Pirate Congress 2021/Minutes/2021-08-01

= Day 2: Sunday 1st of August =


 * Note: video for day 2 is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVTqEFWuq8Q

Councillor's Report (Fred Gerner) 10:18

 * What a year!
 * Fred's first involvement in politics
 * I ran for Councillor because I wanted to see things from the inside
 * Figured there'd be some more international involvement (Fred is from Sweden)
 * time zone difficulties as always
 * Biggest highlight getting Social Fridays going again
 * Slow start but it's taking off
 * "Island of sanity" and lots of fun - good disagreements
 * Went to a Progressive Tech meetup in Melbourne
 * They weren't so interested in us, but that might yet change
 * Miles comments on International Committee work:
 * Originally ~5 years ago to engage with PPI
 * Hoped to restart this past year, but it took a lower priority
 * Definitely interest, but we never appointed a full Officer to run the Committee
 * Much to gain with global networking

Motion to accept all the reports 10:24

 * Forgot to do this on Saturday morning and in any event, Fred only gave his on Sunday morning.

MOTION: accept the President's, Secretary's, Treasurer's and Councillor Reports en banc.

 * Put by: Alex Jago
 * Ayes: 8 (DK, FG, SO, AD, JB, JA, RW, BB, PS)
 * Abstain: 2 (AJ, MW)
 * Nays: 0
 * Motion carried 10:28 AEST.

Nominations 10:28

 * Congress has started and we don't have a DRC nomination
 * Miles proposes to temporarily suspend the Standing Orders to permit such a nomination


 * Miles also proposes to open up NC nominations too, but with those happening Literally Next, Alex is less keen. Miles acquisces.


 * Co-option of Dr Liam Pomfret (mid-term DRC) to be Returning Officer for the day


 * Miles relinquishes the CHAIR to Dr Liam Pomfret (10:52 AEST)


 * Speeches, then questions

Motion: Suspend 1.2 (1) of the Standing Orders to permit a Dispute Resolution Committee nomination from the floor

 * Put by: Miles Whiticker
 * Ayes 9 (JA, AD, DK, FG, JB, RW, MW, BB, AJ)
 * Abstain 1 (SO)
 * Motion carried 10:34 AEST

Andrew Downing 10:53

 * Has been PDO previously and contributed to a large number of policies
 * Particularly interested in economic and IP spaces
 * Nominated for both Councillor and PDO - unprecedented but OK
 * Andrew intends to personal-union the PDO into the NC
 * Reduce PDC isolation from the rest of the party

Andrew Downing

 * See PDO speech minutes

Fred Gerner 11:00

 * Hopes to expand social engagement internal and external
 * Reaching out to people who share our interests
 * Hope to do more worh with International Pirates
 * "Vote for Fred!"

David Kennedy 11:02

 * Long-term member, serving Councillor
 * Hope to do a bit more this year
 * "I consider myself a left-leaning libertarian"

Mitchell Curnoe 11:08

 * New to the party this year
 * Accounting qualifications
 * Drawn to the party for privacy rights, freedom of speech, IP/copyright policy
 * Concerned with corporate monopoly
 * Government as a tool of power distribution
 * Also a fan of how our UBI avoids poverty traps
 * "Having a smoother transition off welfare helps get poor and working classs people up into the middle class"

John August 11:14

 * Treasurer for this year
 * Not much has happened this year, but that's OK
 * Much credit to Mark G
 * Looking to continue in the position
 * Background in secular issues and intellectual property
 * Got that left-libertarian vibe: "mostly left but freaked out by the fringe"
 * "If you go back to Menzies, he was actually liberal, not what we have today"
 * "And there's a bit of me"

Roger Whatling 11:16

 * Joined after the 2019 election
 * Deregistration as a call-to-arms
 * Shout out to Fred and the Friday Night Crew
 * Looking to contribute where I can
 * Consulting and project-management background
 * Looking to contribute some more organisation and coordination skills
 * Supporting Miles, Alex and the rest of the crew

Brandon Selic [11:21]

 * Brandon has been since almost the beginning
 * Legal and Qld State coordinator
 * 2x candidate
 * Incumbent Vice President
 * "Strong working relationship with Miles and Alex, though they may disagree"
 * Looking to help with membership drive and work through our strong internal privacy policy
 * "I joined the party because I was dissatisfied with existing politics, even more so recently!"

Alex Jago [11:24]

 * "Hi, I'm Alex"
 * Incumbent Secretary for the last three years
 * If you've been around for the last three years, you know what I do
 * "My biggest goal remains to be replaced by someone who is better than me at being Secretary"
 * Our big challenge this year is re-rego and then fighting an election
 * "And that's what must be done"
 * Infrastructural work also a goal for this year
 * Hope to stand the Programming Team back up and upgrade a bunch of our custom IT infrastructure
 * "I see us in a better position this year; the trajectory is up!"

Miles Whiticker 11:30

 * Hello World!
 * This will be my fourth term as President in 2021-22. It feels longer. So much has changed.
 * Personally and professionally what I do isn't super relevant to politics, I just have a wide range of interests
 * Recently, I've been getting into more organisational and activism things
 * Historically, I have run for the party and served as the face of the party on a bunch of media
 * I'd love to take a less front-facing role, but responsibility flows upwards - to the NC and to me.
 * The area I've put the most time into has been our digital outreach strategy and trying to solve member attrition
 * Three key words: Engagement, Recruiting, Promotion
 * In Andrew's nomination speech he talked about bringing the PDO into National Council - good idea
 * I commented that we need an International Officer, and that should be an NC member's portfolio item
 * Effectively, giving Councillors portfolios
 * This contrasts with the model we've been running on with Councillors as apprentices
 * Echoing Roger, there are places in the party where we can improve organisation by introducing chains of responsibility
 * In the early days of the party we had heaps of engagement and committees - less now, we need to make it work in the current conditions
 * So once we start thriving, what then? Start improving quality. Explore more niches.
 * We critically need more external communications capacity - stuff like the Online Safety Bill, we didn't make a submission on
 * In conclusion we have a critical niche in Australian politics. We're people who are economically left but unsatisfied with the mainstream parties
 * There are people we can reach out to who would never think to join us on their own
 * In particular we have to reach out to people outside the tech bubble
 * So I'm eager to continue as President and as always I like to encourage competition there. I'd be happy to drop down to a lower-level role and really specialise, but this isn't the year.

Dispute Resolution Committee (1)

 * No nominations at the start of the day
 * Sean O'Farrell indicates willingness to nominate at 12:40 AEST.

Questions following Nominations

 * Miles to other candidates: "Some of you mentioned a topic area of interest..."
 * Roger: My initial interest before the party was the environment - I wanted an ecologically aware party that _wasn't_ the Greens. From there I got into economic discussions. I'm very keen to work on both of those.
 * Andrew sees huge global changes coming economically. When the old systems fall apart, pirates step in.
 * Mitchell: I'm really glad to be representing a step up in terms of accounting background. I'm probably different to many others here - in contrast to being a disaffected leftist, I'm a bit more of a disaffected Liberal who's frustrated with their crony corporatism. The breaking point was probably Big Tech vs Big Media - they should've seen it as citizens vs tech.
 * John: I have numerous topics I take an interest in: economics, land, UBI, IP and repair rights. Bureaucracy and rent-seeking. I concur with Mitchell - the Liberals are too concerned with the big end of town. I'm also not happy with the hypocrisy in Australian foreign policy - Timor, West Papua, Julian Assange...
 * Fred: last year I was more tech focused - but over the year I've been more interested in going back to the roots. I'd say my passion lies in the social bits; forming crews and getting people to become local leaders. Take care of people and they will take care of you.
 * Alex: It all goes back to digital rights - I'm not alone when I say that Cory Doctorow radicalised me.
 * Brandon: I was probably the first lawyer to join the Party, previously on the Legal Committee for this reason. Also interested in environmental policy, and in relation to the pandemic, something about an Australian CDC and better quarantine provisions - let's do better than Labor. I was already radicalised from a young age and with the Democrats going down I jumped over. I'm one of those who think that we firmly need to clarify our 18C policy.
 * David: As a career software developer I was naturally first attracted to the party for digital rights back in the DRM age, like many I've taken a bigger interest in economic policy - corporate BS, UBI, etc. It's critical that working and lower middle class people can advance


 * Sean O: What are the plans for recruitment and outreach beyond a single degree of separation?
 * John: I have a community radio show - everyone who's known me for 5 minutes knows this - I don't know what the reach figures are, but they're hopefully nonzero. You have to have a point zero for the spread of anything, I suppose. We have to take our ideas and present them to outsiders.
 * Roger: I think Miles is on to a good start and I think we have to continue that. The small speeches and digital work around existing policy to make it more accessible and consumable. These are areas we can create organic exposure. We have to work to make the party relevant to people who aren't motivated by our core topics. Post COVID it's necessary to get more boots on the ground too
 * Alex: I think we can do more with merch, stickers and posters; not necessarily overtly for the party, but primarily as agitprop for Free Culture and for Basic Income
 * Mitchell: we might be able to do stuff with sponsorships, but that's complicated
 * Brandon: I'm in central Qld now, so recruitment is challenging. I think our online stuff is working. I'd like to see more on our YouTube channel - John is a good start - and a monthly podcast.
 * Fred: We have early plans to stream Social Fridays to Twitch and elsewhere - I think that will help too.
 * Andrew: as I recall, Fred mentioned that every second Friday, we should do joint discussions with other groups and cross-pollinate - this builds depth into explaining what we're about
 * David: I've had success with recruiting friends from within tech - second tier connections are a challenge but I think we have good ideas
 * Miles: I talked earlier about campaigning strategies other parties use - I want to emphasise a hack the Greens use with their FB events and using the FB algorithm to promote it. At the end of the day it's about creating content and sharing it. We've had a number of policy talks, which are interesting for the people who care about them - but not everyone does. Important != popular. People in IT circles have probably heard of us. So our recuiting grounds now are people outside of IT. Let's create content on those and share it. We need more graphic designers - shout out to Alex for picking that up. We need more social media in general, custom memes and branding. People have to want to engage with our content and interactivity is very useful.
 * Liam: yes, there is a need for more policy development and communications. "What do you do in a pandemic" isn't really something that we've had to think about before, but heading into an election... and of course from a privacy perspective there's plenty to talk about there.
 * Comment from Sean - it's not name recognition, it's about knowing more about us than the name
 * Roger: yes, there's an education process - ensuring that people who've heard of us know what we stand for
 * Liam: yes, sometimes I wonder if it would be helpful to lean into pirate mythology a bit more - pirates as having internal democracy

Elections 12:35 -12:45

 * Miles Whiticker accepts nomination to President.
 * Brandon Selic accepts nomination as Deputy President.
 * Alex Jago accepts nomination to Secretary.
 * Roger Whatling accepts nomination to Deputy Secretary.
 * John August accepts nomination to Treasurer.
 * Mitchell Curnoe accepts nomination to Deputy Treasurer.
 * Andrew Downing accepts nomination to Councillor.
 * Fred Gerner accepts nomination to Councillor.
 * Andrew Downing accepts nomination to Councillor.

MOTION: adjourn for lunch 12:41

 * Put By: Liam Pomfret
 * Carried unanimously
 * Break for lunch from 12:45

Election cont. 13:50 - 14:03

 * Liam Pomfret declares all positions filled without requiring further voting. (14:00 AEST).
 * Miles Whiticker resumes the CHAIR.

Sean O'Farrell 13:57

 * Sean nominates from the floor over lunch
 * Sean O'Farrell accepts his nomination to Dispute Resolution Committee.

Guest presentation - Andrew Downing 14:05
"Talking about Money"


 * We have policies on Basic Income, Land Value Tax and a bit of cryptocurrency, but it's not super clear what our economic basic actually is
 * Particular concerns about the environment and affordability
 * Money is a technology to communicate value
 * Value is time, times, effort, times technology
 * hence post-scarcity with increasing tech
 * have to understand that value is subjective
 * Inflation or deflation as mismatch between currency and value
 * With us on a sharp tech ramp, the value of your future time should be much greater than it is today
 * Inflation effectively steals this from us
 * Note the difference between inflation and CPI
 * Mostly what we have had over the last few decades is asset inflation - land, shares, commodities
 * but consumer goods have held steady, so "the cost of living hasn't gone up"
 * House loans have gone from 2x annual salary to 6x annual salary over the last 30 years
 * Tech impacts also feature a punctuated equilibrium
 * Gains compound - currently seeing information and energy revolutions
 * Technology is naturally deflationary: getting more for less
 * But our monetary system inherently wants to be inflationary
 * (There are reasons for this, small positive inflation rates push investment)
 * Every industry today is seeing an automation revolution driven by computing
 * So what happens? Why is your house price going through the roof?
 * Deflationary technology, but we want inflation, so the money printer goes brrrr
 * More money chasing not enough assets
 * It's never been easier to lend but the banks actually don't want to lend right now!
 * People who have planned for moderate positive interest rates are having a bad time rn
 * All this money chasing not enough assets == NASDAQ blowing up post-Recession
 * Governments, of course, can take advantage of this - it's never been cheaper to borrow
 * But if interest rates rise, western governments are in a bit of a bind too
 * And so where the US goes, Australia must follow - we're too closely bound by international trade
 * Red Queen's Race
 * So the big trouble is that asset price inflation feeds wealth disparities.
 * History rhymes: currency wars -> tarriff wars -> actual wars. But now we have atomic weapons.
 * So effectively, fiat currency requires infinite growth. This seems incompatible with environmentalism, certainly with a finite world.
 * Need an economic model that doesn't require forever growth
 * An approach many countries are moving towards is a central bank digital currency. This solves the "commercial banks won't lend enough" problem but little else. And it's an incredibly powerful tool for repression - BasicsCard for the entire country. So the PRC is doing it already and tying it to social credit scores...
 * still fiat based, inflationary, etc
 * The trouble is that every central bank that doesn't do this will lose to those who do
 * So what do we need?
 * Decentralisation
 * Deflationary
 * Programmable and open source
 * Permissionless innovation
 * Privacy or identity as required
 * Global
 * Efficiency, not "forever growth"
 * Taxing resources, not arbitrary proxies

So that's the sort of thing I want to work on as PDO this year. We have a choice between the Star Trek future (post-scarcity), or the Star Wars future (inequality on a galactic scale).

Q+A


 * What if we put that NASDAQ graph on a log scale?
 * Still a thing. E.g. Apple didn't do anything in the past year to literally double the value of the company... but that's exactly what their market cap suggests.
 * Memecoins a recognition that price signals are completely distorted
 * Thoughts on how crypto seems to swap inflation for computational difficulty?
 * That's for proof-of-work more so than proof-of-stake -- compare gold, the traditional store of value. It's scarce and takes a lot of work to acquire. Consider Bitcoin as digital gold.
 * Compare Ethereum heading towards proof-of-stake. It's a short-term thing and therefore probably less trustworthy - less skin in the game.
 * We need a solid long-term store of value to properly trade with the future.
 * Alex and Andrew have a back and forth about L1 vs L2 networks: actual Bitcoin as settlement layer, most transactions on a Layer 2 network.
 * Overall, Andrew sees a move towards relying purely on exclusivity/resource/consumption/pollution taxes.

MOTION: adjourn for a 10 minute break 14:57

 * Put by: Miles Whiticker
 * Ayes 10 (MW DK Morphs MR AJ RW BB FG AD PS)
 * Abstain 1 (JB)
 * Nays 0
 * Congress to resume at 15:11

PM-5 Freedom of Speech update 2 15:11

 * Sean O'Farrell speaks to his motion.
 * We have a section in our speech policy labelled "remove counter-productive restrictions on freedom of speech"
 * this is a little out of date in that it doesn't include the more recent laws
 * What I propose to repeal prohibits a number of things, some of which are already prohibited.
 * Intimate violence was already prohibited, but this law re-prohibits it
 * This law is largely a response to the Christchurch shootings, where the perpetrator livestreamed his actions
 * However, the approach has problems. One of the cases the law prohibits is "engagement in a terrorist act"
 * The ALRC notes that this is a very vague and arbitrary distinction; violence is used in pursuit of political aims by governments. It only becomes terrorism when our government takes a side against it.
 * So coverage of civil wars has issues. There's an example of a separatist group in Ethiopia - de facto terrorists under Australian law. Under this law, the government remains free to put out whatever
 * Another issue is the treatment of murder. I worry that this law may make it illegal to share footage proving that you killed someone in self-defence
 * Then we get to the impact on police and bodycam footage. It may be illegal to publish footage showing the camera wearer was committing police brutality
 * Sean reiterates that distributing footage of sexual violence or torture are already prohibited under existing law.
 * As for children - we have content warnings and parental involvement for a reason.
 * Question from Fred, Sean re-iterates that this applies to publishing stuff, not using it in court
 * Nonetheless there are cases here where it's not about a courtroom, but in the public
 * There are cases where you can't tell if the filmer was "involved" or not, and the precautionary principle means it will be taken down, as there's no penalty for takedown
 * John posits that this is going to draw a bunch of backlash, and that there are public interest carveouts
 * Sean: the carveouts apply to journalists-as-a-job-title
 * Nobody is going to read this with preconceived notions (like on 18C, where we get conflated with Cory Bernardi)
 * comment from JedB: if we get our Constitutional freedom of speech then pretty much all the laws we want to strike down would be.
 * Comment from Sean: "I wish I'd been told about the Online Safety Bill before today - it'd be in here too!"

MOTION: advance PM-5 15:42

 * Put by: Sean Farrell
 * Ayes 9 (SO AD Morphs Ash MR JB PS FG BB)
 * Abstains 3 (MW DK RW)
 * Nays 1 (JA)
 * Motion CARRIED 15:44 AEST; PM-5 proceeds

PM-4 Freedom of Speech position statement

 * JedB suggests that overnight changes to PM-4 overstep the spirit of the standing orders regarding large modifications
 * Some discussion and clarification of positions


 * John reverts to back his original PM-4, but puts a motion to "replace"
 * Alex takes this as an edit to get the appropriate punnet square of options with 3B

MOTION: adopt PM-4 as a replacement position statement

 * Put by: John August
 * Ayes (SO JA DK MR BB FG Morphs AJ MW)
 * Abstain 1 (Ash)
 * Nay

Procedural motion: extend Congress until 17:15 AEST

 * Put by: Miles Whiticker
 * Carried without dissent

Strategy Discussion

 * John: the major challenge is of course to get re-registered
 * Miles concluded that phone banking wasn't achievable within our eventual timeline but we can restart it
 * Alex comments that running as independents is actually harder than getting re-registered
 * Facebook is actually kinda working
 * John: we're doing a bunch of things - let's do them! Just as long as we don't conflict.
 * Sean maintains that we need to start looking at 2+ degrees of separation marketing
 * Alex to oversee Roger, Mitchell and Satch for merch efforts
 * John emphasises that external speakers attract interest
 * Gotta get them in with things they support
 * Sean suggests Naomi Brockwell as a personality
 * Appearances on generally popular shows is a method used since forever

Roger wrote a document as part of his nomination.,,
 * https://pirateparty.org.au/w/images/c/c1/Rebuilding_Pirates_-_an_Opportunity.pdf
 * Not everything here is doable right away, but can advance the conversation
 * "Glad that everyone is keen on merch"
 * "Have a plan" - what would we do first if we suddenly were running the country? What's the most important things? Liberties, IP, UBI
 * "Would it be worthwhile as an activity by the party to select 2-3 headline non-techy policies? UBI and 1-2 others.
 * "Have a policy on ABC, go talk to related group about it
 * John: in my experience as a candidate, people will go policy shopping on one crucial element - it's waste of time trying to out-green the Greens
 * AndrewD: on the flip side, when it comes to our core issues like privacy, we smash everyone else on the matrices
 * Do more internal engagement
 * fix the email lists issues
 * weekly "we're doing XYZ this week, wanna help?"
 * Local chapters and in-person meetups
 * Necessary for election logistics and similar. We'll only really succeed when we figure it out - Alex
 * Free pizza - Jed
 * "Well, within a budget..." - Miles
 * Party has a long and failed history of meetups, whatever we've tried has often failed due to lack of critical mass
 * This is a big reason why Miles is online now.
 * Go start some (verbal) fights
 * Young Pirates
 * Be Seen
 * (this is merch)
 * Engage Experts

Fred: we'll know we've hit critical mass when we have to split Social by topics

Some discussion of the Secretarial information bottleneck - turns out that privacy is hard for putting people in contact with each other.

Also people don't read/respond to emails. It's a problem.

Alex calls for people to get hacking on MemberDB - several things are a feature there.

Mailouts:


 * Miles notes that mailouts are expensive. $25000/suburb.
 * David says he's talking about self-print, self-drops
 * Party infra is actually almost ready to support this
 * Sean is actually talking about mailouts to members - still not cheap

Next Congress Location

 * Miles proposes online again, unless someone would like to host. Especially with Covid as a continuing risk.
 * General agreement.

MOTION: hold National Congress 2022 online 17:17

 * Put by: Miles Whiticker
 * Carried without dissent (17:21 AEST)

MOTION: end this Congress 17:21

 * Put by: Miles Whiticker
 * Carried unanimously (17:25 AEST)