PDC: altstructure

=Declaration of platform and principles=

Pirate Parties have been founded all over the world with a shared purpose: to protect civil and digital liberties and create a more inclusive and creative culture. We seek to build a vibrant digital society in Australia, underpinned by freedom of culture and speech, personal privacy, institutional transparency, creativity and enterprise.

The following platform presents a detailed blueprint of reforms which implement these principles. The reforms include:


 * Greater protection for speech, privacy, and personal sovereignty;
 * An end to the encroachment of stifling intellectual and state monopolies and creation of a freer and more participatory culture;
 * Educational reforms with a focus on developing creativity and life skills;
 * State systems which embody principles of secularism and non-discrimination;
 * Improved government transparency and a re-casting of state institutions: we seek a state which supports and enables, rather than one which controls and constrains;
 * A simpler tax code and basic income guarantee which removes disincentives from the poor and increases the rewards for work, enterprise and efficiency;
 * Greater transparency and respect for human rights in our international engagement;
 * Investment in digital connectivity, community-based clean energy generation, and a strong national science plan - the critical components of an innovative 21st century economy.

Our policies focus on opening up space for creative civil society rather than expanding the state: consequently, the financial cost of our reforms is minimal and wholly offset by savings encompassed within the policies themselves. As part of an international movement, we seek not only to reform national laws, but to reform perceptions and effect worldwide change. We seek to bring about change democratically, through activism, lobbying and parliamentary elections.

=Civil and digital liberties=

Civil liberties are the core of civil society and an essential balance to state power. History records a long fight for liberty, with even basic rights such as freedom from slavery, freedom of speech and freedom from torture won with great difficulty and frequent reverses. As individuals have become more empowered in the digital age, co-operation and trust between citizens and the state has become increasingly important, and respect for liberty is crucial to maintenance of this trust. The historical truism that security is not won through the sacrifice of liberties has never been more true than in the digital age.

Freedom of speech
The greatest reformers, scientists and philosophers in history started out as heretics. The right to speak out against dogma and consensus underpinned the enlightenment and built a world in which ideas could be attacked in place of people. Speech is a fundamental human right and the safeguard for all other liberties. It protects not just our right to speak out, but our related right to hear and judge ideas. It underpins our ability to think, create, innovate and progress.

Pirate Party Australia does not believe opinions should be regulated. We oppose censorship on moral grounds and do not regard it as a proper response to offensive expression. Advocates of censorship often treat “hate speech” (however defined) as so powerful that its mere expression must be prevented. Counter-speech is often seen in the opposite light – so powerless that only censorship can balance the scales.

Historically, though, the opposite is true: racism and other offensive ideas lost the most currency in the freest societies. Societies outgrow hateful ideas the most quickly when ideas can be freely expressed—and then publicly debunked. Censorship laws are counter-productive because they undermine this important process. Censorship laws also inject dangerous subjectivity in the legal system, and are prone to spreading once enacted. Governments given the power to criminalise opinions rarely stop at one, and as views change, laws which gag speech can all too easily become a technique for repression of minority opinion. This is especially true in poorer nations, where leaders acting to repress speech routinely point to censorship laws in Western nations as a justification for their own laws. Oppression cannot be lifted by resorting to means which have underpinned all state state oppression throughout history. The failure of states such as the Weimar Republic (which operated under a morass of hate speech laws) show the terrible risks of pushing hateful speech under the surface instead of airing and exposing it in debate.

Where digital content is concerned, Pirate Party Australia supports the right of households to install content filtering for their own use. However, we reject “one size fits all”, mandatory solutions. Such mechanisms are built on faulty foundations—the “Refused Classification” category of content has long since become far too patchwork and inconsistent to form any meaningful grounds for filtering. There is also excessive potential for abuse—Section 313 of the Telecommunications Act has been used by officials to block access to around 250,000 legitimate websites to date, with no application of oversight and accountability. A huge array of internet censorship bills of varying purpose and bewildering scope have been passed through in rushed sessions over the past 15 year: we believe these should be repealed and any future laws subject to proper consultation and consideration of evidence.

As has often been pointed out, the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. The same is true for society at large, and we think it's past time to stop inflicting damage in the first place.

Pirate Party Australia would undertake the following reforms:

Enhance protections for freedom of speech
 * Legislate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights into law.
 * Reform classification and classification review boards.
 * Implement a co-regulatory classification model where industry classifies their own content and Government works with industry to determine classification ratings.
 * This system would be akin to European PEGI model or American ESRB model of voluntary classification for media.
 * Restrict unclassified content for sale to adults only.
 * Ensure classification guidelines are published, in accordance with the principle that a classification scheme should be used for consumer awareness and not censorship.
 * Abolish the Refused Classification (RC) rating from the classification system.
 * Content that is illegal under the law would continue to be disallowed for sale, distribution or presentation.
 * Change the role of the Classification Board to be an advisory and review role.
 * Ensure the government and its representatives provide vigorous defence of free speech in international forums and negotiations.
 * Offer a referendum for a bill of rights focused on individual liberties including speech and assembly (see Bill of Rights policy).

Remove counter-productive restrictions on freedom of speech
 * Repeal anti-sedition clauses (schedule 7) from 2005 Anti-Terrorism Act.
 * Abolish residual blasphemy laws.
 * Repeal state laws which grant governments the unilateral power to restrict freedom of assembly for specific organisations.
 * Repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, ensuring that pre-existing common law protections are sufficient to manage all cases of intimidation and harassment.
 * Repeal the Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Amendment (Terrorist Material) Bill 2007.
 * Repeal the Classification (Publications, Films and Computer Games) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 1999/2001.
 * Repeal censorship and web-blocking clauses from the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill (No.1) 2014
 * Repeal internet censorship clauses from the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999.
 * Repeal content prohibition clauses from the Communications Legislation Amendment (Content Services) Act 2007.
 * Delete section 313 of the Telecommunications Act.
 * Ensure no criminal offence applies for linking on the Internet.

Return to contents

Privacy
Privacy is an essential underpinning of human dignity and free expression. It encompasses not just physical privacy, but the freedom to control your cultural presence, and manage the information and identity that surrounds you. The fundamental balance of power between citizens and their government is altered when states or their representatives have the power to abolish privacy. We need to resist a world in which every action, everything said, every interaction and every act of creativity and exploration is recorded. A free and trusting society cannot exist without the protection of a person's private life.

As Edward Snowden has noted, “Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say”.

As a first step to recovering privacy, recently introduced metadata collection laws must be overturned. These laws create a vast new precedent for state intrusion into every aspect of private life and civil society. ISPs are now forced to spy on their customers and retain vast quantities of private telephone and Internet data for 2 years. The resulting database poses little threat to criminal activity, since many technical avenues exist to avoid snooping. However, retained metadata provides an immense amount of information on the most private and intimate details of innocent people's lives, and access is unchecked by any warrant process or meaningful oversight.

Beyond metadata collection, Australians are also subject to an array of secret, warrantless spying conducted from overseas, and freely shared with Australian authorities. Overseas monitoring collects data on Australia emails, chats, photographs, documents and website addresses. These intrusions need to be resisted more strongly, and use of overseas channels to dodge domestic privacy protections needs to cease.

Much improvement would come from introducing a higher threshold of privacy into Australia. This could be done by imposing tougher legislative requirements on organisations retaining data and improving options available to individuals seeking to protect their personal privacy. A new “privacy tort” should also be introduced to curb intrusions into seclusion and misuse of private information.

Australia has a long way to go to reach the privacy standards most other countries have. Pirate Party Australia would undertake the following reforms:

Remove immediate threats to privacy
 * Prevent warrantless monitoring of internet use among the general public.
 * Oppose and repeal legal mechanisms enacted to create records of Internet use among the general public.
 * Records obtained through such schemes to be securely deleted.
 * Replace the Cybercrime Act with more appropriate legislation for the digital age.
 * Conduct an independent review of the Telecommunications Interception and Access Act to ensure digital liberties are properly protected.
 * Ban any future collection of phone or internet metadata without a warrant.
 * Cease information sharing with overseas agencies who collect private data on Australians without meeting Australian protections and laws.
 * Re-focus anti-terrorism practice on alternative methods including informants and targeted infiltration.
 * Ensure individuals have a legally protected right to control data collection on devices they own.
 * Control should cover duration data is retained for, encryption and sending of data, and when data is deleted.
 * Ensure no penalties apply to individuals who refuse to provide passwords or assist in decrypting information (in line with existing legal practices regarding self-incrimination).
 * Repeal the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill (No.1) 2014.
 * Repeal the Intelligence Services Legislation Amendment Bill 2011

Raise the floor for general privacy protection in Australia
 * Enact higher privacy standards for entities holding private data.
 * Ensure entities complete Privacy Impact Assessments (PIAs) encompassing binding data security safeguards.
 * Require government agencies and private organisations to report data breaches.
 * Subject substance testing in the workplace to mandatory PIAs with requirement for consultation with affected persons and assessment of whatever risks the testing is intended to address.
 * Provide affected persons with explicit information on purpose of the tests, procedures to be employed, and use of information.
 * Enact additional protection for individual privacy in the public sphere.
 * Institute recommendations from the Australian Privacy Foundation on providing a right to recourse following an invasion of privacy.
 * Subject publication of private data in the media to a public interest threshold, ensuring no restrictions apply where reporting is consensual or relevant to performance of public office, corporate or civil society, credibility of public statements, illegal, corrupt or anti-social behaviour, or a significant event.
 * Apply complaints mechanisms and legal sanctions where the public interest threshold is not met.
 * Ensure the office of the Privacy Commissioner is subject to periodic performance and function reviews by a member of the judiciary.
 * Provide a legal right for members of the public to appeal Privacy Commissioner decisions.
 * Institute tighter controls and accountability covering use of visual surveillance.
 * Require organisations conducting surveillance to state the purpose of surveillance and identify recipients of surveillance information, with mandatory periodic destruction of surveillance material.
 * Legal sanctions will apply for breaches, with exceptions granted subject to judicial oversight.
 * Decommission surveillance programs where abuse is identified or objectives are not met.
 * Require judicial oversight of undisclosed surveillance in public or private places.
 * Establish expert panel to review the adequacy of laws and legal protections applying to the collection, use and storage of biometric data.
 * Remove body scanners from Australian airports.
 * Implement the Australian Privacy Foundation recommendations to create a single tort covering both intrusion into seclusion and misuse of private information.
 * Ensure tort is subject to a public interest test and is actionable only by natural persons.
 * Ensure the tort is prescriptive in defining high- and low-water marks for examples or classes of acts that are or aren't covered, in order to reduce potential conflict between freedom of speech and privacy.
 * Discretion in interpreting objectives of the tort would otherwise be left to courts.
 * Allow action by aggrieved parties, their family or estate, or by relevant commissions for up to a year from the point of discovery, with remedies to include damages, apologies and injunctions.

Return to contents

Justice
As a general rule, legal systems should always err on the side of civil liberty and the presumption of innocence. Legal systems represent an important check on state power and a means to protect the rights of citizens, but their effectiveness depends heavily on having the right underlying laws and safeguards.

Unfortunately, a rash of recent changes to various laws are falling short of this ideal. Recent counter-terror laws (which weaken the burden of proof and loosen thresholds for detention, search or seizure) are only the latest example of an increasingly punitive trend, which the Pirate Party would seek to reverse.

Journalist shield laws are also need of an upgrade: the present lack of protections is commonly regarded as one of the leading threats to accountability and freedom of the press. In future, shield laws need to cover not just sources, but the informational content which sources pass on, which is all too easily used to identify them. Sources also need to be protected from official inquiries, which currently have powers to publicly expose them. The ability for inquiries to do this threatens the very forms of journalistic investigation which have so often been essential to inquiries launching in the first place.

We support a legal system which protects freedom and which embodies the secular principle of one law for all, applied to all persons equally. The Pirate Party will always oppose punitive laws and parallel systems which impose differential standards on different groups.

Pirate Party Australia would undertake the following reforms:

Improve equality and transparency in the legal system
 * Strengthen shield laws for journalists in the court system.
 * Remove any compulsion for journalists to reveal sources in court, with narrow exceptions where courts determine that a public interest of greater importance than journalistic freedom is served.
 * Extend protections to cover confidentiality of communications and information received from sources.
 * Extend court-related shield laws to also cover public inquiries.
 * Narrow the scope of subpoenas public inquiries can impose to ensure a high standard of relevance applies.
 * Restrict use of suppression orders in criminal trials.
 * Limit suppression orders to protecting national security and the identity of victims, witnesses, or persons under physical threat.
 * Ban any use of suppression orders to prevent discussion of other suppression orders.
 * Ensure no legal standing is extended to alternative arbitration systems, dispute resolution mechanism and other ‘parallel’ legal practices.

Return to contents

Control over the body
The right of self-ownership and the right to live free from pain and physical torment are absolutely fundamental in a free society. All persons should have the right to live by their own convictions, but no person has the right to impose their convictions forcibly on others.

Pirate Party Australia supports voluntary euthanasia. Support for voluntary euthanasia is not a statement of any kind on the value of life. It is merely respect for the right of persons to make decisions on these matters for themselves in the light of their individual circumstances. While safeguards are necessary, adults of sound mind and facing terminal illness should have the right to end their lives with dignity and peace. Bans on voluntary euthanasia create a horrendous legacy of suffering, lost dignity, and the sacrifice of choice.

Pirate Party Australia is also 'pro-choice'. This is not a commentary on the value of life: rather, it is recognition that individuals are better placed than governments to weigh up such complex questions in light of their own circumstances and values.

Pirate Party Australia would undertake the following reforms:

Enshrine freedom over the body in law
 * Enact a law legalising euthanasia and decriminalising assisted suicide subject to:
 * An application process and seven day cooling-off period.
 * A requirement that patients be:
 * Over 18 and mentally competent, and
 * Supported by three doctors, including:
 * A consultant/senior physician in a relevant field of expertise to confirm terminal illness, and
 * A psychiatrist to certify that the patient is not affected by treatable depression.
 * Ensure all persons have full and free access to their personal medical records.
 * Ensure all persons have the right to issue binding health directives to apply in the event of any future mental disability.
 * Extend protections within the Victorian Abortion Law Reform Act 2008 nationwide, to provide baseline legal abortion services nationwide.

Return to contents

Marriage
Changes are needed to the way marriage works in Australia. The Marriage Act in current form denies many couples a human right which is taken for granted in mainstream, heterosexual society. The Marriage Amendment Act 2004 made an unequal situation worse by imposing a declaration, compulsorily recited at all weddings, that marriage in Australia is an exclusionary institution available only to certain types of relationships. Marriage law in Australia has become a means to force religious principles into state ceremonies, undermining the separation of Church and State—a principle which already lacks protection in the Australian Constitution. Marriage laws also feeds existing stigmas related to minority sexual and gender groups. This can cause significant harm: discrimination against same-sex couples is known to cause alienation, anxiety and depression, and the rate for suicide attempts among LGBT persons is now 2.5 times higher than that of the general population. The repercussions place a large burden on our health system.

Pirate Party Australia seeks to protect marriage: not by excluding particular individuals, but by excluding the state. As the modifications enacted in 2004 demonstrate, the Marriage Act has become a vehicle for political grandstanding, to the detriment of respect, equality and civil liberties. The institution of marriage pre-dates any religion or political party and none have a unique right to control it. As as a collective, shared inheritance, marriage should be returned to the community.

Accordingly, Pirate Party Australia would legislate to repeal the Marriage Act and replace it with a Civil Unions Act. This Act will offer equal treatment to same-sex couples, and help to ensure that all Australian citizens receive the same recognition and legal rights.

This would also bring about an end to state control of marriage in Australia.

Replace the Marriage Act 1961 with a Civil Unions Act


 * Couples in a union under the Civil Unions Act will be afforded the same rights available under the current Marriage Act.
 * Civil unions will be available to all consenting couples.
 * The legal age of consent for involvement in a Civil Union will be 18 years.
 * The Civil Unions Act will provide a state recognized union with equivalent legal and monetary benefits to those provided currently within the Marriage Act.
 * Couples in legally recognised unions from overseas will be recognised under this Act.
 * The institution of marriage will be removed from the purview of state authority. The right of secular and religious organisations to offer ceremonies in adherence with their own beliefs would not be infringed.
 * No legal basis will be provided for any attempt to force any organisation to provide marriage services where such an act would be at odds with organisational values.
 * Unions not involving consenting arrangements between adults will remain banned.

Return to contents

Digital rights
The internet has always been grassroots, participatory, and open. Consequently, it has threatened disruption to an array of traditional hierarchical power structures. Unsurprisingly, this is leading to push-back: corporate and government entities have been trying for years to increase control over the Internet through a range of measures including censorship, reduction of access, treaties to reduce the rights of Internet users, and ever-broader surveillance and monitoring powers.

Net neutrality is the rule under which gatekeepers—whether corporate or governmental—are required to treat all online traffic equally. This principle prevents gatekeepers from blocking, speeding up, or slowing down content based on the source, destination or owner. It guarantees that even the smallest entrepreneurs have the same access standards as established firms, and it keeps the internet open, innovative, uncontrolled, and free. By keeping the internet open, net neutrality is not merely a safeguard for our economy and culture, but for our basic rights.

Content providers and ISPs in some countries have tried to undermined net neutrality by seeking to differentiate among forms of information and data flow and impose priorities. Pirate Party Australia will work to defend net neutrality from any such campaigns in Australia. Any attempt to impose a government or corporate veto on internet traffic is censorship by proxy, a threat to competition and innovation. We support the preservation of a fast, open internet underpinned by clear net neutrality principles.

Provide universal access to a fast, neutral Internet


 * Institute a common carriage agreement and legal protection for Net Neutrality, and ban the practice of screening, or prioritizing traffic based on packet sources or destinations, unless
 * 1) The default package offered to the user of an ISP contains no such screening or prioritising; and
 * 2) The user can opt-in to a package that will prioritise certain types of traffic by protocol or destination.
 * Allow exceptions in the case of a court order.
 * Allow generic prioritisation of traffic based on protocol types defined by the IETF.
 * Support fibre-to-the-premises infrastructure projects to help build a vibrant digital society.

Return to contents

=Culture and creative works=

Copyright
Copyright laws are a statutory monopoly artificially applied to information and culture that are traditionally justified as a balance between the rights of content creators and the rights of society. Properly applied, such laws encourage creative output by providing a limited monopoly for artists and writers over the use and distribution of their work. On expiry of copyright (which originally lasted for 28 years) work entered the public domain to be used and built on by others.

The overreach of copyright

In recent times the essential balance underlying copyright law has been lost, and a mechanism intended to serve the interests of the general public is now threatening fundamental rights and cultural growth. Copyright duration has been repeatedly extended, and now persists for 70 years after the death of the original creator. This massive duration is actively harmful for the creative community, because it kills the flow of material to the public domain, denying the opportunity to draw on it. Perpetual copyright benefits only large businesses, and encourages them to reuse old content rather than undertake relatively risky and expensive investments in new material.

Higher duration has been paired up with increasingly draconian enforcement. Enforcement of copyright has encroached into the realm of non-commercial use—a recipe for abuse of the general public. Individuals are now being prevented from listening to public radio, or fined millions of dollars for downloading a handful of songs.' Community groups and charities have been threatened with legal action for allowing children to perform Christmas carols, and corporations are preventing access to public footage of historical events. The rights of the general public are being trampled in the name of protecting obsolete, rent-seeking business models.

Seeking to defend their behaviour, lobbyists and corporate interests have adopted terms like ‘piracy’ and ‘theft’. However, when normal behaviour such as culture sharing is criminalised, everyone is a pirate. The Pirate Party has adopted the term to draw attention to this fact, and to focus attention on threats to a range of fundamental rights:


 * Privacy has been directly undermined by attempts to force ISPs to monitor private communications in the name of copyright enforcement.
 * Participation in the free market is threatened by copyright bills such as SOPA and PIPA, which would have granted US copyright holders unilateral power to shut down the websites of other businesses anywhere in the world on the basis of an allegation that the site "enabled" copyright infringement.
 * The presumption of innocence is taken away by ‘three strikes’ or ‘graduated response’ laws which allow Internet users to be disconnected by copyright holders upon an allegation and without fair trial or due process.
 * Free speech is similarly threatened by compulsory disconnection. The Constitution contains an implied guarantee of freedom of communication in relation to political matters, which the High Court has determined is essential to the proper functioning of Australian democracy. Disconnection interferes with the right to assembly and political communication, and violates the Constitution as well as High Court determinations and international covenants. The Internet is essential for everything from financial affairs to childhood education, and laws enabling disconnection are a frontal assault on free speech and modern life.
 * Consumer rights are being eroded as technology becomes increasingly crippled though measures such as Digital Rights Management (DRM). DRM can be a prelude to surreptitious surveillance and unauthorised data collection. It cripples culture and knowledge distribution, and is an electronic equivalent of a barbed wire fence around data consumers rightfully own.
 * Access to our cultural heritage is jeopardised by the (thus far) successful campaign to impose a ‘forever less one day’ period of copyright duration. All copyrighted works are, to some extent, based on or inspired by prior work. Modern attempts to combine perpetual duration with the prevention of reuse and remixing threaten the mechanisms of progress and impose restrictions that creators have never faced before. They amount to a strangling of the creative process.

Reforming copyright

Placing copyright law in direct opposition to fundamental rights guarantees failure. File and culture sharing are, predictably, continuing to grow in defiance of all attempts to control it, and recent attempts to impose additional enforcement were crushed by determined opposition in the European parliament and US Congress. People have always shared poetry, music and culture, and modern copyright laws fail because they attempt to criminalise innate human behaviour.

Copyright is changing, and we are seeing a completely new and different social understanding of copyright – a generational shift in the way we relate to and participate in culture. It is thus concerning that the Australian government has announced an intention to consider imposing the thoroughly discredited ‘three strikes’ disconnection model on Australian Internet users. Copyright was written to serve the needs of the general public, and this purpose is not accomplished by criminalising an entire generation. Fundamental rights do not need to be “balanced” with copyright enforcement.

A copyright law for our time must combine the balanced approach of the past with recognition of the situation we confront in the present. Normal interactions in the digital sphere should no longer be monitored or threatened. The digital realm offers artists and creators vast new opportunities for exposure, free of old-fashioned limits on distribution, and the overwhelming weight of research shows that file sharing has not reduced revenue to artists. The law should account for this. Copyright duration should also be contained to around 15 years — which is calculated to be the optimal term to drive maximum creative endeavour. Creative remixing and reuse of existing content must be allowed, as preventing them is equivalent to attacking freedom and progress itself.

The Pirate Party proposes the following reforms in order to ensure that copyright law serves the interests of the general public.

Reduce copyright duration to 15 years
 * All material to have been copyrighted for longer than 15 years will enter the public domain.
 * Moral rights entitling creators to be identified with their work will remain unchanged.

Remove copyright restrictions applying to publicly funded material
 * Crown copyright will be abolished for all material produced by government, including:
 * Bills, statutes, regulations, ordinances, by-laws and proclamations, and explanatory memoranda or explanatory statements relating to those materials;
 * Judgements, orders and awards of any court or tribunal;
 * Official records of parliamentary debates and reports of parliament, including reports of parliamentary committees;
 * Reports of commissions of inquiry, including royal commissions and ministerial and statutory inquiries;
 * Other categories of material prescribed by regulation.
 * Open Access provisions will be for required for all publicly financed scientific and academic research.
 * Publicly financed institutions will be required to release all scientific and academic works under principles of Open Access.
 * Publicly financed institutions will be required to provide all raw data collected (anonymised as necessary) in an open and searchable format, via government infrastructure if required.
 * Repositories will be required to make publicly funded research available to the public under principles of Open Access, and free of charge.
 * Government funded software will be made open-source, excepting cases where disclosure threatens national security.

Safeguard current exceptions to copyright
 * Material created in formats accessible to persons with reading disabilities will remain exempt from copyright restrictions, and the exemption will be codified to explicitly over-ride any international export/import restrictions.
 * The Copyright Act will be clarified to ensure that programming made available on-line by radio stations is considered a broadcast for licencing purposes.

Create additional exceptions to copyright
 * A generic "fair use" exception will apply to commercial and non-commercial use of copyright material.
 * Use would be subject to a requirement for fairness and reasonableness, and would note:
 * The purpose and character of the work,
 * The nature of the work,
 * The amount of material used, and
 * The probable cost to the copyright holder.
 * A specific exception will be implemented to protect sampling and artistic quotation.
 * This will cover the creation of remixes and parodies, and will provide a legal basis for quotation rights on sound and audiovisual material (including musical compositions and theatrical scripts) modelled on the allowances currently applied to text.
 * A specific exception will be implemented to protect transformative use.
 * Transformative use would require the incorporation of a new creative element not present in the original work.
 * The moral rights of the original artist to be associated with the work would remain intact.
 * A specific exception would be created allowing consumers of copyrighted material to format shift and back up such material for private and domestic use.
 * This would be considered fair use and will override conditions imposed through product sale and licencing.
 * A specific exception would be created allowing libraries and digital archives to digitise their collections.
 * The requirement for archivists to consider documents individually, on a case by case basis, will be removed to enable large collections to be catalogued and stored.
 * A specific exception will be implemented to protect all non-commercial distribution, including file sharing.

Curtail attempts to restrict consumer rights
 * The 'Technological Protection Measures’ within the Copyright Act 1968—which grant legal foundation to the enforcement of Digital Rights Management (DRM)—will be repealed.
 * Any restrictions or limitations on purchasable items enacted in the name of copyright protection will be required to include information to consumers on the nature of the restrictions, the additional software that will be installed, and any tracking or data collection that will be imposed.
 * A 14 day grace period will be legislated allowing consumers to return any product which includes DRM.
 * Products which include DRM will be considered as being licensed, not sold. Accordingly promotions and offers for such products will be obliged to state that the sale is for a licence only.
 * Restrictions on format-shifting will be banned in cases of:
 * Technological format-shifting, whether physical or digital,
 * Translation into another language, and/or
 * Adaptation for the blind, deaf or similarly impaired, including Braille translation, transcription of speech, or creation of spoken books.

Promote fair pricing and discourage artificial market segmentation
 * Implement the recommendations of the IT Pricing Inquiry in particular:
 * Lifting the parallel importation restrictions still found in the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth).
 * Allowing consumers to circumvent technological protection measures that control geographic market segmentation (see "Curtail attempts to restrict consumer rights" above).
 * Educating Australian consumers and businesses as to how to circumvent geoblocking mechanisms, and what rights might be affected as a result.
 * Creating a right of resale in relation to digitally distributed content.
 * Restricting vendors' abilities to lock digital content into particular ecosystems.
 * Introducing a ban on geoblocking to address persistent market failures.
 * Amending the Competition and Consumer Act 2010 (Cth) so that contracts or terms of service attempting to enforce geoblocking are considered void.

Return to contents

Culture and media
Culture is at the heart of human identity. From the cave paintings to the poetry that was copied and sent to soldiers in the trenches, culture has been something shared - a social glue and a bond between individuals and their societies. Shared expression creates shared experience and values and has allowed the human race to progress.

In modern times, technology changed the way in which culture was produced and experienced. The rise of mass-production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries opened the way for new forms of distribution, but also created a means for the owners of industrial mass production to increasingly control and restrict access. Laws around intellectual property grew which treated culture as something to be restricted, monetised and controlled by vested interests. As technology progressed however, the ability to mass produce in the digital realm has shifted cultural modes back to their historical norms, opening the way to a boom of grass roots cultural production and a golden age of shared experience and artistic production.

Attempts by some to freeze in place the centralism and artificial scarcity which governed culture in the 20th century will fail, because cultural sharing is an innate part of human experience and human nature. In addition, the damage to the cultural commons as a result of 20th century copyright policy is enormous, as is the cost for dealing with it. However, it creates a question which must be taken seriously: where culture is freely available, how will artists be paid and supported? Artists, writers and film-makers are a critical part of society, and revenue must be available to encourage the creation of new and derivative creative materials for society’s benefit.

Pirate Party Australia believes this can be facilitated in several ways. Pirate Party supports a basic income guarantee which will provide a universal support to artists. This can be built on with a wave of investment to create new cultural hubs for the community. These new hubs will expand the role currently played by libraries and provide free facilities for creation of music and art. They will also be places where legal obstacles such as digital rights management restrictions can be overcome. Many obsolete forms of Digital Rights Management (DRM) hamper archivists who seek to engage in digital archiving and preservation of physical and museum content. To directly support artistic creation, we will also establish a new fund to sponsor artists and invest in the creation of films, literature and visual art. Finally, we will seek to provide smaller live music and performance venues with tax breaks as a way to reverse the decline in such facilities and recognise their cultural importance.

We will also stand firmly behind public broadcasting in Australia. Pirate Party Australia will oppose any attempt to sabotage the independence and broadcasting standards of the ABC. The ABC is one of Australia's few highly trusted institutions. Its capacity to reach a diverse national audience and its high focus on cultural programming make it especially important to Australia's artistic and cultural communities. A complete subordination of Australia's media landscape to commercial interests and the political agendas of their owners would be undesirable for anyone who supports independent media and the growth of Australian culture.

Open, participatory culture and investment in our artists will unleash a creative boom for Australia.

Develop a network of facilities to support development of art and culture
 * Provide $500 million from the Asset Recycling Fund to support expanded library facilities.
 * Funding will be allocated by an independent board charged with assessing grant applications and ensuring all proposals are openly accessible to the public.
 * Applications will be assessed on local area population, community need and outcomes of consultation, and quality and innovativeness of proposals.
 * Proposals will be required to maintain and respect traditional library functions.
 * Projects may include development of maker spaces, sound booths, expanded premises, content digitisation and online availability and other cultural and community benefits.
 * Provide additional legal protections to libraries to enhance their cultural value.
 * Allow free use of patented material and full availability of copyrighted material under a Creative Commons Attribution license within physical and digital library spaces.
 * Allow library users to utilise these freedoms subject to a mandate to make materials thus created available under a creative commons license within the library's physical and digital spaces.
 * Maximise public library efficiency by ensuring that digital works become instantly available in any branch (e.g. using filesharing technologies)
 * Ensure libraries maintain, store and make available public records in a standardised format.
 * Ensure libraries provide storage and computation resources to process open data public records. This might include cloud resources, hosting services, and other services to ensure useful access to such content, by any library user.
 * Expand the Archival role of libraries
 * Mandate that any DRM protected product for sale in Australia has an obligation to hand over keys or other mechanisms required to access it in its totality, after either termination of copyright or termination of sale.
 * The disclosure will be to the National Archives until termination of copyright, and held in confidence until it enters the public domain.

Expand funding and venues for artists
 * Provide $1 billion from the Asset Recycling Fund to sponsor Creative Commons licensed artistic endeavour.
 * Funds will be separated into streams to invest in independent films, games, visual art, and literature.
 * Expand current tax exemptions applying to “cultural organisations”.
 * Extend the “Music” category to cover facilities essential to live music, including small-capacity live music and performance venues.
 * Extend the “Literature” category to cover book and cultural exchanges which provide low-cost literary and cultural material to the general public.
 * Provide a central location for artists online containing information for exhibiting, performing, and displaying art, as well as significant, free hosting for exhibiting and displaying digital and digitised art.

Secure Australia's public broadcasting
 * Protect public broadcasters and their boards from political interference.
 * Maintain base funding to domestic public broadcasters at 2012 levels (with adjustment for inflation).

Return to contents

=Science, research and education=

Patents
Patents are a way in which the state grants an individual or a business temporary monopoly over the expression of an idea. Patents can be granted on everything from rounded corners on a phone to human genes. Once granted, the holder of the patent can prevent others from using the material or the idea for up to 20 years.

Patents are meant to encourage innovation. However, they are increasingly doing the opposite. Truly innovative businesses do not use them: rather, they are being used by old, legacy businesses to prevent competition and stifle true innovation through endless legal action. With uncountable millions of patents now lodged, real inventors face a minefield of potential obstacles in bringing a product to market. Serious reform is needed to being the system back to its core purpose.

Reforming patents

Patent durations need to be shorter. The original twenty-year patent duration was set down at a time when ideas and products took years to spread, and most research suggests a significantly shorter term for a modern world where products can be built and marketed to millions in a space of weeks.

Pirate Party Australia will seek to make public interest research exempt from interference by patent holders. Patents are an intervention by the state in the free market, and as such can only be justified where the public interest is clearly served. Blocking public research is against the public interest, and the state should accordingly, not extend such rights to patent holders.

We would also undertake direct reforms to ensure patents are lower in quantity and higher in quality. The current system provides patent hoarders with too many ways to shake down real inventors. This is done by using broad and vague patents to block innovative activity unless the innovator pays a fee. Since patents were introduced to support development of products, we believe any legal defence of a patent should require proof on the part of the litigant that the patent in question is being actively used to develop products. There also need to accommodations to allow independent development of the same invention.

Software patents

The software industry is uniquely dynamic, and patent durations on software should necessarily be shorter than those applying to other patent types. Pirate Party Australia would abolish functional claiming (which patents the end result of software) as it removes the ability of the free market to create newer and better approaches. A larger fee should also apply for software patents to fund additional scrutiny and a raising of the threshold for obviousness and prior art.

Genes and organisms

“Products of nature” were not patentable under the original terms of patent law, but the law has crept over time. Patents on human genes are regularly granted on the grounds that extraction of material from its natural environment is akin to having “invented” the gene. This is a nonsensical legal artifice which, if applied in other fields, would lead to patents on coal, cotton, and wood.

Gene patents are an especially harmful form of corporate welfare. The state is currently granting special rights to corporations to lock away fundamental information about our bodies. The holder of these patents are hindering potentially ground-breaking medical research by forcing scientists to negotiate among dozens of gene patent holders, who bear no obligation to contribute to research themselves. Gene patent holders are also imposing huge costs on sick and dying patients for simple tests and treatments. Other forms of “life” patents are being used to increase control of the global food supply: this creates potential risks for rent-seeking and food security. Patents on genetic material are a clearly a net loss in policy terms, and Australia needs to stop recognising them.

Pharmaceutical patents

Patents on drugs are justified on the grounds that they encourage medical research. In practice, however, patents are an incredibly poor mechanism for this. Much of the money extracted by patent rents does not fund research at all: instead, it is misdirected towards marketing and corporate expenses. To the extent that patents do fund research, the incentive is to develop temporary fixes which can be sold over and over rather than real cures, which can be sold only once. Drug firms often patent products for which the bulk of research has been publicly funded, and invest much of their time on small, incremental changes whose primary purpose is to extend or re-patent existing drugs. Consequently, only around two per cent of new active ingredients and applications devised by drug companies are considered to make real medical progress.

For these dubious benefits, drug patents create a massive cost for societies around the world. Monopoly power allows firms to charge huge prices for drugs whose manufacturing cost is minuscule. Taxpayers are currently forced to spend more than $10 billion each year on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), nearly all of which goes into meeting patent rents so that drugs are affordable. Among developing countries, high drug prices regularly deny prevent the world's poorest from accessing lifesaving medicine.

Pirate Party Australia believes Australia should crease to recognise drug patents in Australia. This would immediately reduce domestic drug prices to their 'manufacturing cost', which is typically cents in the dollar. Market competition would force firms to compete on quality, and future aid programs could include exports of drugs to poor countries which currently miss out. Our public health system would immediately be liberated from a huge cost burden which threatens its sustainability. And the money currently spent on meeting patent rents through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme could be redirected to sponsor truly beneficial drug research and bring about a renaissance for scientific research in Australia (see the Science Plan policy for more information).

Private drug research should continue, but not through a patent system. Instead, funding should be made available to trial a ‘bounty’ system, under which rewards are offered for the creation of drugs which serve an identified public good. Bounties should be paid out on cures, not temporary fixes, and drugs on which a bounty has been paid will enter the public domain. Ultimately, the path forward is for willing countries to negotiate a new biomedical treaty under which drug patents are replaced universally with a global bounty system, which could direct hundreds of billions of dollars a year into the most critical medical research.

Reduce patent quantity, and increase quality Apply full legal protection to all non-commercial use of patented material (any subsequent commercial use would remain actionable). Apply full legal protection to open source products.
 * Reduce patent duration to 5 years.
 * Abolish “innovation patents" and any other patent forms which include a low inventiveness threshold).
 * Require patent holders to demonstrate active use of a patent as a pre-condition for any legal enforcement of exclusivity.
 * Apply legal protection for infringing items which are developed independently and without knowledge of existing patents.

Reform software patents


 * Apply a higher patent continuity fee.
 * Fees will fund impartial, professional reviewers and consultants (experienced in the relevant areas) to review software patents, with the goal of blocking patents that are obvious to someone experienced in area, not novel or having prior-art.
 * Set the length of patents for inventions primarily embodied in software to 2 years.
 * Ensure only specific implementations are protected, with functional claiming and outcomes disallowed.
 * Require software patents to contain sufficient information for someone experienced in software development to be able to implement the invention.

Abolish patents on genes and living organisms


 * Retain patents on inventions based on a gene (which neither require nor confer rights to the gene itself).

Abolish patents on pharmaceutical drugs All patents on chemicals will be placed in the public domain, and manufacturers will be encouraged to produce generics. Redirect $5 billion from current spending on Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme $1 billion to ensure prices are low across the board, and no drug is made more expensive under new arrangements. $2 billion each year to directly fund drug research through the CSIRO and tertiary institutions. $2 billion each year to trial a "bounty system" to reward firms who create drugs which serve an identified public benefit.
 * Techniques for creating pharmaceutical drugs will remain patentable.
 * The bounty would be paid annually, over a ten-year period of time.
 * Incentives would be offered to both first- and second-movers: where a new invention is based upon an earlier invention, rewards would be split even if the initial drug is superseded.
 * The amount of the reward for a particular drug would be determined by an expert panel and based on public health outcomes such as number of beneficiaries, level of therapeutic benefit, and capacity to address priority healthcare needs.
 * Begin negotiations on a global medical R&D treaty, open to any nation willing to commit appropriate funds to support R&D.
 * Funding will support a global reward system following the principles of the domestic trial.
 * Rewards will be linked to metrics determined by signatory nations.
 * Drugs subject to a bounty will be placed in the public domain.

Return to contents

Education
Education is a powerful determinant of well-being. It is a source of wealth, a provider of life skills, an enabler of participation, and a core component of civil society. The 2000 Dakar World Education Conference noted that all young people have the right to an education that includes “learning to know, to do, to live together and to be".

Early childhood education

Pirate Party Australia supports trials in Australia of the childcare cooperative system used successfully overseas. A co-op system will provide a means for willing parents to combine resources and provide low-cost or free childcare by taking turns as carers and volunteers. It also provides social opportunities to new families and their children, and reduces demand pressure on the existing childcare system.

School education

Best practice educational outcomes are Finland. All funding is simply allocated to a system of locally controlled public schools. Teachers in Finland have power to mix and combine classes, test when and how they wish, teach in different ways to accommodate different learning styles, and bring in additional support and resources as needed. Unsurprisingly, this kind of autonomy encourages many more highly qualified and bright people into the teaching profession, and solves many issues of teacher quality experienced in other countries. Finland does not spend massive money on its system, but students consistently test among the world's highest.

Australia's falling education performance suggests our model is falling short of world's best practice in a number of ways. Australia imposes tight constraints on teachers, centralised control, and shreds public funding between public and private school systems.

Diverting public funding to wealthy, fee-charging schools is said to be an equity measure. It isn't: it leads to scarce resources being allocated where they aren't needed. Funding for religious schools is marketed as being pro-diversity. It isn't: religious schools reduce diversity by segregating children along religious and socio-economic lines. A rising number of publicly funded private schools are also refusing to meet educational standards in areas such as science teaching. ref> Maddox, Too Much Faith in Schools: The Rise of Christian Schooling in Australia, 21 March 2014. http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2014/03/20/3968199.htm (Accessed 8 July 2014) The current model is also said to promote choice. It doesn't: the shift in funding towards private schools has left entire leaving entire postcodes lacking any comprehensive public schooling. Diversting public funding to private schools is said to improve value for money. It doesn't: a huge increase in private funding has seen relatively small shifts in student numbers, alongside of a lot of money being spent wastefully. Where students have shifted, the largest impact has been to concentrate poorer students into the increasingly under-funded public system.

Unsurprisingly, the current model has led to falling educational outcomes for many years, particularly among poorer students. This trend can be reversed by adopting the following principles:

1. Public funding targeted to free, secular schools. No funding should be diverted to schools which charge fees or engage in discrimination around hiring and student acceptance. Public funding comes from everyone, and schools which accept it should exclude no-one.

2. Localism. Schools should not be centrally run, nor should they be forced to run constant standardised testing. Best outcomes occur when teachers are empowered and schools are locally controlled. The National Curriculum should be far leaner, and leave far more time open for school-determined content. Unwilling students should be forced to stay on after year 10, since this creates disruption for more engaged students.

3. Disadvantage and true choice are funded. Schools in poor areas should receive additional resources, and all schools should be able to 'bulk bill' activities in which qualified experts are engaged to teach in areas of interest chosen by students and parents.

Improve provision of community based childcare
 * Provide certification processes and a one-stop information service for the setup of childcare cooperatives.

Foster well-funded, dynamic and secular public schools Enact a pilot program to distribute open source, low cost, 3D printers to interested high schools. Students wishing to study at TAFE after Year 10 will be enabled to do so, with student funding following them.
 * Reallocate federal education funding:
 * Progressively reduce quantum of funding to private schools to match 1996 levels, with allowance for private schools to transfer or sell land and assets into the public system.
 * Abolish the school chaplains program.
 * Direct funding towards full implementation of Gonski reforms as part of a needs-based funding system.
 * Change school accountability frameworks:
 * Abolish existing paperwork accountability systems and provide schools with control over finances including management of bank accounts and purchases.
 * Support the establishment of principal networks to encourage the spread of effective systems.
 * Allow students 16 and over to transfer to TAFE and provide vouchers to offset fees.
 * Trial a bulk billing scheme for extracurricular activities including tutoring from outside experts in areas determined by students and parents.
 * Provide stronger support and incentives to teachers:
 * Ensure trainee teachers receive a minimum of 12 weeks supported classroom time.
 * Allow ongoing salary progression for teachers with more than 10 years of experience.
 * Include a solid foundation of life skills and personal development within the National Curriculum:
 * Grades 1-4 to cover behaviour towards others, people skills, and exploration of science and critical thinking;
 * Grades 5-6 to develop earlier material and additionally cover sex education, conflict resolution, and ethics;
 * Grades 7-8 to develop earlier material and additionally cover accidents and emergency response, civics and voting, budgeting, basic IT skills, careers and starting a business.
 * Abolish Special Religious Instruction in public schools and limit religious study to comparative religion in the context of history, culture and literature.

Universities

Tertiary education is increasingly important as we shift towards a more knowledge-based economy. While student numbers continue to rise, growing evidence exists of a troubling deterioration in standards and academic morale in universities. This manifests in various ways: approximately half of academics have been assessed to be at risk of psychological illness due to insecurity and overwork, while two thirds believe academic freedom is being curtailed. Higher education has suffered from efforts by successive governments to force it into a top-down, corporatist structure. This is an inappropriate form for an education system and one which has led to increasing stultification and surveillance, with demands for corporate style messaging eating away academic freedom of speech. The drive towards pseudo-measurement of educational outcomes has imposed unprecedented administrative costs, with administrators and managers now outnumbering academics (who nonetheless face increasing demands to conduct administration).

The impacts of corporatised education are uniformly contrary to what is intended. The narrow emphasis on vocational education is creating graduates unfit for many jobs - employers have raised issues with serious deficits in team work, creative thought and communication. Administrative burdens imposed in the name of quality assurance are driving down quality by drawing resources out of teaching and research. Attempts to quantify educational outputs obscure more than they reveal. And the lowering of standards to accommodate overseas students is reducing Australia’s attractiveness as an international student destination.

Genuine transparency means accountability to the general public, not to a corporate structure. We believe that publicly funded academic research should be made freely available to the public and no longer locked up behind publisher paywalls. We also believe in enhancing the quality of academic work by following the advice of academics themselves, who urgently seek higher per-student funding and greater autonomy. We will also expand the current shift towards digital education. Digital education is an important resource for the poor, for people in remote locations, and carers and people with disabilities.

Fundamentally, we view education as a pillar of civil society rather than a money making commodity, and believe campuses should be encouraged to play a greater role in the community. Passion, curiosity and freedom to speak and question are key curbs to unhindered power, and a successful university system should embody those traits.

Support academic autonomy in tertiary institutions
 * Impose benchmarks to guarantee the use of public funds for academic salaries, teaching material and research.
 * Expand full-time academic positions targeting a maximum student-teacher ratio of 20:1.
 * Guarantee study leave, research time, and fieldwork in academic contracts.
 * Restore academic control over course and research funding, course design & outcomes, unit guides, marking, workload allocation, hiring, and teaching choices.
 * Defund administrative functions and organisations associated with monitoring, surveillance, government reviews and data collection.
 * Abolish standardising and rigid templates.
 * Abolish code of conduct restrictions on academic speech.
 * Limit the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency to an advisory role.

Increase educational resourcing and outputs
 * Provide $4 billion per year to properly resource higher education research and increase grant acceptance (see Science plan policy for details)
 * $500 million per year should be set aside to support a 25 per cent increase in base per-student funding.
 * Ensure a portion of this funding is directed to restoring access and equity measures for poorer students, as well as provision of counselling and childcare services.
 * Replace the lifetime FEE-HELP limit with a maximum loan cap, offset by repayments.
 * Institute Open Access provisions for publicly funded academic, peer-reviewed, journal articles produced within universities.
 * Make all articles freely available to the public without paywalls or publisher restrictions.
 * Promote increased use of campuses for community seminars, live events and public debates.
 * Increase provision of free online courses, and encourage greater use of online infrastructure to reduce course costs and improve budget sustainability.
 * Encourage greater course-driven interaction between students and businesses or community groups.
 * Apply full whistle-blower protections to users of Unileaks and similar outlets.

Return to contents

A national science plan
Science created modern society. Through the scientific method, humanity has harnessed the power of natural forces, revolutionised our social order, and gained incredible knowledge of the universe in which we live. Economic growth is largely the result of improvements in science and technology, and research has long shown that public investment in science pays off many times over.

It's time Australia put real muscle behind it's scientific endeavour and adopted a serious National Science Plan. Australia is the only OECD nation to lack one, and researchers in this country are constrained by under-funding, poor collaboration among research bodies, and erratic grant periods. A Science Plan will address these issues systemically and provide a pathway for a broadening of our research profile into areas such as space research, which offer potentially enormous benefits.

A Science Plan should also include measures to address poor collaboration between business and higher education. Overseas experience suggests voucher programs represent one way to achieve this. Voucher programs allow small businesses purchase services from education and research bodies, which generates a dual benefit of raising overall research funding and encouraging long-term relationship building between sectors. Collaboration can also be supported by allowing researchers at government bodies to personally own patents on their research. In places such as Germany, this has enabled entrepreneurial researchers to spin out and start new businesses, adding vibrancy to the private sector and breaking down barriers between private and public spheres.

Chronic underfunding across the board also needs to addressed. As noted in the patents policy, a huge amount of money is currently wasted on paying the cost of drug patents. Freeing up this funding will provide billions each year to free up a vast reserve of public funding which can be used to revolutionise science teaching and research in Australia.

Develop an Australian Science Plan
 * Improve co-ordination among science bodies.
 * Establish an Innovation Board comprising researchers, government and industry representatives to draw together existing programs, develop research and innovation priorities and monitor Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) progress.
 * Improve public understanding of science.
 * Provide an online portal for use by schools and the general public, with permanent streaming and free download of publicly owned science and science education programs.
 * Require every primary school to employ at least one teacher with specialised STEM skills.
 * Improve conditions for researchers.
 * Align disparate grant processes and link grant periods to requirements of the research.
 * Recommence the International Science Linkages program.
 * Provide an online portal to facilitate researcher access to alternative funding sources, including crowdfunding.
 * Allow researchers working within government bodies to own patents on their research.
 * Re-purpose to directly support scientific research.
 * Provide $4 billion in additional annual funding to Australian research bodies and tertiary institutions to support research into science and social science, in line with priorities identified in the Science Plan.
 * Provide $1 billion in additional annual funding to the CSIRO to support fundamental research.
 * Provide $4 billion in additional annual funding to support pharmaceutical research (see patent policy).
 * Engage Australian Academy of Science to develop a long-term plan for funding and operation of Australian research infrastructure facilities.
 * Provide $100 million for one-off development of space infrastructure recommended in the NCSS Decadal Plan.
 * Establish a National Institute for Space Science to co-ordinate infrastructure and projects and seek global capital.
 * Undertake additional research in pharmaceutical development (see patents policy), renewable energy technology (see environment and climate change policy) and mental health research (see drugs policy).

Return to contents

=Government=

Making government transparent and accountable
A transparent government is one which is open, communicative, and accountable. This form of transparency is not just an antidote to corruption and rent-seeking, it is pivotal to public trust. With governments increasingly disconnected and secretive, it should no surprise to see public trust is currently at a low ebb.

It doesn't need to be so. Public integrity and trust can be built up if the public is properly informed about decisions taken on their behalf. This principle finds practical application in Freedom of Information (FoI) legislation. This legislation needs to be protected and enhanced. Exemptions, which are currently wide and arbitrary, need to be narrower, time limited, and justified by a higher threshold of due cause.

Another pillar of public integrity is the capacity to swiftly identify and manage wrongdoing and corruption. Whistleblowers are an essential here, and repeated instances of harsh and inappropriate punishment and covert forms of deterrence over the past 10 years make a strong case for improving the robustness of whistleblower protections.

Another important principle is universality. The state is funded by all citizens, and consequently any services provided by the state and its authorized service providers need to be subject to a firm principle of non-discrimination. More transparency also needs to apply with regard to the movement of money within the political system. It should also no longer be acceptable to shut down public scrutiny over public spending through the use of commercial-in-confidence clauses.

Institutional transparency is one of the easiest ways Australia can improve government function and service delivery. Pirate Party Australia will push hard for positive change that builds trust and strips out corruption.

Improve transparency and credibility in systems of governance


 * Strengthen the operation and transparency protections afforded by FoI laws.
 * Remove blanket organisational exemptions and evaluate each request on a case-by-case basis.
 * Remove relevance as a criteria for exemption.
 * Exemptions to be subject to time limits, with extensions to be justified.
 * Documents to be unclassified by default.
 * Additional resources to be provided to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to ensure a robust and speedy FoI review and appeals process.
 * Maintain and expand data availability though data.gov.au and support an Open Data Act mandating that data released under an FoI request is comprehensive and provided in a re-usable format.
 * Provide new protections for whistleblowers.
 * Ensure provisions of the Public Interest Disclosure (Whistleblower Protection) Bill 2012 operate in full.
 * Adopt additional measures to build in further protection to all parties:
 * Indemnity provision to third parties involved in the disclosure of information.
 * An intermediary system for anonymous disclosures, including a mechanism allowing whistleblowers to remain in regular, anonymous contact with investigative authorities.
 * Allowances for expedited data preservation orders, including a provision allowing such orders to take effect before a disclosure is made in cases where evidence is at risk of being destroyed.
 * Provisions to allow for disclosure of irrelevant information, where such information forms part of a larger document whose disclosure in complete form is necessary to preserve the quality of evidence.
 * All contracts and deals with suppliers and other businesses to be placed in the public domain.
 * Insert a non-discrimination clause applying to all publically funded bodies, universities, and bodies paid to act on behalf of the state.
 * Providers will have no right to discriminate on the basis of sex, age, race or sexual alignment in the delivery of service provision, access to resources, or any use of public or educational premises and facilities.
 * Provide an official method for Australians to directly petition the federal government for a change in law or other government policy.
 * All levels of government should recognise and facilitate e-petitions.
 * Petitions reaching a predetermined quota to carry attendant obligations upon governments including mandated parliamentary discussion, meetings with petitioners and formal recognition of issues raised.

Improve transparency and conduct in Australian politics


 * Enact legislation to create a federal anti-corruption body with powers based on ICAC.
 * Increase oversight of processes around political donations.
 * Mandatory disclosure of all political gifts and donations provided to elected representatives which have a value over $1000.
 * Donations to be capped at $50 per person for public events.
 * Foreign donations to be banned.
 * Electoral Commissions to collate information into a single searchable database available online and at Electoral Commission offices for ready access to the general public.
 * The database will be updated at three-month intervals, with requirements for donors to report donations within 6 weeks.
 * Prohibit donation splitting between branches of parties to prevent concealment of donations through division into smaller amounts.
 * Create a lobbyists register with mandatory coverage of all lobbyists and full records of all meetings between lobbyists and legislators or government officials.
 * Trial use of electronic voting systems (not online) as an option in polling stations.
 * Specifications and source code will be made publicly available.
 * A verifiable paper-trail will be required.

Return to contents

=Economic reform=

Merger of tax and welfare systems, and establishment of a basic income
Australia's tax and welfare systems have grown so complicated that they are almost impossible to understand. There are now more than 120 taxes, and the tax system increasingly creates bad incentives, favouring property speculation and penalising work and saving. The complexity forces more than two thirds of taxpayers to file returns through tax agents, at huge cost. and imposing deadweight losses of over $20 billion on the economy every year.

The welfare system also faces deep problems with complexity. It has grown in ad-hoc fashion to encompass more than 20 separate payments, each with different means tests, sub-payments, administrative arrangements and compliance regimes. Administrative costs for tax and welfare run to over $5 billion annually, and over $80 billion is "churned" (collected as tax and then returned to the same taxpayers as welfare) each year. Recipients leaving welfare for work often face a combination of large benefit cuts and income tax, which can lead to effective losses of more than 70% of earned income. This punishes the drive to be self-sufficient and creates a risk of inter-generational poverty.  Basic income through reverse taxation

Significant reforms are needed to improve transparency and fairness. The need for reform will only get stronger as automation advances, potentially threatening vast numbers of jobs. To meet the challenges of the 21st century, we need a comprehensively different model of tax and social support.

Pirate Party Australia proposes a unification of tax and welfare into a single system. This system would include a guaranteed basic income for all, paid as a negative income tax.

Negative income tax is tax in reverse - money paid by the government to those with low or no taxable income. It provides social support directly through the tax system rather than through a separate welfare system. It would be calculated by applying tax threshold of $37,500 in conjunction with a tax rate of 37.5%. Under this plan, the first $37,500 of earnings would become tax-free, with a tax rate of 37.5% applied only on earnings above that. However, people earning less than $37,500 will receive 37.5% of the shortfall transferred to them from the government in the form of negative income tax. Thus, persons earning nothing at all are guaranteed a basic income of just over $14,000 (representing 37.5% of the $37,500 by which they fall below the threshold). The following examples show how income is modified under a negative income tax:

incentives.

A basic income system protects against poverty by providing a platform beneath which nobody can fall. It improves the bargaining power of the poorest in society, making it harder to force anyone into exploitative work or abusive domestic conditions. It also stabilises and supports low and volatile wages, smoothing the path for those seeking to shift from welfare into work. It cuts swaths of bureaucracy and welfare 'churn', and ensures government can no longer take take income from citizens while refusing counter-obligations to citizens whose income collapses.

Most importantly, it creates a platform for 'positive liberty', granting everyone the freedom to seek education and training, volunteer, create art and culture, or raise children without bureaucratic obstacles and complex payment rules. A basic income is a platform on which 21st century entrepreneurship and creativity can be built.

On the tax side, a higher tax-free threshold will improve progressiveness in the income tax system. It also provides a simple means to replace the current mass of thresholds and offsets, which unduly favour those who can afford tax accountants. Negative income tax is one of only a few tax and welfare proposals which has near-unified support among economists, demonstrating its merit as a serious economic reform.

Balancing revenue

A shift to negative income tax will reduce income tax receipts by around $30 billion per year, with the bulk of benefit flowing to low income earners. Some of this could be made up through a price on carbon emissions (see climate change policy), and a removal of fossil fuel rebates. Revenue should also be supported by abolishing tax breaks on negative gearing and capital gains: these loopholes have created a huge bias towards property speculation and locked a whole generation out of home ownership. The remaining, substantial tax reduction should simply be left intact as a means to support savings and work in Australia.

Charity and fairness

A few other tweaks would improve the function of the tax and welfare system. All charities should be classified as 'deductible gift recipients' in the future. This will make every charitable donation and activity tax-deductible. Tax exemptions linked to 'advancement of religion' should be removed, since a modern secular society should not discriminate between taxpayers on the basis of their beliefs.

Pirate Party Australia would undertake the following staged reforms: Combine tax and welfare into a single, fair system through a negative income tax '''
 * Set tax rate to 37.5% with a threshold of $37,500 (generating a basic income of $14,062 p/a).
 * Adjust tax thresholds (and basic income) in line with inflation.
 * Time negative income tax payments to supplement regular wage payments, or transfer fortnightly to those with no income.
 * Availability of basic income will extend to persons aged 18 and over, following graduation from school.
 * Ensure 'neutral' and equivalent treatment for all forms of income including fringe benefits, share transfers and dividends, earnings through interest, rental or private company income, and inflation-adjusted capital gains.
 * Phase out negative gearing over five years; allow investors to carry forward losses and deduct them from capital gains to reduce tax liability on property and asset sales.
 * Ensure superannuation contributions are tax-free, with withdrawals taxed as normal income (subject to credit where contribution tax was previously paid).
 * Limit tax exemption to charitable donations and items purchased for the purpose of disability support.
 * 'Top up' the basic income in special cases:
 * An additional $6,000 in child support to primary caregivers, with additional per-child payments reduced by 25% for each subsequent child.
 * A top-up to match existing pension levels for aged and disabled persons, veterans, and carers.
 * A top-up to match existing rent assistance for low income earners lacking public housing.
 * Taper out all ‘top-ups’ as income rises, with top-ups removed once income reaches $100,000.
 * Reset Medicare levy to apply only on incomes over $75,000, with a reduction of one percentage point for holders of private health insurance.
 * Use the basic income to replace existing welfare programs including Newstart, Age Pension, Austudy, Family Tax Benefits parts A and B, School Kids Bonus, Income Support Bonus, Low Income Super Contribution, the Disability Support Pension, and Carer Payments.
 * Use the higher tax threshold to replace existing tax offsets for senior Australians, mature age workers, overseas civilians, entrepreneurs, low income earners, holders of private health insurance, termination payments, zone offsets, notional tax offsets, and tax exemptions for foreign employment income.

Improve citizen and charitable focus in the tax system
 * Undertake systemic improvements to broaden the tax base.
 * Cap fuel tax credits at $100,000 per year and abolish aviation fuel concessions, exploration and prospecting deductions.
 * Tax trusts as companies.
 * Restore a carbon price based on the 2012 model (see environment & climate change policy).
 * Provide secure online mechanisms to allow citizens to easily review their financial relationship with government and conduct digital tax transactions.
 * Ensure data and reviews on the function of taxes and transfer systems are made public.
 * Remove ATO powers to impose or enforce confidentiality clauses on taxpayers.
 * Extend 'deductible gift recipient' status to all registered charities.
 * Remove 'advancement of religion' as a charitable activity for the purpose of determining tax exemption.
 * Retain exemptions for non-commercial income earned by religious organisations if the organisation meets any other categories for exemption including provision of charity, education, culture, community service, or health.

Return to contents

Housing affordability and the land value tax


Long before the creative commons were fenced off by intellectual property laws, a similar process occurred to lock away the physical commons. Incidents such as the Enclosure laws—under which the nobility of the UK granted itself exclusive control of the nations land—have been repeated in many forms, and significantly shaped the world we live in today.

A modern economy can improve its function and fairness through land value tax. A land value tax is a charge for services to a location. An exclusive right to land can come about only through government services, including regulation and enforcement. A land tax collects payment for these services. It also corrects a host of economic and social imbalances.

House prices

High house prices extract wealth rather than creating it. The flipside of high returns for housing speculators is exclusion or massive debt for first home buyers. The housing boom has led Australia into $1 trillion of private debt over the past 20 years, all in order to buy land we already owned. The drain of debt costs reduces imposing a massive interest bill on millions of people, all to buy land which we already owned. Debt costs flow of funds to useful investment and consumption and hamper entrepreneurship, since a need to meet constant repayments make it harder to take risks such as starting a business.

State taxes are a vast source of harmful, regressive and nuisance charges. Taxes on payrolls penalise job creation; gambling taxes increase state reliance on problem gambling and create harmful policy incentives; insurance taxes lead to under-insurance and expose the economy to greater risks, and stamp duties discourage buying and selling property and prevent beneficial exchanges from occurring.

A land value tax would solve both problems, curbing house prices and replacing harmful taxes. Where work and enterprise are variable and can be undermine by taxes, land supply is fixed and taxes on it may actually provide public benefit by encouraging productive land use. Land hoarding will end, and landholders will have strong incentives to increase the rental supply, which will cut rents. The Urban Land Institute describes land taxes as 'a golden key to urban renewal—to the automatic regeneration of a city—and not at public expense'. Land tax is also impossible to evade and represents the most efficient and progressive tax available to governments. It would also create other benefits for cities in Australia:

More livable cities. Options such as scalable public transport and community facilities—which increase land value—would become self-funding under a land value tax. In effect, some of the 'value' of such upgrades would be returned the taxpayer instead of merely converted into private benefit for existing landowners.

Regionalisation. A land value tax would raise more than 90 per cent of its revenue from the largest cities—this is appropriate, since cities have higher services and a greater stock of taxpayer-funded infrastructure. Reducing taxes on regions would encourage movement of businesses and populations into regions, enriching the economies and cultures outside of the cities.

Smaller government. All other state taxes could be removed—this would be economically powerful, since state taxes are the most harmful taxes in Australia. As land tax is raised locally, such a shift would also allow state governments to remove their vast revenue offices, greatly reducing government size and funding needs. In future, state governments would need to invest wisely and improve life for citizens in order to increase their tax take.

Pirate Party Australia believes combined tax and spending across all layers of government should be kept below 25 per cent of GDP. Deficit reduction should be accomplished through economic reform rather than higher taxes, and no reform is more important than the removal of inefficient, investment-stifling and regressive taxes. We can create a tax system worthy of the digital age and a smaller, smarter government which frees its citizens to truly reach for life and liberty.

Simplify state taxes
 * Abolish payroll tax, insurance taxes, stamp duties on cars and houses, gambling taxes and existing land taxes.
 * Institute a per square-metre land tax based on unimproved land value with coverage extending to owner-occupied housing.
 * Apply a per-meter tax free threshold to exclude low-value land including agriculture.
 * Encourage states to apply progressive rates and different structures to encourage 'competitive federalism' and optimal tax builds.
 * Ensure no tax liability applies to land which is preserved in its natural state.
 * Protect income-poor taxpayers by allowing tax payments to be deferred until land is sold or ownership is transferred.

Return to contents

Distributed digital currencies and economies
Distributed digital currencies such as Bitcoin (also referred to as cryptocurrencies) are an emerging and potentially highly disruptive technology, and are the subject of numerous official inquiries around the world. Existing payment methods carry significant risks - such as the need for consumers to share credit card details - and also impose dead-weight middle-men costs. Digital currencies offer a solution to these issues and a potential diversity of new financial services.

Digital currencies allow the population of a country to avoid potential currency devaluation as a result of fiscal and monetary policy. Consumers will also benefit through a reduction of risk in their online purchases and lower transaction fees as middle-men are removed. Digital currencies also offer much to retail businesses. Existing payment systems are structurally unsuited to online transactions: paying online with a credit/debit card involves divulging card details to a slew of interested parties, with all costs associated with poor practices or fraud falling on the retailers, and ultimately on consumers. Organisations which directly wear the costs of poor security (the vendors) are also not the organisations with the power to increase the security of the system (the banks and payment services). Distributed digital currencies correct this issue inherently and are structurally more secure. They eliminate the need to divulge account details and ensure vendors have access to incoming funds immediately with no risk of fraud.

Pirate Party Australia anticipates a large future for the general distributed currency concept, but to be successful Australia needs to actively engage in its development. Pressure from incumbent financial organisations seeking to restrict competition must be resisted, as self-exclusion will deny Australia potentially enormous benefits.


 * Support the development of new technology businesses.
 * Ensure clear guidelines and a suitable regulatory environment are available for businesses.
 * Treat restriction of basic banking services to crypto-currencies businesses as an illegal restriction on trade, excepting where trade poses direct financial risks to the bank.
 * Ensure crypto-currency businesses with control over customer funds are subject to equivalent regulation to banks.
 * Ensure crypto-currency businesses without control over customer funds are not subject to traditional banking regulations, but are encouraged to self regulate.
 * Change tax regulation to support distributed currencies in the broader community.
 * Re-define digital currencies from a commodity to a currency for tax purposes.
 * Count digital currency gains through 'mining' or speculation efforts as capital gains.

Return to contents

=Infrastructure=

Support for fibre-to-the-premises infrastructure projects
The current copper network is not sufficient to meet the requirements of a growing digital society. A fibre-to-the-premises infrastructure project that connects the majority of Australians to a fibre network, where economically feasible, is fundamental to the creation of a vibrant digital society in Australia.

Return to contents

=Environment=

While the environment is perpetually changing, there is a risk that enormous changes imposed in a very short period of time may have a destabilising effect on our planet's ecology and life support systems. Pirate Party Australia supports efforts to preserve the environment and reduce carbon emissions and pollution in line with the precautionary principle.



Climate change and renewable energy
Global energy markets are approaching the “crossover point”, when prices for on-site production and storage of energy fall below the price of traditional grid power. Research and development and technology export can speed this up, and encourage consumers to become ‘prosumers’ – energy users capable of independently generating their own power. A 'prosumer' market will be a freer market in which consumers directly compete with utilities.

A few simple changes could bring this future closer. Resources currently allocated to the Emissions Reduction Fund could be re-targeted towards research and technological development. Regulations could be changed to ensure consumers are freer to enter markets. Utilities could be deregulated so they can adopt leaner 'probabalistic' power models and new services such as trading platforms between distributed energy producers. And carbon pricing could be adopted to bring the price 'crossover' closer.

Serious emissions cuts can't happen without a predictable carbon price. A shift from taxing savings and work to taxing carbon emissions will be economically beneficial. A fixed carbon price creates incentives for efficiency and investment all across the economy, and provides the essential certainty which long-term investment demands. Pollution is the embodiment of privatised profits and socialised losses, and carbon pricing will ensure coal mining repays some of the costs it imposes on national water reserves, agriculture, and general public health. ,.

Clean energy reforms will pay for themselves. A distributed grid open to 'prosumer' competition will be cheaper in the long run as wastefully long power lines disappear and communities become self-sufficient. Successful climate change policy should produce benefits far beyond merely addressing climate change itself.

Enact measures to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2030
 * Expand investment in technological improvement and community power.
 * Re-purpose the 'Emissions Reduction Fund' (ERF) to the CSIRO and ARENA to sponsor additional research and development in clean technology and power storage.
 * Ensure technology developed with public funding is made freely available to developing countries.
 * Extend Clean Energy Finance Corporation loans to support community power start-up costs and grid connections.
 * Amend AEMC rules to ensure power purchase agreements, solar services agreements, virtual net metering and other forms of decentralised grids are viable and available.
 * Strengthen existing measures and price signals.
 * Restore a carbon tax with pricing set to the 2014-15 level and price increases fixed at CPI + 5% p/a.
 * Provide free permits to coal-generated power stations only where grid stability is at stake.
 * Provide a final extension in the Renewable Energy Target (RET) to 70GwH by 2025.
 * Increase the number of renewable certificates offered for generation at peak periods to encourage baseload renewable generation.
 * Include waste-to-energy in RET certificate allocations.
 * Remove waste levy exemptions applying to coal power.
 * Levy thermal coal exporters $2 per tonne of exported coal.
 * Revenue will be used to to purchase carbon offsets through the UN clean development mechanism.
 * Require transparent disclosure of energy ratings for all buildings.
 * Adopt EU 2020 vehicle fuel efficiency standards including the passenger vehicle target of 95g CO2/Km by 2023.
 * Form a panel of government and industry representatives to develop a plan for roll-out of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations and development of an Australian standard for EV rechargers.
 * Offer assistance to private operators who wish to operate recharging stations through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
 * Create a corporation with joined State and Federal Government ownership to lease recharging sites on public land.

Return to contents

Preserving Australia’s ecology
Pirate Party Australia believes we should treat lightly on our planet. Our precious ecology and fauna require more care and more holistic approach than what we've seen to date. Cases such as the Murray-Darling system show that ecosystems are too deeply interconnected to be managed in different ways across state borders, and a clear case exists for future environmental approvals to be conducted at the Federal level by a fully independent authority. Funding should be set aside to develop a national Biodiversity Matrix, which will provide planners and the general public with a unified information source on our land and ocean ecosystems.

There also need to be practical measures to protect biodiversity on the ground. We will seek to both expand national parks and ensure that groups and communities have more avenues to assist with maintenance and management. We will also seek to re-allocate funding allocated to supporting 'green cars' - this funding is no longer required now that the automotive industry is leaving Australia. This can be better spent on urgent priorities such as water quality in the Great Barrier Reef. There also need to be more solutions to the problem of feral animals—with funding for both long-term research and immediate containment of the problem.

Pirate Party Australia also believes the needs of farmers should be prioritised over activities such as coal seam gas (CSG) extraction. CSG extraction is being undertaken from a position of profound ignorance regarding its impacts on rivers, groundwater, and food security. Given the evidence of fugitive emissions leaks and other unforeseen impacts, a moratorium is likely to be necessary until more meaningful evidence is available to demonstrate that extraction can be done safely and without undue impacts.

Improve land management to protect biodiversity
 * Expand the environmental oversight of the federal government to cover mining approvals, rivers and water areas, and national parks.
 * Provide independent statutory status to areas overseeing environmental approvals.
 * Cancel 'automotive transformation scheme' and re-allocate the remaining $650 million to catchment and water quality management on the Barrier Reef.
 * Provide $50 million to develop a Biodiversity Matrix to classify nationwide land and ocean ecosystems and species distribution.
 * Information collected will be published, and will inform land use changes, management of threatened species, development approvals, and management of biodiversity issues and national parks.
 * Provide $100 million to sponsor endangered species plans and community group projects including sanctuaries and land management initiatives.
 * Provide $50 million to support long-term research and adaptive management aimed at curbing feral cats and foxes.
 * Expand and improve national parks.
 * Increase national park thresholds to cover 15% of land in Australia, with a representative sample of at least 80% of regional ecosystems protected in each bio-region.
 * Review national park legislation and remove restrictions on volunteerism and community engagement in improving parks.
 * Amend Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to insert specific requirements for accountability and monitoring of Recovery Plans.
 * Protect agricultural and farming land.
 * Grant landowners rights to refuse exploitation of coal and coal seam gas deposits on land they own.
 * Permanently ban extraction and exploration of coal and coal seam gas around prime farming land, water catchment areas and aquifers.
 * Apply a moratorium on new coal seam mines and additional use of existing mines in metropolitan areas, with periodical reviews to assess evidence and present recommendations on the scientific case for lifting or modifying the moratorium.

Return to contents

Animal welfare
The Pirate Party is opposed to animal abuse and believes our laws should be informed by scientific research which demonstrates the capacity of animals to feel emotion and pain. The improvement of public understanding through transparency and scientific discovery has been crucial to improvements in animal welfare to date, and we believe in the further application of these principles. Accordingly, we support existing efforts to create an independent statutory authority to conduct research and improve animal welfare outcomes. We also support improvements in the level of transparency applying to animal products.

The Pirate Party believes live exports need to be examined, with ongoing efforts made to promote chilled meat exports as an alternative to the live cattle trade: live exports are characterized by months-long voyages, unsanitary conditions and total absence of any freedom of movement, with a significant follow-up risk of abuse in destination countries. Efforts to improve live export conditions—in conjunction with sensible domestic reforms—offer the best chance for a 'net' gain in global animal welfare.

Foster improvements in animal welfare

Improve legislation applying to animal product industries.
 * Support existing proposals to form an Independent Office of Animal Welfare (IOAW).
 * The IOAW authority will be dedicated to animal welfare issues, with enforcement powers and a mandate to adopt a scientific approach.
 * The authority will have statutory independence to prevent political and commercial interference.
 * Ban the use of sow stalls.
 * Codify a legal requirement for all abattoirs to stun animals prior to slaughter.
 * Provide whistleblower protection for persons who expose animal abuse at factory farms and other facilities.
 * Ensure transparent and clear labeling of all animal based products, with "free range" label permitted only when:
 * Independent audits of sanitary and welfare conditions are allowed.
 * For birds, indoor stocking density is at a maximum level of 28 kg of live birds per sq metre (35 kg for turkeys), with unrestricted access to an outdoor range with maximum of 1500 birds per hectare, no use of growth promoters, no mutilations (beak trimming, toe trimming, de-snooding).
 * For pigs and cattle, unrestricted access to soil and pasture and no use of farrowing crates, sow stalls, feedlots, tail docking, teeth clipping and nose ringing.
 * Enact a package of reforms to transform and improve the live exports industry.
 * Provide assistance for willing live animal exporters to shift to chilled/frozen meat exports.
 * Require transparency and minimal standards for animal handling among destination countries as a condition of sale.
 * Australian trade officials to inspect animals upon arrival and in abattoir facilities in destination countries.
 * Reduce numbers of animals carried in ships and holding pens, and ensure sufficient provision of food and water.
 * Ensure open and transparent systems for euthanising animals, with a requirement to use stun equipment.

Return to contents

=Health=

Transparent, efficient health services
Pirate Party Australia believes that ensuring universal access to affordable, high-quality health care is a core responsibility of government. However, with resources tight it is necessary to accomplish this by improving the quality and priorities of existing spending, which already accounts for around 25% of overall federal, state and local government revenues.  Making better health affordable The trend of rising health expenditure in many countries partly reflects growing demand due to the increasing effectiveness of clinical practice informed by ever more sophisticated medical research and technology. However, rising costs may also be driven by rent-seeking in an industry which is often far removed from the economic ideal of a free market due to high entry barriers and large information asymmetries. Thus, a key role of governments is to enforce effective regulation to protect patients from over-servicing, price-gouging and treatments which lack a solid evidence base. Ideally, the regulatory framework should allow maximum flexibility for medical staff, and avoid undermining the intrinsic, non-monetary motivations of health professionals.

Ideological cost-shifting between public and private sources should not be a priority for health reformers. Rather, the goal should always be to minimise the total public and private cost of achieving our desired health outcomes. This can be done partly by removing the private health insurance rebate, which, by most estimates, provides poor value for its $5 billion per year cost. Removal of pharmaceutical patents and their replacement with alternative research incentives will also lower health costs by reducing medicine prices to a fraction of their current value, creating huge savings for hospitals, patients, and everyone who has ever bought over the counter.

A greater focus on improving preventative practices and addressing homelessness, drug abuse, and domestic violence will pay off significantly, with a 2013 Senate report noting that, "by addressing the social determinants of health that are the genesis of many health problems, the costs to government of providing healthcare can be reduced, and individuals can enjoy better health outcomes". Vaccinations are also an important pillar of preventative practice, with the available science clearly showing that compromised herd immunity represents a threat to the entire population. Efforts at harm prevention are reckoned to be particularly effective at reducing the likelihood of chronic illness, which often require highly complex treatment regimens.

We also believe the fragmented nature of Australia's health system, with responsibilities split between federal and state governments, requires reform in order to reduce perverse incentives to minimise costs within each funding silo instead of minimising the overall cost of treatment. In order to improve accountability and co-ordination, we advocate financial support for general practitioners to take on the role of designated treatment coordinator for patients, particularly where patients have complex chronic conditions.

Plugging the gaps Australia's health system faces several old challenges and several new ones.

Pirate Party Australia supports the ongoing roll-out of the NDIS—although continued consultation with carers and patients will be needed to maximise the benefits. Pirate Party Australia would support the NDIS by making items purchased for disability support tax-free. We also believe mental health efforts within the NDIS may need additional direct support. Mental illness is creating an epidemic of suffering—not only for the mentally ill themselves but also their family, friends and the wider community. Suicide is the leading cause of death for Australians between the ages of 15 and 45, and the fact that mental illness is itself a significant risk factor for physical ill-health means that better resourcing of treatment for the former often pays for itself by savings for the latter. A priority is to improve coordination of services to ensure that recovering patients have stable and appropriate housing, with access to ongoing support. Mental health advocates also stress the potential for better coordination between agencies to improve outcomes and reduce costs.

While most Australians can afford dental treatment and have adequate dental health, severe and chronic dental health issues have become concentrated among some lower income groups, with around one-third of Australians receiving no dental care at all. While some have called for a universal dental scheme, the Australian Dental Association has warned against it on the grounds that thinly rationed coverage across the board will prove unnecessary for the majority and insufficient for those in greatest need. Pirate Party Australia instead supports a model which focuses intensive resources on the poorest and most needy, and thereby achieves better outcomes at less overall cost. A dental plan can be easily funded out of savings from removing the Private Health Insurance Rebate.

Australia should also do more to avert the risk of growing resistance to antibiotics. Antibiotics for treating human infections are quite closely regulated in Australia, but better public education would help further reduce the number of unnecessary prescriptions for antibiotics. Pirate Party Australia also supports better monitoring of growth promoters in animal feed and antibiotic residues in imported fish and animal products.  Data and IT infrastructure

Pirate Party Australia supports moves by the Federal Government to establish a national system of electronic health records, provided strict privacy safeguards are enforced. Once in place, such a system promises to provide better medical care at a lower cost by avoiding duplication of diagnostic tests and by reducing the incidence of medical errors. The data gathered, once suitably anonymised, will be of great value to researchers for epidemiological and other studies, and free access should be maximised with public funding of the necessary IT infrastructure. At the same time, to avoid an incentive to falsify medical records, the public must be assured that the data gathered cannot be used to discriminate against them, for instance by employers or insurance companies.  Undertake measures which ensure best-value for money in the health system
 * Abolish pharmaceutical patents and substitute a 'bounty' system to support pharmaceutical research (see patents policy).
 * Provide financial encouragement for parents to vaccinate their children (see tax and welfare policy)
 * Remove private health insurance rebate and utilise savings (of around $5 billion) to support other policy priorities.
 * Revise health budget guidelines to ensure public subsidies for health services are determined by:
 * The seriousness of the patient's illness or injury,
 * The proven effectiveness of the treatment,
 * The financial capacity of the patient,
 * The wider public benefit (e.g, 'herd immunity' resulting from immunisations),
 * The opportunity cost for the rest of the health system.

Support general systemic improvements in Australia's health system
 * Provide additional $2.5 billion annually to the public health system to manage any increased patient need resulting from lower private health coverage.
 * Base fund allocations on existing funding ratios.
 * Improve privacy safeguards for electronic health records (see civil liberties policy).
 * Conclude development of a national system of electronic health records.
 * Ensure personal files incorporate strong cryptographic protection, and utilise a format easily processed with standard, free software.
 * Trial a new annual payment for GPs to coordinate the care of patients with complex treatment needs.

Undertake new measures to close gaps in health coverage
 * Provide $2 billion per year to fund Australian Dental Association recommendations on improving dental health.
 * Fund direct service provision for those currently lacking access to dental care, including people facing financial disadvantage, people in remote areas, the elderly, children of health card concession holders, and those with special needs.
 * Increase incentives for dental students to accept rural placements by expanding the existing scheme for medical students.
 * Support preventive and promotional health initiatives and integrate dental care into Australia's health plans.
 * Provide $500 million to support initiatives to curb homelessness, including:
 * Direct investment in expanded accommodation services for mentally ill people facing homelessness;
 * Seed funding to extend successful community programs including Common Ground and Journey to Social Inclusion.
 * Establish a national centre to coordinate Australia's response to antibiotic resistance.

Return to contents

=Law and order=

An end to the war on drugs
People have always taken drugs, and modern attempts at prohibition are at odds with history as well as human nature. The war on drugs is best understood as a war on a market. Such wars are futile: demand always creates supply, and ad-hoc attacks on supply channels do nothing other than reduce the quality of drugs, and increase the risks. History shows that even the harshest attempts to outlaw a market do not make the market go away, but merely create an unregulated black market in place of the legal one, making criminals of regular citizens and funding organised crime.

The cost of the war on drugs

At present the illegal drug market is worth around $300 billion per year, making a mockery of prohibition. The choice we face is not between drugs and no drugs, but between legal and illegal markets.

The illegal market funnels vast profits to criminals and imposes equally vast costs on society. The US alone spends $50 billion per year fighting the war on drugs, and global spending is far greater. The secondary costs are incalculable: jailing people for drug offences does far more to destroy individual lives and potential than the drugs themselves. The policy is poorly targeted, excluding alcohol and tobacco but imposing massive punishments on non-violent users of much less harmful products. In producer countries, the illegal market has enriched drug cartels, causing thousands of deaths every year, corrupting civil societies and creating a risk of failed states.

Prohibition offers no success to justify the cost: figures from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime show no observable decline in global drug use, nor is any decline evident in Australia. Results among individual nations show no correlation between drug use levels and the harshness of drug laws.

The alternative

The experience of Portugal—where decriminalisation led to an observable fall in drug deaths —suggests that a much better approach exists. Imprisonment is an immoral and ineffective way of handling mental health issues and other drivers of drug abuse. It is cheaper and more effective to handle these issues in the sphere of public health. Legalising and taxing safe drugs will raise revenue to fund better support services for addicts and their families. Decriminalising other drugs will broaden options for treatment and allow help to be extended without the threat of criminal sanctions. Effective policy must offer help and treatment, but must also recognise that most drug users are neither addicts nor criminals.

In handling drugs, policymakers should also take note of their one success: the campaign against tobacco. The anti-tobacco campaign has reduced the proportion of smokers by 40% over 20 years through a combination of advertising, warnings, and social sanctions in a legal framework. It is a far more successful model than prohibition, and a broader application of it should be considered.

Ultimately however, civil liberties must be respected. A belief in civil liberties does not require approval of every private choice, merely acceptance that choice should exist. The alternative has cost us too much, for too long.

The Pirate Party proposes that management of drugs be shifted into the public health arena through a combination of legalisation and decriminalisation.

Legalise safe, non-addictive drugs


 * A controlled substances committee will be established. The committee will meet periodically and will be tasked with several activities as specified below.
 * The committee members will be healthcare professionals assembled for this purpose and strive to make fact-based decisions.
 * Psychoactive substance classification will be amended to conform to criteria such as:
 * Addictive properties
 * Habituating properties
 * Perception impairment
 * Reversible impact on the user
 * Known therapeutic properties
 * Re-classification will be performed periodically by the controlled substances committee.
 * Substances which are non-addictive and have a reversible impact on the user will be legalised, i.e. removed from any schedule that prohibits their use.
 * Marijuana      will be made available subject to appropriate health warnings and quality assurance.
 * The committee will be able to recommend conditions for obtaining legalised substances, such as requiring a psychological evaluation, etc.
 * Legalised drugs will be taxed.
 * Tax rates will be set at a level which balances the need to manage health impacts with the need to provide financial incentives to avoid the black market.
 * Sales will be regulated.
 * Retailers will require licenses (as per conditions for selling alcohol)
 * Products will include mandatory warnings on health risks as recommended by manufacturers and relevant government bodies
 * Products will be restricted to sale in limited quantities, and may not be sold to intoxicated persons
 * All forms of advertising will be banned.
 * Products will be subject to strict quality control, with penalties for poor product quality being equivalent to those currently applied to pharmaceuticals.
 * Age verification will be required for all drug sales.
 * Exports will be controlled.
 * Exports to countries where drugs remain illegal will be a criminal offence unless products are sold under license to authorities in those countries that are legally permitted such purchases.
 * Minors will be protected.
 * Making drugs available to minors will be a criminal offence.

Partially decriminalise drugs which fail to meet the threshold for legalisation


 * Decriminalisation will apply to possession, purchase and consumption of small quantities of drugs for personal use.
 * Small quantities will be defined as a 14-day supply.
 * Infractions will be handled outside the criminal justice system, with preference given to the application of civil penalties including confiscation of drugs and treatment recommendations. Treatment may be imposed as part of a prosecution if other civil or criminal acts are committed by a person under the influence of drugs.
 * Users who work in professions with professional duty of care to others may face suspension of their right to practice under civil law.
 * Penalties for the sale of small quantities of decriminalised drugs will include fines and confiscation of products under civil law.
 * Criminal sanctions will continue to apply for possession, sale or smuggling of substances in commercial quantities.
 * Decriminalised drugs may be made available under prescription.
 * Supply would be procured following medical consultation in instances where harm minimisation or addiction treatment requires it, or as a mechanism for reducing black market purchasing.
 * Chemists providing drugs will be required to provide dosage levels, toxicity information, and information about side effects, as per standard requirements for medication.

Redirect existing resources and additional revenue to fund more research and support services


 * Expand mental health services, rehabilitation facilities, and programs to assist addicts with social re-integration.
 * Persons seeking treatment will be entitled to protection of their privacy as per a doctor-patient relationship.
 * Adopt harm minimisation techniques.
 * Pharmacies will be encouraged to make clean needles and drug testing kits available.
 * Redirect police and prison resources towards preventing violent crime.
 * Curb the use of sniffer dogs and random "inspections" at public events.
 * Undo restrictions on research and data collection imposed during prohibition.
 * Re-start research programs utilising previously banned drugs.
 * Re-start data collection on drug use and drug effects.

Return to contents

=Foreign policy=

Asylum seekers and refugees
Handling of asylum seekers is one of the great policy failures of recent years. Domestically, political and legal processes are mired in buck-passing and blame - a dysfunction mirrored in wider regional disputes. The backlog of boat arrivals has overwhelmed capacity for processing, drownings at sea continue to escalate, and growing evidence is emerging of inept and inhumane handling of the problem in Australia and overseas.

A crisis on such a scale requires a regional solution. We believe efforts should begin at once to set up a single regional asylum seeker 'queue'. Asylum seekers arriving anywhere in the region would be subject to a single processing system overseen by an independent body with all participating nations accepting a share of approved refugees. The existence of a common regional queue would remove specific incentives to travel to Australia, reducing drowning and deterring backdoor economic migration. A transparent allocation process should reduce disputes between nations, and pooling of information should improve document and identity checking. The creation of a new system of oversight allows for a best practice approach built from the ground up, with a humane appeals process and a means for swift and safe return of arrivals deemed not to be asylum seekers.

Such a scheme would require funding, leadership, and specific incentives provided by Australia to encourage sign-up. However, Australia currently spends over $1 billion per year on detention facilities, and redirection of these funds will free up significant resources. Nations such as Indonesia would have strong incentives to sign up, both to receive aid, and to obtain help with settling their own large backlog of asylum seekers. As participating countries would be required to sign the UN Refugee Convention, funding and aid from Australia could become a mechanism for improving region-wide standards in asylum seeker handling.

Asylum seeking is lawful, and detention should not last longer than the minimum time-frame necessary to assess claims and conduct health and security checks. Approved asylum seekers can be brought into the community, provided with support and training, and settled in areas where jobs remain persistently vacant (the National Farmers Federation estimates around 96,000 jobs are unfilled in regional areas).

The Pirate Party believes it is past time that our response to the plight of vulnerable people embodied our best qualities instead of our worst.

Set up a single regional asylum seeker "queue" comprising willing refugee convention signatory countries


 * Australia to offer funding and leadership.
 * All countries take a share of asylum seekers according to a transparent allocation process.
 * A single process will provide common housing, education, treatment and assessment for all asylum seekers who arrive in any participating country.
 * Assessments, health & security checks to be conducted in common, agreed places.
 * Process to be overseen by UNHCR or by an independent, expert organisation.
 * Assessment of backlogged claims to be fast-tracked.
 * Families should be kept together, and asylum seekers may submit preferences on a destination nation.
 * Preferences may be taken into account, but final decisions to be made by the overseeing body in line with agreed quotas.
 * Nations to pool information to assist with document and identity checking.
 * Processing will follow all relevant international law and treaties.

Refugees accepted into Australia to be released into the community


 * Successful asylum seekers assigned to Australia to be brought safely as refugees (by plane or naval vessel).
 * Conditions of release should include reporting requirements and continued availability for processing.
 * Peer-driven community training and social services will help refugees understand their legal rights, build social networks, and overcome disadvantage (language barriers, skills, trauma, etc).
 * Refugees to be provided with a basic income (see PPAU welfare policy), a right to work, and a pathway to citizenship.
 * Savings from closing offshore detention centres to be redirected in order to provide:
 * Incentives for regional nations to sign the refugee convention and engage with the plan.
 * Resources to speed processing times, develop humane processing practices, and improve support services in destination countries.

Return to contents

Treaties and diplomacy
Australian foreign policy should focus less on imperial entanglements and more on supporting peace and regional development. Civil and digital liberties, transparency, and human rights are universal principles and should be embodied in foreign and domestic policy alike. Indeed, foreign and domestic spheres are often difficult to separate, with international treaties having potential to drive domestic lawmaking.

Like all legal mechanisms, treaties derive legitimacy through consent and consultation. For this reason, treaties such as ACTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership have drawn concern due to the intense secrecy surrounding their formulation and negotiation. Serious investigation of purported 'free trade' treaties has often shown they are nothing of the kind, and offer few economic benefits relative to the costs they impose, which can include insidious protectionism in the form of longer copyright and patent terms, higher medicine prices, imposition of surveillance, significant additional complexity for exporting firms, and curbs on national sovereignty. Pirate Party Australia supports direct dismantling of tariffs and trade barriers as a better alternative to preferential trade treaties.

Pirate Party Australia will also push governments to make better use of diplomatic channels, and in particular to register a stronger response to recent revelations of massive and warrantless monitoring by the US National Security Agency. Australians are being subjected to offshore monitoring on a massive scale with no access to appeals or accountability. The notion that allies can be treated as suspects with no rights is harmful both to domestic sovereignty and broader international relations. One method of safeguarding the liberties of internet users will be to ensure that foreign whistle blowers offering information relevant to the public good are granted protection under Australian whistle blower laws. Another will be to ensure that foreign intelligence and surveillance facilities operating in Australia are subject to some form of Australian oversight. We also believe negotiations should also commence on a new treaty to enshrine the principles of the internet and protect the rights of its users.

Support principles of transparency and openness in treaties and trade agreements


 * Ensure treaty negotiations are subject to oversight and public participation.
 * Require a window for public participation and the availability of draft texts prior to signing.
 * Conduct a constitutional referendum to require parliamentary oversight and consent in treaty making and other international instruments.
 * Renegotiate or withdraw from treaties which unduly restrict policy including:
 * Treaties which bind Australia to economically harmful intellectual property laws. These include the Berne Convention, WIPO Copyright Treaty (WCT), Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), and Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement (AUSFTA).
 * Treaties which oblige Australia to adopt failed models of drug prohibition. These include the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the Convention on Psychotropic Substances, and Convention Against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances.
 * Treaties which disadvantage Australian businesses by offering special parallel legal systems to foreign-owned firms under the guise of investor-state dispute settlement.
 * Ensure Australia complies fully with all treaty clauses which protect individual rights.
 * Remove exceptions granted to Australia which potentially reduce the capacity of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) to protect Australian citizens.
 * Ban inclusion of investor-state dispute settlement provisions and ensure foreign businesses retain equivalent legal protections to domestic businesses.
 * Begin negotiations on an international treaty to enshrine net neutrality, freedom of the internet from state control, and protection for private communication, free expression, and unrestricted access to information.

Return to contents

Defence and regional stability
Defence is also an important aspect of overseas engagement. Australia's defence strategy is blurred by confused objectives and competing demands. The fundamental purpose of national defence sits uneasily with the counter-demand for participation in overseas wars, which have often undermined Australia's security. The purpose of defence is blurred further still by laws which allow the use of defence forces against civilians on domestic soil (in the name of protecting 'Commonwealth interests'). Defence needs greater transparency and to be purely dedicated to the safeguarding of Australian territory and people. This will open the way for a far more optimal use of defence resources and a more self-reliant global stance.

As an ocean-surrounded nation, Australia is well placed to maximise the benefits of submarine defence. Modern submarines are enormously powerful defensive tools  which, by some estimates, require an investment ratio of more than 100:1 (meaning every dollar spent on submarine capability requires at least $100 for an aggressor to counter). Oceanic defence can be backed up with reliable, affordable aircraft and a well equipped army which will increase the scale of forces an invader would need to commit. Pirate Party Australia supports investment in high quality, 'asymmetric' capability designed to raise the costs of attacking Australia. Pirate Party Australia does not support investment in force structures based on invasion and occupation. We do not believe it is necessary to expand defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP, and oppose the associated wasteful spending on flawed joint strike fighters, large and vulnerable warships, and long-range bombers.

Outside of direct military force, Australia can enhance its broader security in other ways. Australia should remain active in regional peacekeeping, and direct a greater share of defence resources towards regional engagement. This will facilitate trade and investment and provide channels to manage regional issues such as asylum seekers. Australia should also do more to meet its Millennium Development Aid targets in order to foster regional development and stability. This could be done by re-allocating the latest funding bloat allocated to 'national security' and data retention and directing it to aid instead. Aid funding can also be freed up by implementing the recommendations of numerous inquiries to reduce waste and dead-weight costs in the defence bureaucracy.

Where aid is deployed, the aim should be to foster human rights and humanitarian causes in a manner which is consistent with long-term improvement of local conditions. Aid has sometimes been structured to benefit business and producers in the donor countries - with potentially negative effects upon the recipient countries. As an example, the increase in US rice delivered to Haiti as food aid in the wake of the disastrous earthquake of 2010 has put further pressure on local producers already struggling after years of their market being flooded by cheap, heavily subsidized US rice and very low tariffs imposed by the IMF. This practice should cease, with aid focused first and foremost on providing a path to local development and freedom from poverty.

Improve defence transparency and focus


 * Focus defence on safeguarding Australian people and territory.
 * Prioritise investment in 'sea denial' (submarines supported by unmanned underwater vehicles), informational warfare, and intensive regional engagement.
 * Remove prime ministerial authority to commit Australia to war and ensure military engagement requires parliamentary approval with two-thirds support in both houses of parliament.
 * Repeal the Defence Legislation Amendment (Aid to Civilian Authorities) Act.
 * Ensure the Defence Trade Controls Act does not restrict academic freedom or any right to encryption.
 * Improve transparency of defence operations.
 * Subject foreign intelligence and surveillance facilities in Australia to parliamentary oversight.
 * Review national secrets files and release all material which is not operationally important.
 * Enact recommendations of the DLA Piper Review to protect defence personnel from abuse and misconduct.
 * Reduce costs and prevent 'white elephant' projects.
 * Place funding for future capability into a separate budget, with spending subject to open tenders and public oversight.
 * Enact recommendations of First Principles Review to reduce defence bureaucracy, enhance strategic focus and improve efficiency.
 * Sell non-critical defence land and buildings to reduce maintenance costs and fund future capability.

Expand use of diplomacy and aid in support of global human rights


 * Increase foreign aid to 0.5 per cent of GDP within two years to meet Millennium Development Goals.
 * Expand provision of generic medicines (see patents policy), and prioritise areas such as childhood nutrition, universal education, environmental preservation, and access to contraception and immunisation.
 * Ensure local producers are not disadvantaged by dumping of aid products, with local suppliers of goods and services to be used where practical.
 * Support political asylum or subsidiary protection status for overseas whistleblowers per provisions of Article 14 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
 * Suspend extradition processes and law enforcement cooperation in cases where:
 * Only political offences have been committed.
 * The act being investigated is not an offence in Australia.
 * A death penalty could potentially apply.
 * The nation involved has not ratified the United Nations Convention against Torture.
 * Utilise diplomatic and political channels to seek urgent clarification from nations that Australia has intelligence sharing arrangements with regarding the scope of monitoring of Australian citizens.

Return to contents

=Constitutional change=

Bill of Rights
The Pirate Party will sponsor a referendum to introduce a Bill of Rights as a way to protect basic liberties.

Australia is one of the few remaining western democracies whose citizens and residents lack any significant, constitutionally declared rights. This lack of protection creates an imbalance of power between individuals and the state, and poses risks to privacy, free speech and individual choice. A bill of rights is overdue as a way to restore balance and provide unambiguous checks on the creeping intrusion of the state into private life.

We propose a referendum to alter the Australian Constitution and include a bill of rights, codifying a basic set of human rights and freedoms. The Pirate Party proposal incorporates the most fundamental and essential elements of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

Protecting rights and freedoms

The following rights and freedoms should only be construed as applying to natural persons as opposed to corporations or other non-natural entities. None of the following rights and freedoms should be construed as enabling the violation of other rights or freedoms. Where conflicting rights or freedoms are found to occur, the resolution should be based on the greater overall good.

The individual is the ultimate minority, and these rights are designed to protect the private lives and rights of individuals. Broader rights (which are often assigned on the basis of belonging to an identity group) are less prominent, as these potentially impose subjectivity, conflict with other rights, and drive burdensome litigation. Rights and freedoms not mentioned here may be granted through other laws and, where not covered by law, are left to the people.

Rights and freedoms should be considered to apply collectively (thus, various combinations of rights exclude practices such as slavery).

People may not sell, trade or otherwise contractually sign away these rights.

Life and Death


 * The right not to have your life taken from you.
 * Any application of the death penalty will be unconstitutional.
 * The right to end your own life should you explicitly, in right-mind and without coercion, choose to do so.
 * This allows euthanasia, provided that the conditions listed above are legally confirmed.
 * The right to control your body and health.

Thought and Belief


 * Freedom of thought, conscience and belief.
 * Includes freedom from compulsion to adhere to another's beliefs, and protection against imposition of such beliefs through law.

Communication and Expression


 * Freedom of speech, communication and the right to express your thoughts or beliefs.
 * This applies to all mediums of communication but does not guarantee that the medium will be provided, merely that access may not be removed by the state.
 * This specifically stops laws such as blocking of Internet access for Copyright infringement.
 * This right does not include a right to be heard, or impose a duty on anyone to listen.
 * This applies regardless of the purpose of communication.
 * The right to express an opinion will be protected without exception.
 * There is no right to not be offended by the free expression of the thoughts or beliefs of others.
 * Exclusions:
 * Direct attempts to bring about the use of force against another person.
 * Intentional, false statements of fact (slander, libel, false advertising).
 * Direct threats.

Fair Legal Process


 * Habeas corpus - the right for a person under arrest to be brought before a judge or into court.
 * Right to trial by a jury of your peers for criminal proceedings.
 * Right to legal representation.
 * Provision of lawyer for defence.
 * Self-defence.
 * Right to not incriminate yourself.
 * Freedom from retroactive legislation.
 * Protection will apply to anyone found guilty of acts that were not crimes when committed.
 * Right to freely access and copy all laws and public judicial proceedings.
 * No prison for breach of contract.

Privacy


 * Privacy for homes, property and effects
 * No illegal search & seizure.
 * Covers any invasion of privacy not authorized by warrant issued on probable cause.
 * Privacy of Communication.
 * Excludes communication in open spaces with general public access or public forums.
 * Exceptions from exclusion:
 * Targeted recording of communications without warrant issued on probable cause
 * Dragnet, state-sponsored recording of communication, which allows after-the-fact targeting of any individual
 * Public officials, in performance of official, or purportedly official, duties, may be recorded without constraint.
 * This protection will apply independently of communications medium.

Liberty, Movement, Assembly and Association


 * The right to personal liberty.
 * Protection against arrest or detainment without cause or due process.
 * On detention, the right to be given written evidence of detention, including officers involved and reasons for detention.
 * Freedom of movement.
 * Protection against forcible constraint of movement without cause or due process.
 * Freedom to peacefully assemble in public or private.
 * Freedom to associate with others.

Political Participation


 * Right to participate in civil and political life.
 * Includes right of any adult citizen to run for any government office.
 * Includes right of any adult citizen to join political parties or activist groups.
 * Includes right of any adult citizen to vote.
 * Is not nullified by civil or criminal status.
 * This should not be construed as taking away any existing right to civil or political participation.
 * The government shall not pass laws intended to limit participation.

Property


 * The right to own property and not have it unlawfully taken from you.
 * This right only extends to physical property where acquisition removes it from possession of another person.
 * Intellectual and other property rights schemes will remain an issue for the legislature.

Non-Discrimination


 * The right for all permanent residents and adult citizens to be treated equally by the state.
 * Guarantees freedom from discrimination by government, based on any arbitrary or generalised condition, including gender, age, sexual orientation, race, religion (or lack thereof), social sub-cultural and political affiliation.

Return to contents

Citizens' initiatives
Australians lack any direct way to enact, amend, repeal or vote for or against legislation which affects their lives. A solution to this is to allow citizens to directly petition the Commonwealth Parliament for referendums.

Citizens' initiatives allow citizens to directly participate in legislative decisions. Mechanisms of this kind have been implemented in various forms and to varying degrees in Austria, at the supranational level in the European Union, Finland, all German states, Hungary, Italy, Latvia,, Lichtenstein, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, several states of the United States and Uruguay.

The Pirate Party supports the right of Australians to exercise legislative power in certain circumstances using citizens' initiatives. However, the Pirate Party also recognises that setting a threshold is necessary to prevent abuse of the system by special interest groups.

The Pirate Party therefore supports two levels of initiatives modelled closely on the systems in Latvia, Hungary, Brandenburg and Hamburg, but with adjustments made to accommodate Australia's significant geographic size and low population density. The first level, an agenda initiative, would have a lower threshold and be a binding petition to place an issue on the parliamentary agenda. If Parliament fails to take action, a full-scale initiative with a higher threshold would compel Parliament to hold a binding referendum. This allows legislative development to be guided by parliamentary institutions and procedures and to arrive at considered and enlightened decisions, as well as helping to avoid populism and the disregarding of minority interests. Combining agenda and full-scale initiatives allows Australian citizens to encourage their representatives to take action, while providing a mechanism to challenge parliamentary decisions.

The Pirate Party supports legislation allowing citizens' initiatives as a temporary measure, but ultimately this right should be enshrined in the Australian Constitution.

Support for citizens' initiatives


 * Enact a referendum to insert provisions allowing citizens' initiatives in the Australian Constitution.
 * Initiatives would be divided into two tiers: "agenda initiatives" and "full-scale initiatives."
 * Agenda initiatives would be non-binding mechanisms modelled on the systems in Latvia, Hungary, Brandenburg and Hamburg, which would compel Parliament to consider a particular proposal.
 * Agenda initiatives would have a petition threshold set at 0.2% of the number of enrolled electors at the Federal Election prior to the submission of the petition.
 * Full-scale intitiatives are binding mechanisms to compel the holding of a referendum on a particular proposal.
 * Full-scale intitiatives would have a petition threshold set at 1% of the number of enrolled electors at the Federal Election prior to the submission of the petition.
 * Citizens' initiatives should be permitted for enacting, amending, repealing or otherwise challenging legislation.
 * Specifics relating to citizens' initiatives would be dealt with by legislation.
 * Citizens' initiatives will be obliged to provide reasons for the petition and identify objectionable aims or provisions of the legislation if supporting a repeal.
 * Legislation repealed or rejected as a result of a citizens' initiative (or legislation that is similar) could not be re-enacted without the approval of a referendum unless the objectionable provisions or their effect have been removed.
 * The High Court of Australia will have power to determine whether legislation is the same or similar and whether or not the objectionable aspects remain.
 * To avoid excessive polling, referendums should be held at fixed intervals.
 * Unless there are three or greater successful full-scale initiatives, referendums should be held at the same time as Federal Elections.

Certain decisions to be reserved for Parliament


 * The decision to go to war should be vested exclusively in the Australian Parliament, not the Executive.
 * Executive power should be removed with regard to international legal instruments such as treaties and trade agreements.
 * The accession to and ratification of such instruments will be decided by Parliament.

Return to contents

Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and prohibition of racial discrimination
Although European colonisation of our country began in 1788, the Australian continent has been the home of indigenous societies and cultures for at least 40,000 years. However, numerous indigenous societies have faced virtual destruction as a consequence of discrimination, paternalism, genocide, as well as the introduction of diseases, substance abuse, slavery and dependency on the state. Families have been broken up, and discrimination in the criminal justice system has inflicted further harm on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and their societies. Moves to amend the travesties of the past have been positive. The High Court's decision in the Mabo v Queensland (No 2) overturned the doctrine of terra nullius that was used to dispossess Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. The Native Title Act 1993 (Cth) restored some land rights to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. The 2008 apology to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples was symbolic of a nation willing to make amends for the horrors of the past. However, more needs to be done before we can truly have reconciliation in Australia.

Efforts have been made to recognise the rights of indigenous peoples (particularly in relation to land) in places such as the United States, New Zealand, Canada, Malaysia and South Africa. The Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples draws attention to the recognition of indigenous inhabitants in Finland, Norway, Sweden, Greenland (Denmark), Russia, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and the Philippines, in addition to Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States. These efforts range from recognition by the courts to treaties and constitutional recognition.

The Australian Constitution does not recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as the original inhabitants of our country. It was drafted in an era of racial discrimination and the shadow on our constitution is undeniable. In particular Section 25 permits states to discriminate on the basis of race by disqualifying persons of that race from voting, and Section 51(xxvi) permits the Commonwealth Parliament to create laws for "the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws."

It is against this backdrop that the Pirate Party supports the recommendations of the Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples for a single referendum to repeal the 'race provisions' in the Australian Constitution (Sections 25 and 51(xxvi)), recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples as the original inhabitants and their languages as the original languages, and to include an explicit prohibition of racial discrimination. The Pirate Party agrees that, although there is still a long way to go, "constitutional recognition would provide a foundation to bring the 2.5 per cent [of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples] and the 97.5 per cent [of non-indigenous Australians] together, in a spirit of equality, recognition and respect, and contribute to a truly reconciled nation for the benefit of all Australians."

Support for the recommendations of the Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples


 * The Pirate Party supports a referendum as recommended by the Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples in order to:
 * Repeal Section 25 and Section 51(xxvi) of the Constitution.
 * Insert a new Section 51A recognising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and providing the Commonwealth Parliament with the power to make laws in the interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.
 * Insert a new Section 116A prohibiting racial discrimination.
 * Insert a new Section 127A recognising English as the national language and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages as the original Australian languages, a part of our national heritage.

Return to contents

=References=