Pirate Congress 2024/Motions

Formal Motions, and Policy and Platform Amendment Motions, should be submitted to the Secretary with 10 days' notice so that they can be allowed for in the agenda (and for others to read them).

Constitutional Amendment Proposals

Constitutional Amendment Proposals must be submitted to [email protected] before 9:00am AEST on Saturday 29th June 2024.

Proposals to change the Constitution are Special Resolutions under the NSW Associations Incorporation Act 2009.

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CAP-1: Enable sharing member information within Fusion for more purposes

Put by: Alex Jago

Motion

Replace Article 14(2) with the following text:

Constitutional Amendment Proposal Text

All Full Members of the Party are to be members of the coalition. Relevant member details will be shared within the coalition for the purposes of:

(a) obtaining and maintaining electoral registration;

(b) conducting coalition-level membership ballots;

(c) establishing and maintaining geographic branches;

(d) campaigning operations; and

(e) notifying members of coalition meetings, activities, and similar business.

Rationale

Back in 2021 we adopted a quite restrictive set of rules around what information could and couldn't be shared and for what purposes: they were points (a) and (b) only from the above list.

Since then, these rules have been an impediment to effective campaigning in particular and party operations generally. Pirates are unable to be reached by most internal engagement processes (many of which were introduced to Fusion by our own President!). We're split-brained.

Notes

Only Full Member's information will be shared under this proposal (as was already the case), just for more purposes. In particular, personally identifiable information will now go into Fusion's NationBuilder instance or successor.

This is proposed to be achieved by a routine bidirectional sync. The first sync will not occur with less than thirty (30) days' notice to allow time for current objecting Full Members to e.g. downgrade their membership status or resign. Subsequent syncs will typically not be notified.

The party's privacy policy will also be updated.

Everyone with access to member data must sign the PII agreement, version 2.3 linked below. As of June 8th, approximately 10 people had access. There is a process for revocation of access — for example, Alex Jago (Pirate Secretary) had access during the 2022 election campaign but does not now.

https://pirateparty.org.au/w/images/8/8c/Fusion_PII_Data_Access_Agreement_v2.3.pdf

The current Pirate privacy policy provides for data access by coordinators (items c, d, e in the proposal) and contacts to confirm membership (item a).

Victorian state law requires that on cessation of membership, the organisation retains the former member's name and date of cessation of membership. Our implementation will of course comply with the law while seeking to redact as much information as possible.

CAP-2: Membership Qualifications

Put by: Alex Jago

Motion

Replace Article 4.1(1)(c) with the following text:

Constitutional Amendment Proposal Text

Are not currently members for electoral-registration purposes of any other political party in Australia.

Add Article 14(11) as follows:

Constitutional Amendment Proposal Text

Membership of an affiliated electoral coalition does not prevent membership under Article 4.1(1)(c), but Full Members must be considered primarily members of this Party within the coalition.

Rationale

Our party constitution need not name another party directly. We also don't need to carve out permission for non-Pirate Fusion members to join us — they could always join us as Supporter members and as Fusion members they automatically have Supporter privileges too by virtue of Article 14(10).

CAP-3: Preselection

Put by: Alex Jago

Motion

In Article 7(3) omit "National Congress", substitute "Preselection Meeting".

Add Article 14(12) as follows:

Constitutional Amendment Proposal Text

The National Council may declare that a coalition-level preselection process fulfils the requirements of a Preselection Meeting, provided that it is:

(a) open to Full Members;

(b) includes a member ballot; and

(c) is generally of like nature to the Party's own preselection process.

Rationale

The amendment to 7(3) fixes what appears to be a drafting error, as Preselection Meetings often don't coincide with Congress.

The addition of 14(12) is motivated by a few things. Our preselection processes were developed a decade ago when we were an independent party and have quite a long timeframe, especially considering that they now only precede Fusion's process. This amendment would allow us to just delegate to the Fusion process with a minimum of other changes.