Climate Action! Immigration Action! Accountable Politicians!
The main thing that you need to know here is that the party’s name has absolutely nothing to do with what they stand for. It’s a pretty clever bait to grab uninformed voters at the polling booth, but in the immortal words of Admiral Ackbar:
What they really are is an online direct democracy party, which is trash enough in itself, and also means they manage to “ascend” from the political spectrum because they have no opinions. But trying to scam votes by hiding behind a fake name is a level of dickishness I have not before seen in Australian politics, so they can burn in the dumpsterfire of their own creation.
Policy
This party has one policy. And that is to introduce a direct democracy system for people to vote on legislation.
Now, I’m marginally salty that I couldn’t use my funny joke about voting for this party if you really like exclamation marks, but online direct democracy is the most fucking stupid idea you could ever imagine trying to bring into our political system and would have made me angry anyway.
Basically, there is some online portal, where everyday citizens give their vote on bills being presented to parliament. After that’s all collected, the elected representative looks at those citizen votes and then votes for the bill accordingly. There are a few problems with that.
One, we pay our parliamentarians an extortionate amount of money to represent us and reflect our opinions in parliament. It’s not a perfect system, but online direct democracy means we pay someone to sit in parliament and not to their job, just relying on us to tell them how to vote.
Secondly, no system is immune from hacking, and putting votes in parliament into the hands of the internet is a terrible idea no matter how you swing it. But there are even more problems when you look at their specific implementation of the system.
Their threshold for a vote carrying through and actually being implemented in parliament is at least 100,000 citizen votes with a 70% majority. Not only would you struggle to get 100,000 people to vote on every single bill, getting 70% of them to agree on anything would be impossible.
If you look at the same-sex marriage plebiscite, only 30 of the 150 electorates (because the party still states that the elected member will still only represent their electorate’s views) passed that 70% threshold either way. But, none of those electorate’s votes would have actually carried through under their system, because less than 100,000 voted in every single one, even with 80% overall turnout. Now would also probably be a good time to mention that 20% of people don’t have regular access to the internet in Australia (they admit this), which means there will be literally no situation where they can vote in the House of Representatives.
But that’s not even the worst part. They say themselves that it will take them two years after being elected to fully implement their voting system, and they’ll only start being able to take votes after 9 months. That’s a lot of parliamentary sitting where that member will be twiddling their thumbs, isn’t it?
Thank you for listening to my TED talk.
Vote for them if
You constantly fall for clickbait.
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