Position Statements

Position Statements are policies that either cut across and combine many aspects of the main platform, or apply Pirate principles to a specific issue.

Statement
Pirate Party Australia encourages the maximisation of political participation. As part of the global movement that is well known for its interest in the concept of liquid democracy, Pirate Party Australia has strived to investigate new means of political participation. We are one of the few political parties in Australia that provides for the remote participation of members and online voting. We intend to seize the opportunities that modern communication technologies provide to change the nature of politics.

However, while the Internet particularly is opening up new methods of participation, Pirate Party Australia and other minor parties like ours exist because their members do not feel existing parties adequately represent our interests and views in Parliament. To rectify this, we and other parties contest elections. This aim is stated in our constitution.

In 2013, both houses of the Federal Parliament passed a bill amending the Electoral Act 1918 (Cth). Among other innocuous changes, the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Improving Electoral Procedure) Bill 2012 included an amendment to the Electoral Act that doubled the nomination deposit for contesting elections. As a result, the fee per Senate candidate is $2000, while the House of Representatives is $1000, coming to a combined cost of more than $300,000 to contest every electorate and run full Senate tickets nationwide.

Pirate Party Australia views this as a serious affront to democracy. This is a deliberate stacking of future elections in favour of incumbent parties, and deprives Australians — both electors and candidates — of true democratic participation and fulfilment. This places an unfair burden on parties and candidates that do not have the same membership numbers and corporate sponsorship that well established parties enjoy. This is not conducive to a multi-party democracy, and directly effects our ability to reverse the poor decisions of previous Parliaments.

It was unthinkable that Parliament would pass such exclusionary measures, but now that Pirate Party Australia has been confronted with this change, there is concern that future Parliaments may continue the trend of discouraging alternative representatives.

In response to this, Pirate Party Australia pledges to do all it can to restore candidate fees to a reasonable level, and to oppose legislation that would introduce unfair restrictions on candidates. The Party also supports a referendum to include protection against onerous or excessive requirements on candidates standing for election to the Federal Parliament in the Australian Constitution, similar to that which appears in the Canadian Constitution. In Figueroa v Canada (Attorney General), it was ruled that several sections of the Canada Elections Act were unconstitutional as they violated section 3 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which protects the right to play a meaningful role in the electoral process.

Pirate Party Australia recognises the need for similar protections in Australia.

Statement
The issues affecting transgender and intersex persons, cut a narrow swath across a large number of Pirate Party Australia policy areas. These issues are frequent sources of public enquiry. This policy statement outlines the concerns, followed by a cross reference to related inclusions in other policy statements.

The diversity of and within gender is still little understood and accepted in wider society, which can cause all sorts of problems. Social, bureaucratic and possible medical challenges of transitioning from the gender one is assigned to at birth to the gender one identifies with are exacerbated by prejudice and discrimination in most levels of society, even family and close friends. As a consequence, the issues transgender people face are much like those that gay population were and are still facing: being beaten, thrown out of home, losing work and many other issues. The prevalence of male to female transsexualism is estimated to be in the range of 1:250 to 1:200, in the general population

Being transgender isn't just a case of feeling attracted to what society deems the wrong gender, it is people assuming from your birth that you are something other than you, some people feel for a long time "Something isn't right, but I don't know what" and some people go along the lines of "I wish I was a girl/boy/different gender" then finding out either sooner or later it is possible. Trying to differ from what society has deemed your gender at birth to be, causes momentous challenges for people in such situations.

One of the first question asked when a baby is born is whether it's a boy or girl. One of two answers is usually given, based on physical appearance; male or female. The newborn is assigned a sex, which is consequently formalised in the official identity documents of the newborn. This predominant culture of categorising newborns into one of two sexes, with their associated genders, can cause several issues in a person's life.

Gender Divergence
Some people realise sooner or later that they don't identify with the gender associated with the sex assigned to them at birth, i.e. if their gender 'diverges' from their assigned sex. These transgender (or transsexual, non-binary, agender,...) people suffer from being put into a metaphorical box they don't belong in by society, which can cause psychological issues from an early age. When they decide to transition to another gender to show their true or newly found identity, they often face discrimination and violence even by those closest to them.

While it would by far not solve all issues for intersexed and transgender people, removing the requirement for an assigned sex would benefit many people in society. The shift needs to be more than just a formality though. There needs to be a shift in how gender is understood: differentiated in people's understanding from a person's sex. At the same time, understanding of both sex and gender needs to be expanded from a strict binary, both medically and in wider society. People need to be able to have their legally-recognised gender changed without sexual-reassignment-surgery as a mandatory prerequisite once it is decided that you are suffering gender dysphoria, surgeries are no longer elective (ie, will be covered by Medicare).

Intersex Conditions
Some people are born intersexed. This often means that they have primary sex characteristics from both the male and female sexes or other sex traits which may appear to stem from either end of the sex spectrum. Some intersex conditions are discovered soon after birth, while others might take years to discover. In either case, 'corrective' surgery may be proposed and secrecy of the condition is frequently recommended. It is our view that medical interventions of conditions which do not harm a person's health should be outlawed until the person with the condition is of an age where they can consent to the procedure. People born intersexed should not be made to feel ashamed of their condition.

References to Policy Text covering Transgender and Intersex issues

 * Support constitutional recognition of the equality of gender- and sex-diverse people.
 * Abolish patents on pharmaceutical drugs, which will dramatically reduce the cost of perpetually overpriced drugs that may be a lifelong requirement for transgender people. "
 * Implement fair and respectful processing of asylum seekers fleeing oppression for their gender, sex or orientation.
 * Reform the prison system to include diverse gender-appropriate prison assignment and hormone replacement therapy continuation.
 * Remove legal definitions of "marriage" and recognise the civil union of any two persons.
 * Improve the treatment of transgender persons in the public health system.
 * Endorse and extend the Safe Schools programme.
 * Simplify the process of changing gender in official identification documents.

Statement
The Pirate Party notes with concern the excessive growth in bureaucracy and rent-seeking, at the same time as we note the worthwhile possibilities for government involvement in the economy. Because of political polarisation, neither major party engages with these realities. Government funding is "cut back" as the result of party agendas, without any sense of perspective on what effective bureaucracies would in fact look like, resulting in both a chaotic outcome that does not improve the situation and further opens the way up for rent-seeking individuals and corporations.

Supposed "user pays" reforms often really mean openings for rent-seeking individuals and corporations - resulting in a net transfer of wealth to the privileged and connected.

Current trends in health and education point to an administration whose costs exceed their savings. Both our existing policy and the press have outlined wasteful "top end" bureaucrats in universities. Our Health policy also notes rent-seeking issues in that sector.

Prompted by problems with Dr Jayant Patel, the Queensland Public Hospitals Commission of Inquiry revealed many problems with bureaucracy. Some problems were unique to Queensland, but others would be expected to reveal themselves in similar bureaucracies elsewhere in Australia. The health bureaucracy allocated resources inefficiently, telling clinicians what to do rather than listening to them. One example was to set up a small orthopaedic unit in Hervey Bay Hospital, which was too small to be effective. It would have been better to do fewer things well, but there was a political goal of setting up vote-winning "satellite facilities" which actually made the whole health system deliver worse outcomes for the same dollars. To some degree this was political; but other examples were also a function of bureaucrats not listening to clinicians.

The bureaucracy seemed to be more concerned about embarrassment than patient health. For all that, they were ineffective in responding to concerns about Dr. Patel. Certainly, there were broader budgetary concerns which were covered up by Government propaganda, and perverse incentives around "efficiency dividends" prompting the prioritisation of some services at the expense of others, but onerous bureaucracy had an important part to play too.

This is noted in the whole report, but particularly Chapter 6 parts b, e and f. We also note that many health initiatives are seized upon by private interests, who seek to take advantage of the opportunity and over-service - in fact, rent-seek - as compared to the original initiative, which was only meant to make a difference for those who were in most need of it without an excessive impact on the budget.

Many situations can be viewed from a rent-seeking lens. One view of rent-seeking is that privileged parties set up a difficult situation, and then charge people extra to escape from the situation they have set up. Tolled infrastructure and water rights are both vulnerable to this.

The appearance of rent-seeking can be avoided with transparency in contracts. We assert that if a financial approach cannot be readily explained to the general voter, it should be replaced with one that can be. It is not just a case of transparency - but also of maintaining clarity. This noted in our Transport and our Transparency policies.

The Commonwealth Employment Service, for all the criticism in its time, has been replaced with a plethora of rent-seeking companies that between them provide a less effective service than the CES did. Anecdotally, employees of the CES saw over 20 clients a day and placed more than half in jobs. Now, there are stories of companies being paid more to interview a client than that client gets paid in a week, and encouraging people to become long-term unemployed as the companies get paid additional bonuses for placing such clients. The incentives are wrong. It is for this reason that we support restoring the CES.

A related problem is government departments outsourcing their work base from employees to contractors, and ultimately costing more, even though the original goal of such initiatives was to save money. The point is that problems with bureaucracy and structures are real and significant, and are ignored by both major political parties. This is more surprising for the Liberal Party, but in fact rather than engaging with the details, they engage in a theatre of ideology, letting significant problems grow and fester regardless of their rhetoric. Certainly, there is also a problem with the Labor Party having a naive view of the possibilities for government involvement. There are real and substantial benefits from government involvement in our economy, but we all need to keep our eyes on the ball.

The rent-seeking spotlight can be put on many things. It is the reason we see less shared wealth between all of us, but because it is not obvious, those abusing it can readily take advantage of it, and the rest of us struggle to appreciate what is going on. We have developed a sense of unease about the part of Government, bureaucracy and administration of the last few decades. While it is hard for us to put a finger on that unease, we feel that these trends in the background are an important contribution.

Statement
Pirate Party Australia acknowledges that the modern political debate on free speech in Australia is fraught by tribalism and misunderstanding. We consider free speech to be an important principle, but also acknowledge that speech can be used to cause forms of harm particularly to vulnerable members of the Australian or international community. Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Commonwealth) is one area of the law that has provoked considerable debate in Australia with regards to free speech and hate speech.

For a number of years it has been party policy to repeal section 18C in order to defend free speech more broadly in Australia, conditional on existing common law protections being sufficient to prevent hate speech and discrimination. A position taken by electoral candidates for the Party from 2012-2019 (see campaign statements made by Brandon Selic, Sara Joyce, Miles Whiticker et al) has been that existing protections are insufficient, thus the unofficial party position prior to 2020 has been that Section 18C is currently doing more good than harm. The specific portion of Section 18C that we consider to be censorious overreach are the words "offend" and "insult".

Our policy platform states "Pirate Party Australia does not believe that regulating opinions is a legitimate function of the state". Despite this we hold a growing recognition that certain opinions can come to cause harm, and that a principled defence of free speech should exclude forms of speech which induce violence or harm.

Thus any future policy of Pirate Party Australia, whilst carefully guarding against overreach into the political theatre of "regulating opinions", should also specifically acknowledge that advocacy for violence or harm cannot be considered "free" speech, as it comes with the cost of reducing the "freedom" of the victims. None of us can be free until all of us are free.

= Repealed =

No Position Statements have yet been repealed.