Pirate Party saddened by Manning sentence

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Former US private first class Bradley Manning was today sentenced to 35 years imprisonment for his leaking of thousands of classified documents, including the infamous “Collateral Murder” video documenting the killing of civilians and reporters by US troops in Iraq. Manning will be dishonourably discharged and will lose all pay and allowances[1].

Pirate Party Australia wishes to extend its condolences to Mr Manning and his family, in what can only be described as a gross injustice.

“Whistleblowing is unfortunately one of the only ways to make politics and governance transparent,” said Queensland Pirate Party Senate candidate Melanie Thomas. “As governments worldwide become increasingly secretive it is apparent that whistleblowers are vital to keeping us informed of what our governments are doing as our representatives. Individuals like Bradley Manning should be applauded for their courage in revealing war crimes, rather than punished for revealing information that needs to be public.”

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Pirate Party encourages cultural participation, innovation and dissemination

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Pirate Party Australia offers an alternative to the cultural policies of both major parties and the approach advocated by Liberal Senator George Brandis in the Australian recently. The Party’s policy fosters a participatory cultural environment that promotes greater development and innovation, boosting community programs and outlets while reducing the restrictions copyright law places on our culture.

Contrary to Mr Brandis’ implied support of draconian copyright laws[1], the Pirate Party believes strongly in relaxing copyright to bring it more in line with contemporary needs and expectations. Rapid changes in technology, including affordability and access, have resulted in copyright law from the print era being erroenously applied to contexts where interactions with and uses of copyrighted material have changed.

“If we want people to respect copyright, we must have respectable copyright law,” said Brendan Molloy, Senate Candidate for NSW. “References made to the current state of copyright law by Senator Brandis are troubling in that legal restrictions that prevent artists building on previous works threaten the sustainable development of culture. When we lock culture up for nearly two centuries, we severely limit the ability for works to be reused in new contexts.”

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Pirate Party preferences announced

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Yesterday the Australia Electoral Commission published group voting tickets (GVT) for this year’s Senate election, indicating where parties have decided their preferences should flow. Pirate Party Australia is proud to announce that it has successfully completed this important stage of the election process.

In keeping with the Pirate Party’s committment to transparency and participatory democracy, this election the Pirate Party pioneered a form of preferencing unprecedented in Australian politics[1].

“Our approach had three phases. First, all parties were invited to provide our members with a message explaining why we should preference them. These were published publicly. Second, all members were asked to rank the parties according to how they should be preferenced. Finally, our members were asked whether any deals offered by other parties were acceptable,” said Simon Frew, President of Pirate Party Australia. “This made our preferences entirely democratic and transparent. Pirate Party Australia stands in a class of its own in this regard.”

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Preferencing Statement for Federal Election 2013

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Preferencing Process

Pirate Party Australia has completed its preferencing for its first federal 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, this election the Party pioneered a form of preferencing unprecedented in Australian politics.

All parties were invited to provide members of Pirate Party Australia with a statement explaining why they deserve preferences. These statements can be found on the wiki.

After publishing the statements publicly, the members of Pirate Party Australia ranked all 53 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 tackles Australia’s energy crisis

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Pirate Party Australia is pleased to announce its signature infrastructure project — a renewable energy rollout that aims to provide Australia with 100% reliance on renewable energy within 10 years[1].

The time when renewable energy was unaffordable, impractical, or technologically unachievable has passed. Renewable energy has evolved remarkably in the last few years. Technology has improved and become vastly cheaper, and credible organisations have produced costed, modeled and technologically sound blueprints for a full transition to renewable energy.

Australia’s leading renewable energy think tank, Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE), has developed a clean energy plan which features deployment of concentrated solar power (CSP) facilities supplemented with wind and biomass sources. CSP is already in use in Spain and the United States, and Australia is in a uniquely strong position to transition to solar energy due to its size and natural advantages.

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