This was briefly discussed at the Congress, but since then hasn’t been raised.
The idea is that the federal party develops an initial draft unified state platform that should be adopted by all state and territory branches, and only diverged from where appropriate to do so.
This process should happen in a few phases:
Work out which issues are inherent to states and territories and not federal
Which issues are relevant to our party at this time (prioritisation)
Which issues we’ll then begin to tackle.
Let’s start with phase 1. Reply to this thread with issues you believe to be inherently state issues that would have a significant benefit from being developed in a unified manner.
Oh, and something else of note: issues can be reinterpretations of federal policy that can be applied on a state level, such as implementing Bill of Rights Acts in each state, or enforcing Creative Commons licenses for state copyright works. Be creative!
A couple of comments I made on the Tasmanian discussion list earlier in the year seem relevant here:
One obvious thing would be moving for greater transparency in our state government. Let’s pretend for a moment that someone had put in a submission to Legislative Council Sessional Committee Government Administration ‘B’ - Tasmanian Electoral Commission, and had subsequently received a reply stating that their submission was confidential and must remain so until the committee had published their submission. I can imagine such a person experiencing some frustration at this and being amazed that all submissions were not published publicly immediately.
[…]
For me, personally, a large part of what we’re about is individual empowerment and cultural participation. To this end I think that, at a state level, the first three things to form policy on might be:
IT (because in modern times you can’t participate without it)
Education (because if you’re illiterate or innumerate, you’ll probably suffer when trying to use IT)
Health (because you can’t do either of the above if you’re dead)
Another helpful starting point might be adapting federal points to states as well, to get a good basis to work from. I know education and health already exist in federal policy.
I wonder if public transport could be brought up. It feels like it might be too localised geographically for even a state policy to make sense, but some sort of overarching “Public transport is meant to ease the burden on local infrastructure rather than making a profit” policy could be useful.
Public transport would be a good policy area to build into our platform. I suggest if we do this, that it should be part of an over-all transport policy. Road spending is often considered at odds with public transport, yet the two are intimately entwined.
Law and order issues would be another good area:
Prisons are designed for retribution, needs to be a bigger focus on rehabilitation
Police often get away with bullying members of the public, so mandatory vest-cams should be considered
CCTV is a an issue at all levels of government
Anti-corruption bodies need to be established or where they exist, be given bigger teeth
Our drug policy is probably more relevant to state governments
Education, particularly state schools and technical colleges are primarily state issues. Both need more investment.
Negative gearing is also a state issue and should be abolished or at least significantly curtailed.
Expanding on this, the majors’ local-level fights often appear to be infrastructural:
As part of $TEAM, $CANDIDATE will deliver $UPGRADE
We probably don’t want to play the pork-barrelling game, but we’ll definitely need to think about infrastructure once we get to the point where we regularly contest [state] lower-house elections. (And up here in Qld we only have a lower house…)
Basically, pre-election the candidate’s role is to represent themselves and their platform to their electorate. Post-election, their role is to represent their electorate to Parliament and Government.