When do we ramp everything up into election mode?

We are 1/3 into an election year, the election could be called at any time as the prime minister realises that his popularity is starting to slip since taking over office.

Do we have enough potential candidates lined up and in the right electorates?

Do we have refined enough policies which are both long term and based on current issues?

When are we going to rally the existing member base for participation in discussion and voting, and campaign donations?

Is there going to be a massive awareness/membership drive?

Are we meeting/voting with enough frequency to make important change?

Unless Turnbull loses his nerve and decides to go full term, the election will be on July 2.

We are in the middle of the pre-selection process, the deadline for candidate applications is April 25. We mailed everyone a few weeks ago asking for candidates and have had some interest. We don’t have a great deal of money and the price of running candidates is ridiculous ($1,000 for House of Reps, $2,000 for Senate), so we are only running for the Senate, in states where we have both decent candidates and activists on the ground to make the campaign successful.

We held an open election strategy meeting on March 23 and invited everyone along. We set out the timeline and election plan then. The politics of the election campaign will in part, be an attempt to make civil liberties, internet freedom and the TPP election issues as much as we can, whilst utilising the flow of the political debate to score what points we can.

We are also holding an election committee meeting tonight (Monday April 18) t at 8:30pm AEST on IRC: https://pirateparty.org.au/irc/

Both the political campaign and the logistics of the campaign will be discussed in greater detail tonight.

A fundraising email is going out tonight (theoretically) and we are planning on doing more fundraising as the election approaches.

Our platform is excellent, but only aimed at long term because we don’t do knee-jerk policies. This is due to our commitment to member participation and careful deliberation on policy development.

As is the permanent state of affairs, among all small political Parties we don’t have enough volunteers to do as much as we would like. We always need as much help as we can.

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Hi Simon.
I looked back on my emails and I can see that I received the email “Important information regarding the upcoming election and the future of the Pirate Party!” March 31, and I thought it was all about the Pozible campaign for funding the membership software, I missed the other information about the future of the party. Perhaps the next communication could put information about signing up to the mailing list as the top item and each topic of the email to be separated by a bold heading?

When I signed up I didn’t even realise I wasn’t signed up for newsletters automatically, so it would certainly help to put this message across to sign up for newsletters. Ideally, as a one-click or checkboxes for each mailing list than to sign up to each mailing list individually. New members should be signed up to a mailing list by default unless they opt-out.

Has there been enough interest by potential candidates in the States desired?

Also the Calendar shows a Transgender meeting tonight? I also know that there is a Melbourne Meetup, which is also missing from the Calendar, and the links to integrate the calednar with Google Calendar aren’t working. I think some work needs to be done here.

I would really like to do what I can to provide more resources for the party where I can and will join tonight to participate in the detail.Looking forward to it!

I hope you guys are turning up to the gathering this Sunday (24 April KereKere Cafe). The whole point is for people to get to know one another, if any of us are going to do things like handing out “how to vote” cards.