Federal Election 2019/Preselection Meeting 2018-12-01

Meeting Log This page contains a transcript or log of a meeting that occurred on 2018-12-01. It should be used for reference only and does not need to be edited.

1st December 2018

Start time: 16:21 AWST End time: 17:20 AWST

Candidate Q&A

The unedited IRC transcript is available here.

The prospective candidate was permitted to add answers to existing questions and to expand on their existing answers over email in the following 18 hours.

Senate

Western Australia

Paul de Abel

• Nomination Biography
• Alex Jago seconds Paul's nomination
• Question: "What do you think is fairly rare about yourself that makes you a worthwhile candidate?"
  • Answer: "1. From reading FB posts, I believe there are 2 rare things about me. 1a. I take the time to think about spelling and grammar of the written word. 1b. I have an understanding of how the political process works."
• Question: "What would you like the focus of your personal electoral campaign to be?"
  • Answer: "The parliament should be a place of reliable governance of the country and not the current theater that it has become."
• Question: "Would you mind explaining a bit more about your professional history in the tech industry, and how our government and tech laws have or may impact that?"
  • Answer: "I started in IT as a programmer (always a good start). Once I got to terms with the technology I understood the huge gap between what can be delivered and what people actually wanted. People just want things to work for them tech makes that happen for them. Regarding tech laws I believe there should not be any ! Existing consumer law provides protection for consumers, if it doesn't do what is promised then you get your money back."
  • Follow-up Question: "Could you provide an example of such a tech law?"
    • Answer: "Government should not have access to anyone's communication, they are personal. I can say whatever I feel and that should not be intercepted and processed by the spooks. They should be earning their keep honestly. Site blocking is the government telling us what we can and can not see. That's wrong, the gov are not our nannies and they should not block any content. And access to metadata is the thin edge, it will grow and the gov will push for further information. Again personally I don't have anything to hide however gov could use info for their own political outcome and just on that alone I do not like any such powers."
• Question: "What's your 3 sentence pitch as a candidate? Why should the general public vote for you specifically?"
  • Answer: "My aim is to return reliable and dependable governance of Australia to the parliament of Australia. I believe that Australians should be free to choose the digital content that they wish to access and that such access should not be monitored. I believe that creation of environmentally and economically sustainable energy production should be encouraged and supported as required."