Minutes/Policy Development Committee Meeting/2013-11-27

Agenda

 * "Revenge porn" (Mozart)
 * Emissions Trading Scheme (Brendan)
 * Indigenous Australians — http://www.recognise.org.au/final-report (Mozart)
 * Improving the basic income policy (Mark)
 * Open standards (Mozart)
 * Energy policy (Mark)

Attendance

 * Mozart Olbrycht-Palmer
 * Mark Gibbons

Apologies

 * Melanie Thomas
 * Daniel Judge
 * David Crafti
 * Brendan Molloy

"Revenge porn"

 * Probably a minor amendment to the privacy policy
 * Making it a criminal offence to publish sexually explicit material of a former partner as revenge or blackmail.
 * Photos are taken with consent, released without it, and cause damage to reputation and cause psychological harm.
 * Frequently accompanied by threats.
 * This would create a new sexual offence
 * Needs some research, an adequate description, and a rough outline of penalties.
 * Persons found guilty to be placed on sexual offenders list.
 * Wouldn't need a working group, one person could write it.

Emissions Trading Scheme

 * To be returned to in the future.

Indigenous Australians

 * The report is quite detailed at more than 300 pages long.
 * Important part is the Executive Summary — specifically the recommendations.
 * Provides recommendations for content and process of referendum.
 * Adopting most of the recommendations as either part of an Indigenous Australians policy or the current Bill of Rights policy
 * Expert Panel was quite diverse and consultative.
 * Repealing the "race provisions" — sections 25 and 51(xxvi) — are good ideas.
 * Inserting section 116A — prohibition of racial discrimination — good idea.
 * Cautious of inserting section 51A — precedent shows it might be used to continue racial discrimination.
 * Undecided on section 127A — Recognition of languages.

Improving basic income policy

 * Issues with current policy:
 * It goes through Centrelink, and they treat the poor badly.
 * Anything that goes through Centrelink ends up being a tool of surveillance, micromanagement and dehumanising treatment.
 * Doesn't solve problem of poverty trap.
 * Alternative might be a negative income tax (NIT) — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
 * Pays basic income through the tax system, making it automatically means tested
 * No middle class welfare
 * No surveillance or stigma
 * Would stop the trend where the rich get increasingly de-regulated and the poor get increasingly regulated.
 * If, for example, the tax is 25%, you never lose more than 25% of any dollar you make, regardless of income.
 * People on welfare currently get taxed over 100% if they decide to shift from welfare to work
 * This is how they get stuck on welfare forever, and inter-generation welfare dependence happens.
 * Example: pick an income (e.g. $40K) and a tax level (e.g. 25%).
 * Anyone earning above $40K pays 25% of the difference
 * Anyone earning below $40K receives 25% of the difference.
 * If you earn $0.00, you receive $10K (being 25% of the difference between $0.00 and $40K).
 * This provides a safety net of $10K in the example.
 * People earning above $40K pay 25% of the amount they earn in excess of $40K.
 * People earning less than $40K receive 25% of the deficit between their income and $40K.
 * A person earning $30K would receive ($40K-$30K)*0.25 = $2500. (i.e. 25% of 10K).
 * Regardless of what you choose to do (e.g. have children, study) you get the same amount of support.
 * The state doesn't get to choose what is valuable according to the whims of politicians.
 * It is the push to determine what is valuable and classify people accordingly that dehumanises the poor and requires thousands of different types of benefits.
 * It's a theoretically much better way to get people to work than make their lives horrible.
 * Would still include some benefits based on disability/age, etc.
 * Hits a combination of of transparency and social justice
 * Concerns over successful implementations
 * It's never been fully implemented, but partial attempts were successful.

Open standards

 * Standards prescribed by legislation (including standards that are "owned" by private companies) should be public domain.
 * Works with patent and transparency policies.
 * No patents on something that's a mandated industry standard.
 * Abolishing monopolies on standards that people must use.
 * Alternative would be a statutory licensing scheme, but that seems to go against PPAU views.
 * The idea is to reduce commercial privileges created by legislation.