Pirate Party Australia offers an alternative to the cultural policies of both major parties and the approach advocated by Liberal Senator George Brandis in the Australian recently. The Party’s policy fosters a participatory cultural environment that promotes greater development and innovation, boosting community programs and outlets while reducing the restrictions copyright law places on our culture.

Contrary to Mr Brandis’ implied support of draconian copyright laws[1], the Pirate Party believes strongly in relaxing copyright to bring it more in line with contemporary needs and expectations. Rapid changes in technology, including affordability and access, have resulted in copyright law from the print era being erroenously applied to contexts where interactions with and uses of copyrighted material have changed.

“If we want people to respect copyright, we must have respectable copyright law,” said Brendan Molloy, Senate Candidate for NSW. “References made to the current state of copyright law by Senator Brandis are troubling in that legal restrictions that prevent artists building on previous works threaten the sustainable development of culture. When we lock culture up for nearly two centuries, we severely limit the ability for works to be reused in new contexts.”

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Yesterday the Australia Electoral Commission published group voting tickets (GVT) for this year’s Senate election, indicating where parties have decided their preferences should flow. Pirate Party Australia is proud to announce that it has successfully completed this important stage of the election process.

In keeping with the Pirate Party’s committment to transparency and participatory democracy, this election the Pirate Party pioneered a form of preferencing unprecedented in Australian politics[1].

“Our approach had three phases. First, all parties were invited to provide our members with a message explaining why we should preference them. These were published publicly. Second, all members were asked to rank the parties according to how they should be preferenced. Finally, our members were asked whether any deals offered by other parties were acceptable,” said Simon Frew, President of Pirate Party Australia. “This made our preferences entirely democratic and transparent. Pirate Party Australia stands in a class of its own in this regard.”

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Preferencing Process

Pirate Party Australia has completed its preferencing for its first federal election. All group voting tickets (GVT) have been published on the Australian Electoral Commission’s website.

In keeping with the Pirate Party’s commitment to transparency and participatory democracy, this election the Party pioneered a form of preferencing unprecedented in Australian politics.

All parties were invited to provide members of Pirate Party Australia with a statement explaining why they deserve preferences. These statements can be found on the wiki.

After publishing the statements publicly, the members of Pirate Party Australia ranked all 53 registered parties according to how they should be preferenced.

A rundown of the process is as follows:

  • Party members were given a ballot listing the parties to be preferenced in an order predetermined by the Party’s Election Committee to be a good general order of preferences based on the Committee’s research. They were given three days to respond to the ballot.
  • The Committee used the preferencing order prior to the closing of the ballot in order to determine how to best go about negotiating preferences with other parties in order to get them to reciprocate the preference order determined by our members.
  • As soon as the GVT ballot closed, the deals ballot was put to our members.
  • 24 hours later, the deal results were determined and the other parties were informed.
  • The Election Committee met as soon as possible after receiving the Group Voting Tickets for each state and democratically determined any changes necessary to the GVT that were not possible to determine in advance.
    • The minutes of that meeting can be found here.
  • These results are now being published in this statement.

An example of the digital ballot that the members of the Party used to determine their preference order can be found here!

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Pirate Party Australia is pleased to announce its signature infrastructure project — a renewable energy rollout that aims to provide Australia with 100% reliance on renewable energy within 10 years[1].

The time when renewable energy was unaffordable, impractical, or technologically unachievable has passed. Renewable energy has evolved remarkably in the last few years. Technology has improved and become vastly cheaper, and credible organisations have produced costed, modeled and technologically sound blueprints for a full transition to renewable energy.

Australia’s leading renewable energy think tank, Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE), has developed a clean energy plan which features deployment of concentrated solar power (CSP) facilities supplemented with wind and biomass sources. CSP is already in use in Spain and the United States, and Australia is in a uniquely strong position to transition to solar energy due to its size and natural advantages.

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Pirate Party Australia is pleased to announce the release of its tax policy.

Principles of transparency and accountability apply not just to government spending, but also government revenue, and the Pirate Party has long been frustrated that the present tax system is such a hindrance to this transparency. The current mass of complex and hidden taxes costs our nation vast amounts of time every day and effectively prevents all of us from knowing how much tax we really pay. Absurdly, over two thirds of taxpayers in Australia now have to file tax returns through a tax agent due to the complexity of our laws[1].

The Henry Review provides a powerful blueprint for improving transparency and sweeping hidden, inefficient taxes out of our system, and the Pirate Party has incorporated many of the key recommendations into its plan.

“Under our system the burden of tax will shift from savings, work, and innovation, and towards consumption. Over 90% of Australians will pay less than 30% in income tax under the Pirate Party’s plan. By raising the tax-free threshold to float at a level equivalent to the poverty line, we will remove much of the current tax-welfare churn and free low-income earners permanently from the burdens of income tax, and from the stress and costs of filing a tax return,” said Qld Senate candidate Melanie Thomas. “Under these reforms, income support and supplementary payments such as family assistance would be tax-exempt, allowing struggling families an opportunity to really get ahead”.

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