it’s a dirty job, but it needs to be done, and someone’s got to do it. I feel very much like the Simpsons clip (amazing that they put something relevent out after season 12)… This will not be enjoyable.
Moved from the PDC Thread
Considering the women involved in the linked thread are in favour of affirmative action, your response is to take a position against? That’s going to encourage involvement! /sarcasm
I’m not arguing in favour of affirmitive action here, that is a separate discussion for another thread, but starting with a rejection of what active members, who are part of a minority thinks is an important tool to deal with discrimination, is an awful starting place for a diversity policy. It has fail written all over it and it hasn’t even started.
Your weird personal pet project to keep the state as an arbiter of love, which everyone is already against.
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Moved from the PDC Thread
Frew, I think that you should take specific comments on that thread back to that thread. You could also join the group if you want to contribute. But for the sake of answering your concerns you raised in here, I will:
That seemed to be the only idea that everyone (including the women) agreed upon. There was some confusion on what “Affirmative Action” actually meant, but in the context of using Affirmative Action to discriminate against everyone else, there seemed to be a consensus on that. Again, I’m trying to built up the numbers significantly to hopefully include more women (and other diverse groups) to make sure that the group 100% takes the right line (and the right wording!) on it. Maybe we can use a different term than Affirmative Action to differentiate from the existing meaning which is not clear to mean the same thing for everyone involved (that is why I used the qualifier “while discriminating against everyone else”).
It’s not a weird personal pet project. There is more to the Working Group than just one topic and it’s a genuine issue that a lot of people care about. Even if the exact policy stays the same, the wording is terrible because it is unclear at conveying what we are really trying to do. It looks like (to the outside observer casually viewing our policies) that we are trying to replace Marriage with Civil Union to appease people who are against Marriage Equality by not calling it a marriage, because it would still exist in law under another name (“Civil Union”). Civil Unions are really offensive to people who want their Marriage to be called a Marriage.
If anything, the Video Gaming one could be considered a pet project, since I don’t have anyone else to work with me on that one yet.
In any case, these working groups that I’m heading wouldn’t put anything out if there isn’t broad support in the party on what we come up with, that would be ridiculous.
Really? Where?
Laura was using examples like:
I note you argued against that, but it wasn’t like she agreed. I think it is an example of affirmative action too. I am using this to show that what you think is a consensus is anything but.
Arguing about affirmative action is a sidetrack on what I think the major issue is, which is an attempt to write a diversity policy without anyone contributing from different (I.E. minority) points of view. Whilst I have been accepted as an ally of the feminist, anti-racist, indigenous and queer movements, I am still another white guy pontificating on what we can do to make the Party more diverse, my opinion is not important.
You really need to go back to first principles. What can we do to make the Pirate Party more diverse? Put everything on the table and then try and work out what we can do from there. Prefiguring it with statements like we are opposed to affirmative action (which I see you have edited out, and referred to me as ‘triggered’) is not looking objectively at evidence and working from the evidence to solutions which fit within our principles. Do it properly or don’t do it at all.
I suggest keeping the marriage policy separate because there is little cross-over and seems like a distraction.
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Hear. Hear…
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Frew, please stop trying to be difficult on purpose.
Let’s start again, and this time I will try to be as concise as I can be without using tainted words like Affirmative Action which seems to have different opinions on what it actually means.
Statement: Giving a candidate a position, even though they are not the best candidate for that position, only because they are in a minority class, and without their standing in that minority actually making them better at fulfilling that role, is wrong.
I am part of a minority, so that is at least one person.
Well you seem to be doing a good job and defending it, but even though there are people out there who are better qualified to understand these things (because they are actually in that position), it doesn’t mean that you can’t contribute your feminist, anti-racist, indigenous and queer points too. Your opinion is absolutely important.
As it is right now, you are right - too many white guys on the Group who are not in a first-hand position to understand all these issues - that’s why i’m making a point to reach out and expand the group before it gets anywhere.
I am more than happy to hand over the reigns of leading the group to a more qualified person who steps up to take it. It’s just that I was the one who came up with the idea. If I would have said nothing when calls are being made for Policy Working Groups, then this issue would have slipped another year while we do nothing to address it. Nobody else except for me has stepped up to the plate to bring this issue on so far.
Getting this policy group happening is a way to bring in new members to the party (and re-activate old) who are more diverse without compromising anyone else who wants to be part of the policy group, and if we get any good policies out of it, we could attract even more.
The truth is this policy is good for the party, directly aligns with our desires to become more diverse and I’m not going to let skeptisim hold us back. Even if we never even succeed in getting a policy, at least trying to will bring us closer to being more diverse and representative of the Australian population than being a bunch of mostly white IT guys.
Marriage is absolutely an equality issue. Even if you don’t think that it should be, it is.
Couldn’t agree more. And this is what I’m trying to get done.
You want to say I’m triggered you are going to cop some shit back, it was a dick move.
I may participate, I have other shit I want to do this year, we’ll see.
What is the goal? Work on internal practices and our image? Make policies attractive to minorities? Both?
I think they are quite different issues, although there would be some overlap. We already have good policies for minorities.
If you want the working group to work on minority participation in the Party it is a separate issue, if you want to work on policies to make us more attractive to diverse groups it could be lumped in. I see the Pirate Party diversity problem as more a result of party culture than policy, but both wouldn’t hurt.
Come on mate, we all want to work towards common goals here. Let’s just be sensible about the way we deal with each other so we have a chance at achieving something at all.
It’s not about personality politics with each other, we need to focus on the issues at hand.
I am accepting of anyone from the entire spectrum of views, as long as they agree with our core principals of the Pirate Party, as per our party’s constitution:
Pirate Party Australia strives to protect and expand civil and digital liberties, social equality and freedom of culture
Sure, the same goes to you though. I am in no mood to cop passive aggressive shit, I have a hangover.
The rest of my comments are all good though. Would be nice to know what you are thinking in regards to whether you want to work on internal practices, policies to make us more attractive to minority groups or both?
It absolutely goes for me too, I don’t dispute that (and I inclusively use the word ‘all’ to mean me as well). This discussion is very equal, on a meta level. I don’t intend to convey any passive aggressiveness from my side, I certainly don’t feel any passive aggression towards you or anyone else in here.
I just want everyone to see this for what this truly is about, without any subliminal messages not being stated. What I have learned already is not to presume anything, even if you think it’s 100% the most basic thing that nobody could ever disagree with.
Let’s work on the Diversity & Equality Policy.
Working on this Policy is likely to attract people who are interested in this policy, particularly those actually from a diverse background who can use the knowledge they got from being in that diverse background to contribute to this Policy.
If we have more people contributing to this Policy, it is a small step that they might want to be involved in other areas of our party as well.
With more (active) party members of a more diverse background, it will become easier to organically draw ideas from a larger pool for future direction of the party as it relates to Diversity.
Meanwhile this Working Group will hopefully end up with a Policy, and that final Policy too will attract anyone who aligns with our party’s principles, for either voting for us, or wanting to join the party as well.
Frew, I’m not going to hold your personal doubts you have about this against you. I’ve moved on. I’m purely focused on the policy itself. That’s all I care about. I’m confident that when we give this a go, you’d see that something has changed, and be impressed by the results.
Yes, I agree. As per the party constitution, first principles includes advocating social equality, freedom of ideas, and evidence based policy. It does not include diversity of race/sex/whatever for diversity’s sake. Everyone should be as welcome to participate as everyone else. Opinions and viewpoints should stand or fall on their own merits, independent of the race/sex/whatever of whoever said them.
In accordance with evidence based policy, let’s go grab a few definitions of affirmative action to see what we’re working with.
There’s Dictionary and Wikipedia, which I was using as my references earlier, but there’s also Merriam Webster and Encyclopaedia Britannica, which I’m only just looking at now. As you can see, of those four the only one that doesn’t go on to detail additional discrimination being intriniscally bound up in the concept is Merriam Webster. However that definition is still consistent with the others, resembling the opening sentence of Britannica’s version, for example.
This clears up at least some of the earlier disagreement, I think, if Laura was using that Merriam Webster reference. As she said, affirmative action is an attempt to remedy a situation of discrimination. But the nature of that attempt was discrimination itself, favouring groups based on their race/sex rather than relevant individual criteria.
Neither. We need to be more visible and engage more with people in general. Then more people who are interested in politics and agree with us will join. Whether those people are of a particular race/sex shouldn’t matter.
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So your contribution to developing a policy on diversity is to do nothing to address the lack of diversity in the Party? Well with that out of the way, you probably don’t need to turn up.
My contribution is to push for equal opportunity and measures to reduce/eliminate discrimination. Both very relevant things for a policy on diversity and equality, and important things to push for when others here want the opposite.
The “diversity problem” you speak of is actually a general population engagement problem, and should be treated as such.
Casting a wider net does something. If you call to action on a topic, the chances are that only those with a direct interest in that topic are the ones who are most likely to respond. But everyone has the chance.
This is really out of line and I will not tolerate this. Please no personal attacks or personal politics. The issue at hand, people.
In that case, there should be a participatory democracy working group, and not a diversity and equality working group.
I myself would put it slightly differently and say as I have done repeatedly, that our priority should be just that, because participatory democracy is a core tennet of what the pirate movement stands for, what could make a fundamental difference to politics everywhere, and we still have a long way to go with that.
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We could also think about our other tennets and reach out to minorities who are most affected and outright targeted by surveillance and policing policies, such as facial recognition software. Remember that there are members of minorities for whome privacy is a matter of life and death.
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While you could call it that, there is still policy to be made on diversity and equality. Such as what to do about non-ABS collection of racial data as part of various sorts of applications, support for checking whether the justice system is truly neutral, what to do about racist scholarships, recommendations for any modifications to public service hiring practices, whatever.
Even repealing sections 25 and 51(xxvi) of the Aust constitution would fall into scope, I believe, rather than where it currently sits under democracy policy.
Oh, I very much like that.
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I dread to ask, but what, exactly is a “racist scholarship”?
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A scholarship that is only offered to people of a particular race/ethnicity, of course. In this country as far as I know that’s generally scholarships offered only to Aboriginals or Torres Strait Islanders.
If the intent is to have scholarships for rural/remote/poor students, then do that. If the intent is to have scholarships for high achievers, then do that. I can’t see any justification to outright racially specify such things.
holy shit you’re not wrong
COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA CONSTITUTION ACT - SECT 25
Legislative powers of the Parliament [see Notes 10 and 11]
(xxvi) the people of any race , [strike thru: -other than the aboriginal race in any State-], for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws;
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s25.html
COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA CONSTITUTION ACT - SECT 51
Provision as to races disqualified from voting
For the purposes of the last section, if by the law of any State all persons of any race are disqualified from voting at elections for the more numerous House of the Parliament of the State, then, in reckoning the number of the people of the State or of the Commonwealth, persons of that race resident in that State shall not be counted.
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/coaca430/s51.html
are you talking about Government or Privately Funded Scholarships?
Anyway, I couldn’t really get behind any policy that could put the Aboriginal people at a disadvantage without actually consulting with someone who actually understands the Aboriginal community. The concessions which are made for Aboriginal people I feel are justified, because we owe the Aboriginal community a whole lot from past wrongs that have put them at an extreme disadvantage today.
If any changes were to be made, it would have to be for their net benefit.
To use jedb’s example (and I don’t know if it’s even true, it’s just an example):
For example: Instead of giving out scholarships to people who don’t really meet the required knowledge for the course but do fill an aboriginal quota (and are doomed to fail), to instead put in a lot of resources into schools in aboriginal areas to teach to such a high standard that the students from this community would have no problem competing with the rest of the country for a scholarship position.
I would feel like that is not racist, just targeting to where the problem needs to be fixed. Or perhaps small amounts of positive racism where it is strongly justified should be allowed, as long as it’s being targeted in the right way to actually fix a root problem.