Preferencing Statement for WA Senate Election 2014

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Preferencing Process

Pirate Party Australia has completed its preferencing for the 2014 WA Senate election. All group voting tickets (GVT) have been published on the Australian Electoral Commission’s website.

In keeping with the Pirate Party’s commitment to transparency and participatory democracy, last election the Party pioneered a form of preferencing unprecedented in Australian politics. We continued to use that process for this election.

After publishing the statements publicly, the members of Pirate Party Australia ranked all 56 registered parties according to how they should be preferenced.

A rundown of the process is as follows:

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

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

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Pirate Party renews call for international open and free Internet agreement

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Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, has recently called for the development of an “Internet Users’ Bill of Rights” as part of the “web we want” campaign[1]. Against this backdrop, Pirate Party Australia renews its calls for a global treaty to enshrine net neutrality, freedom from state control, and protection for private communication, free expression and unrestricted access to information[2]. In 2012 the United Nations Human Rights Council effectively declared that Internet access should be a human right, and that the same rights that people take for granted offline must be also enshrined online[3].

“Many of the rights we take for granted are being violated online because the Internet is still be treated as a dark and scary place,” said Fletcher Boyd, lead candidate for the Senate in WA. “The approach taken by governments and intelligence agencies is fundamentally misguided. The Internet is not separate to society, it is a key part of how our society functions. Our rights must be respected online just as much as they are offline.”

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Pirate Party successfully crowdfunds election campaign

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Yesterday Pirate Party Australia met its campaign funding target of $10,000 entirely through crowdfunding, in preparation for the WA Senate election on 5 April.

Following the announcement that fresh elections would be taking place, the Pirate Party launched the fundraiser using Pozible, a crowdfunding website similar to Kickstarter, and has reached the $10,000 goal in just under two weeks. Supporters of the Pirate Party are still able to contribute to the fundraiser via Pozible, and all money will go directly towards purchasing campaign materials for the election.

“This is a fantastic show of support for Pirate Party Australia,” said Fletcher Boyd, lead candidate for the Senate in WA. “We are very thankful to our supporters for providing us with the funds to seriously give this election a go. Despite lacking wealthy sponsors, celebrity candidates, or a massive membership base, we have an enormous amount of grassroots enthusiasm as demonstrated by how quickly we were able to reach our goal.”

The Pirate Party would like to thank all those who contributed, especially those who contributed more than $250 to the campaign — Mitchell Carr, Adam Thomas, Matthew Schmidt, Dennis Au, Georg Sinn and Mark Walkom.

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Pirate Party Announces Candidates for WA Senate Election

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Pirate Party Australia is pleased to announce that it will contest the Western Australian Senate Election on 5 April, 2014, and has completed preselection of its candidates. Western Australian members of the Pirate Party voted to field Fletcher Boyd and Michelle Allen, in that order.

“2014 is the year Western Australia can take a stand,” said Fletcher Boyd, lead candidate for Pirate Party Australia. “This election offers our state the opportunity to say ‘no’ to the human rights violations being committed in our name. To say ‘no’ to reactionary legislation designed to placate, and not to solve. To vote instead for policies based on scientific evidence, dedication to transparency, and protection of human rights.”

“Pirate Party Australia offers Western Australians a chance to take this stand. As a candidate I will uphold the Pirate Party’s beliefs in equality and freedom, beliefs the majority of our politicians do not seem to share.”

The Pirate Party’s policies cover a broad range of issues. Apart from the Party’s core policies of intellectual property reform, protection of personal privacy, increased governmental transparency, and opposition to censorship, the Party has developed policies on asylum seekers and refugees, energy, the environment, welfare, taxation and foreign affairs[1]. Pirate Party Australia supports a fibre-to-the-premises broadband network[2] and the introduction of an Australian Bill of Rights[3].

The Party is yet to decide its preference allocations, but will be using the same democratic process it pioneered at the Federal Election in September 2013[4]. In accordance with this process, all members from Western Australia will vote to determine the order in which the Pirate Party’s preference are to be distributed. This will include any preference swapping arrangements proposed by other parties.

In order to raise funds to contest this election, including the $2,000 nomination deposits required for each candidate, the Pirate Party has turned to crowdfunding for its election campaign. More than $7,000 of the $10,000 target has been met in just over a week[5].

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Planned responses to piracy are “overkill” says Pirate Party

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Pirate Party Australia opposes the push from Attorney-General George Brandis to coerce Internet service providers into becoming copyright police[1]. Threats to take legislative action to institute a graduated response (“three strikes”) regime and website blocking will be ineffective to curb illegal file-sharing of copyrighted material and are an unnecessary, reactionary measure.

“Creating a censorship regime and cutting people off from the Internet are non-solutions which are attempting to solve a problem that does not exist,” said Simon Frew, President of Pirate Party Australia. “Censorship is overkill, and graduated response regimes have been shown to be totally ineffective in practice — last year France dropped its controversial HADOPI scheme, and a recent study by Rebecca Giblin from Monash University’s Faculty of Law indicates that graduated responses are neither successful or effective, and that the future of such schemes should be reconsidered[2]. For the Attorney-General to suggest this as a way forward is absurd and flies in the face of available evidence, as per usual.

“In his opening address at the Australian Digital Alliance Forum this February the Attorney-General cited the Great Gatsby as an example of why we need to protect the Australian film industry from file-sharing[3]. He claimed that piracy is putting content creation at risk. If this were the case, the Great Gatsby would not have made more than double its production budget at the box office alone[4]. The film industry does not appear to be suffering from file-sharing, despite their claims, considering 2013 was the biggest year for box office takings in history, and broke the record which was set only the previous year[5].”

Evidence suggests a large proportion of illegal file-sharing is actually driven by lack of access in markets like Australia, and that it is possible to compete against piracy if you’re willing to adapt your business models[6]. Consumers who cannot access content in a timely, affordable and convenient manner are more likely to turn to piracy as an alternative. Panellists at the Australian Digital Alliance Forum representing Google, Ericsson, and InternetNZ all pointed out that markets with easily accessible content are likely to see a much lower proportion of consumers relying on file-sharing for their content.

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