy. Agriculture is something we could investigate if we can convince our farmer types (Hint @twisty) to get involved in some policy development sometime in the future (progress will be driven by interest in and spare time for it).

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So I should contact twisty to get involved in developing policy in this area?

twisty is our Social Media officer (and also happens to be a farmer). Our Policy Development officer is @Jesse_Hermans.

So definitely get in touch with Jesse, and maybe Twisty would like to get involved too.

I’m watching

hjsagyhjigtyufagfyasu

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Our next PDC meeting is on Tuesday 8:30pm. Please do come along, it gets a bit boring and repetitive if I’m the only one suggesting and working on policy. It’s good to have some fresh perspective and suggestions.

Is there anything in particular you have in mind? I know there’s a real gap in disaffected rural voters who half the time feel like the Greens on their side and half the time they’re screwing them over, while the Nationals and ALP aren’t really listening either.

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I’ll be there.

How about we start a new thread for Farming policy discussion?

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That’s super convenient. We’ve been rabblerousing a couple of ideas for outreach to rural QLD recently with mixed success. I’ll post my thoughts in there.

We liberate new blood from the murky mudslinging of the hyperpartisan dual axis of mainstream politics and enlighten them with our brand of radical centrism!

Having just read the thread, I noticed there were some issues mentioned around immigration, as well as Islamic extremism etc. I think I’ll throw in my 2 cents worth.

On immigration, there’s a few different aspects to this that need to be dissected and examined in isolation.

Firstly there is the general effects of immigration induced population growth. There is a growing angst from moderate centerist types about the negative economic impacts from very high immigration and lack of a population policy, that the left are ignoring. It frustrates them how only the right seem willing to even talk about immigration policy. They use evidence from e.g. the productivity commission to support their views. These type of people are calling for net immigration to be reduced from it’s current level of 200k+ back to the long run average pre-Howard of around 70k.
These sorts of views can be easily obtained from MacroBusiness:


(Just search immigration, population ponzi etc.)


Then there is the issue of asylum seekers. The PPAU already has a good policy on this so we can skip it.


There is also the issue of people who immigrate to Australia who don’t share our Pirate values, or even more generally Australian liberal democratic and egalitarian values. This can be further splintered into Islamic extremism. Islamic extremism can further be segmented into those who immigrated here without our values, but more commonly the issue is later generations which grew up as Australian citizens but actually re-adopted the illiberal theocratic values their parents fled.

This issue of people who “come here but do not share our values” is very serious, and the only non-bigoted voice I’ve heard out of Aus politics on the issue was from David Leyonhjelm. Although his solutions are insufficient and would likely only mitigate some of the problems by creating a segregated class of illiberal non-citizens who have no political power. This could make things worse given those people would still be here, but would only have proselytisation/indoctrination and/or violence as a means for them to further their views given the avenue of politics and soft power is denied. The tightening up of citizenship by Turnbull (which was actually a LDP policy) was a step in the right direction (aside from the excessive language reqs) but is nowhere near enough.

On this issue I’ve heard both extremes. There are the head in the sand leftists who will defend or refuse to condemn homophobes because they view their protection as a religious minority should take prescedence, and then there are the extreme right who vary from slash immigration to abolish religious freedom for Islam in a similar fashion to Bhutan, shutdown mosques, ban Islam etc. The Bhutanese model I can sympathise with, but I don’t view it as palatable.

The only solutions I’ve heard which don’t conflict with PPAU values come from 2 different people I’ve met who are both migrants.
The first suggests using sophisticated screening tests in the immigration process to determine whether candidates share “Australian values”. I was skeptical at first, but having worked in recruitment over a decade he assured me there are ways of testing people in this capacity. Marketing is a sophisticated science these days, we can know what people really think apparently. However this only works for immigration, not for what happens afterwards.
The second is a policy wonk from the PPE society of La Trobe who takes a more holistic approach. Having grown up in Israel, he is very aware of how sectarian views can destroy a country. His analysis of the issue and policy prescriptions can be found here:


He too is also frustrated how the left is completely ignorant on this problem, and in fact facilitating it. Meanwhile the looney right are aware of a problem but have bigotry intertwined with their extreme solutions, and are crap on too many other fronts.
So this issue continues to fall under the radar and has no moderate solution from any political party.
FYI this problem is referred to as Karl Popper’s paradox of tolerance:

It is undoing the left and giving fertile ground for the right to make gains.

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This is a really hard one to crack - The Right is really entrenched. But saying that (I ran in the 2011 state election) a strong policy and position could shake a few voters out. I met with the Farmers Association (Meet the candidates) and they raised a lot of issues (ie price wars with the major supermarkets) but there biggest concern for not changing their vote was Party policy. They won’t vote for an independent as they have been burnt historically with elected members crossing the floor. They want concrete policy and a Party that sticks to its guns(no pun here).

Actually when I was in Labor there was a lot of behind the scenes discussion with Nats in actual country areas - the Nationals often had a lot more in common with Labor policies on issues they care about. Often farmers do care about the environment and are not as hardcore religious right as what you would think.

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The left “view” on immigration is reactionary in a sense. The Greens policy used to call for scaling back immigration on environmental grounds. But after Pauline Hanson came along they ditched that for fear of being seen to have something in common with her, and substituted the empty waffle that remains their “policy” to this day.

The Stable Population party was a reaction against the reaction- a splinter group of Greens who thought a environmental party shouldn’t support endless population growth and who wanted to go back to the Greens original policy.

It is observable and entirely obvious that population growth is placing strains on our ecology and infrastructure and livability in our cities. The high immigration side is made up of an unlikely alliance between corporatists who want to keep wages low and left-reactionaries who equate concerns over population growth with racism. Those two groups continue to dominate the issue even though almost everyone else disagrees with them. It’s a recipe for populism.

I don’t think we should have a dedicated population policy. Our platform is large as it is, and we’re in danger of creating something that’s too long to people to read. What we could do is add a line to the transport policy saying that future immigration intakes should be linked to the level of investment in transport and other infrastructure. Our problem all along has been that we’ve treated infrastructure and immigration as if they were totally unconnected things.

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Excellent points.
The only points I would add is when it comes to thinking about population policy, one can think in nationalist or global terms.
While high immigration may be expanding Australia’s population rapidly, in effect it is actually contributing to reducing global population growth since immigrants mostly adopt our lower fertility rates.

Whether we can handle larger populations in Aus or not depends on how much we invest in environmental restoration, infrastructure etc. as you’ve pointed out.
That line can and probably should be thrown into an amendment of the transport policy.

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That’s not really a factor. The only parts of the world remaining with high fertility rates are sub-saharan Africa excluding South Africa, along with a few spots in the Middle East. And that doesn’t really line up with the country of birth census data.

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re: population

It is absolutely imperative that nations around the world unite to confront the population challenge directly, rather than just assuming that the problem will be solved when the developing world gets rich.

Ya gotta love policy by Dick.

My favourite though is James Lovelock and his Gaia Hypothesis. Lovelock, for me, sums it up, humans are Earth’s illness.

Lovelock names this illness polyanthroponomia, a condition in which humans are so plentiful they do more harm than good. More to the point, the condition is untreatable. Renewable energy projects, cutting carbon footprints and promoting sustainable development and other green ideas are no more than the posturing of “tribal animals bravely wielding symbols against the menace of an ineluctable force” (… lol). In short, we are heading towards a climate catastrophe that will leave only pockets of humanity left alive, says Lovelock.

I hope Gaia gets well soon.

jhdhjhgcj

There’s another opportunity to look at implementations of a job guarantee - by making inhospitable areas of Australia’s interior livable through innovative technology and sustainability initiatives. Terraforming our outback.

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