Strategy Paper 2

Party Improvement
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The last paper established that goal as a technologically based brighter future for all. This paper is going to be a primer for the debate that will happen at Congress and, if need be, after Congress. The aim of the debate is to establish an agreed plan for moving forward by the end of the process.

Below is an incomplete list of our strengths, weaknesses and some notes about the political terrain. I thought it would be good to frame the debate starting with our current position in Australian politics and work from there.

As it stands, we are an Australia wide organisation with approximately 1500 members and we get around 0.6% of the vote. We lack people putting in time, which is what is required to do anything.

What are our strengths?

Attractive, if controversial branding, complete with an air of rebellion.

Great policy, if we can get people to read it. Good analysis of government legislation, when we do it.

Technological literacy that eclipses all other parties.

What are our weaknesses?

Other organisations have a concrete ideology that people adhere to, where we are a loose association of people with common goals but no underlying agreed to ideology. This is problematic when it comes to trying to forge an overall identity, as soon as we get away from our core areas, disagreements can be intractable and damaging to our cause.

We are dominated by people who are relatively introverted, which is unusual for a political party. Lucky for us, we have the Internet. This makes meat-space politics more difficult though, extroverts are best at approaching people in the street.

Being forged on the Internet, we were immediately good at tackling national and trans-national issues. We could all contribute to the national debate and have done. What we lack is the local organisation. By contrast, the Greens were a motley crew of local organisations that over time reached out and formed the national organisation. This is how pre-Internet parties were almost universally formed. It makes them much better at doing the local grass-roots politics which is something we lack.

What is the Terrain?

Australia is a huge country and organising where each capital city is 1000km from the next capital city (excluding Canberra) means that organising face to face events is difficult, which in turn limits the formation of social bonds and comradery that develops in organisations where most work happens face to face.

Assuming there isn’t another Double Dissolution, we need 14.3% of the vote, including preferences to get into the Senate. The quota for running in state elections is often much lower, NSW requires a touch over 4%. Local governments have a higher quota, but more potential of electing minor parties as long as the candidate is well known in their local area.

We have good relations with the Greens, the minor Party we have the most in common with is the Science Party. We have friendly NGOs in the Electronic Frontiers Australia, The Australian Privacy Foundation and Digital Rights Watch.

Like other English speaking countries, we have an inter-generational divide that is comparable to the 60’s baby boomer generation (ironically with the Boomers being today’s reactionary conservatives). This is important to note from a cultural perspective and influences politics is a variety of ways.

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Excuse me, what? Our ideology is of free and open culture, civil and digital liberties, privacy and anonymity, and direct democracy. It’s in our party constitution, it’s mentioned on the front page of the website, there’s even a section of a wikipedia page about it.

If we have members who disagree with this ideology then I don’t know how the hell they got here, because it’s been very clear from the beginning.

You should stop focusing on percentages, because they’re very misleading. That 0.6% of the vote we got last year? That was 35184 votes, and if we could somehow concentrate that number of votes in Tasmania it would be enough for 1-2 seats in a DD or a very strong chance of a seat in normal conditions. Geographical placement of voters and how many votes constitutes a quota are important.

This is why pre-internet parties grew out of local organisations, because it’s the only way to get a foothold. It’s why I mentioned focusing on smaller local, state and territory elections (smaller states/territories being SA/Tas, mostly) in the “exploit the system” option in the other strategy paper thread, and why PPAU is poorly positioned to do so since we’re too federally focused. It’s also why the system is broken and part of the reason I advocate changing the system instead.

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That isn’t an ideology, that is a set of agreed to principles. No-one disagrees with that as far as I know. People agree to that from completely different underlying belief systems.

Chill with the hostility. You aren’t contributing anything positive. Just hostility.

We can’t all move to Tasmania. We all have to operate in the areas we live. We have few members in SA. We need people on the ground to do the work, we have few activists.

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A set of agreed to doctrines/principles is more or less what an ideology is.

I am merely expressing surprise since you seemed to be contradicting something obvious. I even checked one or two definitions to be sure I wasn’t off base on what ideology meant.

Agreed. Attempting to exploit the system is impractical and even if we manage it, we will almost always have much less representation than we should. Check out the Green’s performance in the House of Representatives relative to their vote for an example there.

So we should focus on changing the system to be more democratic instead. We can leverage our relationships with other minor parties since it’s in most of their interests as well, it’s more in line with our ideology, it doesn’t require us to focus on local issues as a federal party, and it has better long term potential results.

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How?

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The theory, at least, would be that since it’s in the interests of most other minor parties (notable exceptions of the Nationals and probably Xenophon) to reform the system, it wouldn’t be too hard to convince them to focus on that policy along with us. Our good relationship with the Greens helps, since they’re obviously the biggest player with a lot to gain there. The more minor parties holding up a system reform policy as important, the harder it is to ignore.

The problem is that the Greens have been… odd… about the subject in the past, showing less interest than would be expected for a party that has as much to gain as they do.

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Hi,

We have a fundamental issue here. The inability to see other people means that our world view is based upon a very narrow relativistic definition, especially when they representatives or lobbyists claim to represent the entire world’s viewpoint in distilled manner to us.

They way I see it we have to know what we have and who we are in order to form an opinion. Then move to governance.

First step would be to understand and continuously monitor the:

  • 1.3 Trillion dollars per year GDP ( If small business is 7 million, indigenous .5 million, and homeless .5 million, half the nation and foreigners are probably claiming a ‘median’ GDP of 1 million dollars per capita )

  • Land ownership ( without confiscating property based on people’s political affiliations, every square inch of land ownership has to be ascertained ). I’m not a fan of foreign ownership especially from foreign locations. Taking citizenship amounts to good citizenship and one should be accorded all freedoms to sit, own, perform, write, play, enter clubs etc. Do remember businesses are not there to deny, throughput of the economy is sacred, also because of large distances in Australia, denying is a safety hazard. I agree with the fact that at least in the case of governance, single citizenship is important.

  • The definition of republic should be changed to belonging to the Commonwealth of nations. I can tell you the withdrawal of India from the Commonwealth has resulted in a genocide the likes of which the world has never seen before. We’re talking a Schindler’s List every year.

One can use ‘instruments’ from other nations:

UK for how to run London
US for stock market
India for commodities exchange
Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan for engineering
US for demolition and peace keeping
US for automated farming
US for hospitals
US for generic open source IT enabling components, architecture and software for all entities
East Europe for homeopathy and nursing
India for public private banks, highways, companies, competition, socio-capitalistic actual democracy.
South East Asia for martial arts training for army and paramilitary personnel.
Salaries to maintenance personnel from Annual Maintenance Contracts
Salaries and bonuses in public sector.
No politics in the workplace.

As far as technology is concerned, the idea is to get out of the way and not moralize. So therefore all routers should be switched to switches. Vector notation based security systems. The first thing we can do as guardians of the internet is to run a laptop in every house dedicating computational resources to hosting application logic. eg Gridcoin, Softether, Maidsafe.

Us as Australians tend to think that creating one product well has scale. Networks, graphs and real societies ( not armies ), require design and enabling like the internet. Although US does not have the necessary resources to translate the successes of the internet model to humans.

So Australia would have to lead the way for itself in the network of professionals that runs itself.

Let us remember that the governance is more fake than the 1.3T per year economy. Drama doth not make a governor. I have yet to find a governor that has done a single thing according to promise. A single thing according to advice. Instead an entire structure is formed out of denying poor people. One prides themselves on road toll, but the sheer inability to let governance bring actual cost of living down and realise that polishing surfaces but hiding real toxicity, optimism up, brings the hidden toll to the thousands.

Healthcare is a trillion dollar farce. I do not want a damn actor punching holes in my arm. I don’t know what one knows what it feels like to take your family member to emergency to find out the entire damn bunch of assholes are perfumed assholes who smile and send you home and deny you the 2nd level care and 3rd level care. All 60 year olds are designed to be extinguished unceremoniously.

Change the damn incentive structure for optimism and health age.

And criticism. You’ve got to be kidding me. Trying to pretend to be an economy with this bull.

They should have a governance and public health Bachelors Degree and Masters Degree. All governors should regularly practice absolute brain health ( not eating other people’s egos in a relativistic nightmare).

Also let us remember that in the recent years alone, we have borrowed a quarter of a trillion dollars to keep the peace while transitioning construction projects. Please let us try and restructure the home loans to be a company per house banked by two banks, and 10% of the rent goes to neighbors. It is imminently possible eg do check the crowd-sourcing model of home investments by The Succesful Investor.

Enabling small business and community centre performance is a civic duty of citizenship.

Regards.

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Errr. Wut?

I can’t make any sense of this.
Can you break this down a little?

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I guess the order of the day would be to understand:

  • Define the nature of Australia’s Republic status in the Commonwealth of Nations. Sudden perceived withdrawal can cause confiscation of property, that usually triggers worldwide judicial and extra judicial problems. Project management can be open ended in time ( not deadline based ) ie Destination is decided and two project paths are charted towards the destination. Actual work can be conducted for the converse outcome to come true too.

  • Property as land

  • Property as GDP

  • Property as throughput of money

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Well that’s a shorter/simpler list which is a nice start.

Can you tell us how you think these thing influence our strategy as a party?

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Of the three weaknesses you list, I think that this is the one that can be most easily turned into a positive. We’re in a place in history now where people are more likely to engage in an online environment. I can’t remember when I last asked a question of a politician in an IRL environment, but have no hesitation in doing it online.

For us introverts, the fear of actually speaking to most people is tied up with the fear of stumbling over our words or not being able to clearly articulate what we think. This is not the case on a computer, so the bright members of the PPAU will be able to communicate effectively, given the proper forum.

For the members of this party, the internet is our natural environment, and it is increasingly becoming so for more and more Australians. All we need to do (haha) is find a way to reach out via the web, social media, etc and get people to start engaging with our policies.

I would love to see us start encouraging online content makers to help our cause with everything from infographics, to political white papers, to memes. Anything to get our message out. This part, I suppose is where it’s essential to have a clear and concise message that resonates with people today.

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