Australian Progressives
https://www.progressives.org.au/
* Seem centre-left on first impressions.
* So far as climate change goes, they're after net zero emissions by 2030. _Then_ negative
emissions after that, which is some nice evidence of someone thinking beyond the popular
hype. They also have some real plans for how to achieve it. Many are fairly radical including
banning all fossil fuel mining licenses and renationalising the electricity sector at a federal
level. Through this they intend to achieve "a 100% renewable energy target for stationary
energy by 2025", while keeping it cheap. The effort and expenditure required to pull that
off in just a few years seems prohibitive (especially while they promise to keep energy
cheap), but probably is the sort of effort required for a 2030 target to be serious. Otherwise
their climate policy is agriculture-friendly, even including "Protecting our most fertile land
from built up development". They want to restore funding to research and oversight organisations
set up then abandoned by governments past.
* Transport emissions reductions focus on rail - expanded, made faster, and made zero-emissions.
Also sounds very expensive, though they don't have a deadline for this.
* They support moving industries out of the major cities into regional Australia, which is nice.
* Quite concerned about drought-proofing - desalination plants in each capital city and domestic
water tank subsidies for low income households (= under $80,000 p.a., geeze I'm poor...).
* They have a whole lot of "Transport Infrastructure" policies which are incredibly vague.
Basically they'll make every transport-related thing great, somehow. They do plan for
"re-nationalisation of public transport previously sold off."
* Renationalisation seems to be abit of a common theme (in reality these industries were
originally under state not federal ownership though). I'm a bit divided on the topic myself,
but they frame it nicely as a way to make widespread adoption of clean technologies in those
industries much easier to implement. The cost though, the cost!
* They're all for public broadcasting and want to restore or expand funding to the ABC and SBS,
including getting ads off SBS. I'm all for that because they make up practically all my TV
viewing, radio listening, and much of my news media. I do suspect extra funding could be easily
wasted though, as it usually is in government agencies. They also want to restore international
TV services, but they don't mention restoring shortwave broadcasts of Radio Australia, the loss
of which I consider a more significant and ignorant cut to a long established service for
Australians, as well as one one offering political influence in surrounding nations. Shame
nobody seems to pay attention to that.
* They want to remove tax exemptions for churches, and generally any special treatment or inclusion
of religion in government. Interesting their policies here sound exactly like the Reason party -
some copy/paste work going on by one party or other perhaps? Anyway, again I'm ambinalent on
this.
* Truth in Political Advertising laws would be nice. This is something I couln't find again
in the Australian Democrats policies this time (though I might have just missed it). Like
the Democrats though, there's no detail, and the devil would easily hide within such things
(except that they don't believe in him).
* They want a new referrendum to vote for Australia to become a republic, which I don't support.
Our politicians are up themselves enough as it is.
* They want to mess about with the consitution, but aren't clear on the details except that they
want to "bring it in line with modern multicultural Australia" and "capture contemporary thinking,
practice, and will of the Australian People". I'm guessing they want to make sure it doesn't
mention "God" anywhere. A pointless waste of time and resources so far as I'm concerned, and
with risks of stuffing things up. Oh, I see that in part it's also about S.44 and the
prohibition of dual citizenship for members of parliament. Actually I think that requirement
is quite reasonable, and if politicians are too stupid to figure out when they're breaking it
then tough luck.
* They want better data privacy protections, and again I'm getting dejavu from the Reason Party
here. This party have a little bit more detail on it though:
* Policies that strengthen privacy protections for the public.
YES PLEASE
* Policies to require opt-out and deletion processes for data as well as ability to find out
who your information has been passed on to
YES PLEASE
* Policies that would treat Metadata as any other private data and require a warrant for
interception/collection by government agencies and must be specific and limited in scope.
YES PLEASE
They have a nicely organised set of policies covering a satisfyingly wide field of topics.
Probably a little too far to the left for my taste, but up there above the majority anyway
thanks to a more considered climate change policy and ABC/SBS funding. As with so many
nice-sounding centre-ish parties though, there's a lot of spending which seems out of touch
with the already massive national debt.
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