As a reasonably technically-oriented Party I was simultaneously flattered and horrified to receive a “Pirate Party Membership Audit” invitation during the past week.
Flattered for I hope fairly obvious reasons.
Horrified because this amounts to yet another reason to encourage one (or several) of those not-quite telemarketer style calls one has come to dread in the real world.
Bearing in mind we are coming up to the sesquicententary of telephones as a technology, surely it is sorely overdue for upgrading the current binary pick-up answer/reject feedback logic available to an unsophisticated end-user be expanded to something like
Answer
Ignore
Reject
If you would only F**k off I might cease to care whether the caller lives or dies
…
For the record I (reluctantly) approved the request…
For the record: this is an audit required by the AEC to confirm we have the numbers we claim they do. They use the information we supply to them to match to the electoral roll. Some people may be called by the AEC, which I understand they have the right to do anyway. PPAU won’t be calling you to confirm all your details.
This is standard practice for all parties. Unfortunately the AEC isn’t overly progressive so yes, phone calls still exist. And hey, the vast majority of people in the world communicate by phone. My clients do.
After reading your post 3 or 4 times, I think I understand. Unless I am mistaken, you are saying that the email itself is asking you to opt-in to an AEC audit and you don’t like this, and that it is akin to telemarketing nonsense.
The audit email we conducted is merely a courtesy to our members. Members are required when joining the party to consent to ensure the party stays registered, so the email acts as a reminder of this and that members have the option of consenting to this actively, ensuring their details are up to date, or resigning if they have changed their mind.
As Michael said, it is required by law that we take part in the audit or we will lose our registration status. We must submit 550 names and the records have to be as up to date as we can possibly manage to limit the potential issues. When I registered the party at the end of 2012, teaching the AEC guy how to decrypt the archive of names was one of the funniest conversations I’ve ever had with a bureaucrat.
It sucks, I know. I hate phone calls. They probably piss me off more than anybody else in existence because they claim so much of our time. However, considering the amount of bureaucracy the National Council does on behalf of the members completely voluntarily, I think it’s not too much to ask to answer one phone call (and you might not even get called!) every three years to ensure we can continue to contest elections.
Am I inferring from this statement that the problem is with the AEC rather than the Pirate Party?
From past experience, individuals used for the purposes of securing registration receive one call from the AEC that simply asks the person to confirm that they are, in fact, a member. This ensures the ongoing registration of the party.
This post went badly off the rails and I can only apologise to everybody for confusing them.
I now fear trying to drag it back to the topic I had originally intended (i.e. do we have any ideas as to updating the DNC rules with something less embarrassingly archaic?) is not even worth the effort.
Shall we all agree to drop this? Once more please accept my apologies all for wasting your time.
