Pirate Party Australia accepts PM Morrison’s “Declaration of War”

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In a world leading move, Prime Minister Scott Morrison has again declared his intent to crack down on human rights in Australia, by announcing restrictions to online anonymity1. Privacy is a fundamental right of free and open democracies, so the Pirate Party has defended privacy in Australia since its inception in 2008. This is despite the fashionable excuse to look tough on socially unacceptable trends, the latest of which is online trolling. But the Prime Minister’s falling polls are simply not a good enough excuse. Privacy is an essential underpinning of human dignity, encompassing the freedom to control your cultural presence, and manage your own identity. A free and trusting society cannot exist without the protection of an individual’s private life.2

“While back benchers set up anonymous profiles to undermine their critics, the Government points the fingers at others doing similar. Of course, it’s fine when the Government does something dodgy – it’s only wrong when others do it,” said Pirate Party justice spokesperson Brandon Selic.

The Pirate Party stands with the approximately 26 million Australians who do not have access to parliamentary privilege and maintain a right to anonymity in the face of so called “SLAPP” lawsuits designed to discourage public criticism of government figures. This is especially notable given Minister for Immigration Peter Dutton’s recent defamation suit against refugee advocate Shane Bazzi.3

Despite vagueness of the announcement, these new powers are likely only to be enacted through civil court cases, meaning it is out of reach for any Australians without the time, energy or financial resources to pursue. Communications experts claim this will not help 99% of victims of trolling in Australia.4,5 Even advocates for ending online abuse are claiming the measures will be ineffective, such as non-profit Reset Australia.6

“The right to criticise governments and elected representatives is a necessary freedom in any democracy. Increasingly restrictive legislation and the threat of legal action have a very chilling effect on free speech by suppressing the opinions of ordinary Australians and concentrating the control of public discourse to a small number of media organisations and online social platforms, ” said Pirate Party civil liberties spokesperson David Kennedy.

So the Pirate Party accepts Scott Morrison’s war against human rights, on behalf of ordinary Australians who understand that to the failing Liberal-National government, “criticism” and “bullying” are indistinguishable. Twitter user @marleyhodgman put it best: “It is, of course, not designed to prevent online bullying. It’s designed to enable offline bullying, by the Duttons of the world.”7

References and further reading:

1: https://www.pm.gov.au/media/combatting-online-trolls-and-strengthening-defamation-laws

2: https://pirateparty.org.au/wiki/Platform#Privacy

3: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-10-06/peter-dutton-defamation-case-against-refugee-advocate/100517922

4: https://www.businessinsider.com.au/federal-government-social-media-big-tech-crackdown-trolls-defamation-law

5: https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/morrison-s-war-on-trolls-offers-a-tantalising-future-20211129-p59d6i.html

6: https://au.reset.tech/news/troll-hunting-isn-t-solution-to-social-media-s-hate-problem/

7: https://twitter.com/marleyhodgman/status/1465403511810637824

ENC ’21: Ballots are on their way!

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Hi Pirates,

We concluded our emergency National Congress this morning!

If you’re a full member, you should have received (or be about to receive) two emails from our voting system. These will let you vote in the post-Congress ballots.

There are six questions that will be put to you, our members:

1. CAP-1, which is the support framework for joining an electoral coalition;
2. CAP-2, which aligns our party constitution a bit better with the NSW Model Constitution;
3. FM-1, which means we join Fusion;
4. PM-1, which introduces a Sovereign Wealth Fund policy;
5. PM-2, a minor wording update to our Education policy;
6. Approval voting to endorse our first four preselection candidates.

The CAPs are three-quarters majority votes with a 20% quorum requirement. FM-1, PM-1 and PM-2 are two-thirds majority votes (no quorum requirement). Each preselection candidate must receive a simple majority of support in order to be endorsed.

You can peruse the minutes from both days of Congress here:
https://pirateparty.org.au/wiki/PirateEmergencyCongress_2021/Minutes

Read CAP-1 and CAP-2 here:
https://pirateparty.org.au/wiki/PirateEmergencyCongress2021/ConstitutionalAmendments

Read FM-1, PM-1 and PM-2 here:
https://pirateparty.org.au/wiki/PirateEmergencyCongress_2021/Motions

And read the candidate nominations here:
https://pirateparty.org.au/wiki/PirateEmergencyCongress_2021/Nominations

If you’re not a full member, for example if your membership has lapsed, simply visit members.pirateparty.org.au to join or renew. Next week we’ll be voting on the rankings of other parties, which will inform our preference negotiations.

We thank you for your continued support!

Kind Regards,
Alex Jago
Secretary
Pirate Party Australia

Remembering Aaron Swartz

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The Pirate Party commemorates the memory of Aaron Swartz: hacker, activist, and Internet freedom fighter.

Today we commemorate the birth of Internet freedom fighter Aaron Swartz in Brooklyn, New York City on November 8th 1986. As co-founder of Reddit and contributor to the RSS1.0 web specification, he was immersed in computers, technology and internet culture from a young age. But It was his download of hundreds of thousands of academic journal entries in 2010 that became his greatest act of self sacrifice. For the crime of legally accessing journal articles through his JSTOR account granted by Harvard, he was punished with $1 million dollars in fines and a 35 year jail sentence that was never carried out after he died of suicide on January 11th 2013.[1][2] His fight for freedom of access to scientific knowledge is carried on by Alexandra Elbakyan, the founder of https://scihub.org/ [3]

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Pursuing online safety, or undermining digital rights?

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As part of its latest assault on the right of Australian Citizens to privately access a free and open Internet, the Online Safety Bill 2021 was recently passed by both houses of government.

This lengthy Bill grants extraordinarily broad powers to a so-called “E-Safety Commissioner”, with no statutory limits, in a short-sighted attempt to improve the safety of Australians online. Their rulings are not subject to appeal, and purport to extend across the entire world, regardless of jurisdiction or international borders. They grant the Commissioner near-unlimited power to censor the Internet, and compel assistance from all individuals, internet service providers, hosting services, social media platforms and communications services to facilitate investigations, without any regard for the security of these services or the privacy rights of individuals.

To make matters worse, the Bill is in no way limited to the more laudable objectives of preventing distribution of material that is harmful in its creation or violates users’ privacy (such as child pornography or non-consensual sharing of private intimate video), and instead seeks to apply sweeping restrictions to the entire internet. The Commissioner is empowered to censor or restrict access to any kind of adult content, prevent ordinary people from sharing videos of violent confrontations, intervene in online verbal disputes between school children or Australian adults, construct mandatory industry standards without parliamentary oversight, and indeed “do anything incidental to or conducive to” any of their other goals… all at their sole discretion.

While child pornography and similarly abhorrent material have no place in civilised society, these matters should be handled by Police under judicial oversight and limitation, not by an unaccountable and despotic government-appointed bureaucrat. These laws do not create a “safe” internet for anybody but the government. They harm activists, they harm whistleblowers, they harm sex workers, they harm civilian journalists, they harm free speech, they harm privacy, they harm security, and they harm every single Australian who uses the internet. But for Labour, the Coalition, and the new E-Safety Commissioner, it seems the ends truly do justify the means.

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We are hopeful Aussie digital liberty politicians, Ask Us Anything on Reddit!

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This Friday 24th September at 6pm AEST, Pirate Party Australia is going live on reddit.com/r/technology to answer questions on civil rights, digital liberties, and the steady descent of Australia into spying, surveillance capitalism and authoritarianism. Speaking will be three of our candidates from the 2019 Federal Election: Brandon Selic (Queensland), John August (New South Wales) and Tania Briese (Victoria) who between them draw on diverse experiences in law, community, family care, education, health, and of course technology.

We’ll be creating the thread at about 30 minutes beforehand for all your questions then answering questions for the following three hours until 9pm AEST. Feel free to ask about the 2019 election campaign, the 2021 election campaign, the recent Identify and Disrupt Bill (which makes it legal to impersonate/add/delete data without a judicial warrant), the recent changes to party electoral registration (designed to disqualify minor opposition parties), the recent changes crackdowns on whistleblowers and journalists or anything!

Edit: now on the 24th!