Reason Australia
https://reasonvic.org.au/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_Party_(Australia)
* The Australian Sex party, all grown-up and serious, and not really hung up on sex very much
anymore, though they still want more freedom for the sex industry.
* Legalisation of all drugs is still on their adjenda too, though more realistic aims are probably
around their support for safe injecting rooms.
* They seem to have stepped up their stance on climate change since a few years ago. They have
a decent set of pilicies working towards this while taking care not to sound like anything might
make life more difficult to the average joe. At the same time they claim to be aiming for "zero
carbon" by 2030, which seems like overreach, especially as they only plan to stop the sale of
new petrol-fuelled vehicles _by_ 2030! Still the subsidies on electric vehicles would be nice.
* Beyond those key issues they seem to have their finger in every pie on the political left. This
tends to manifest itself in lots of very expensive policies, from free child care to increased
rental assistance, better school funding (public and private, frankly I think the latter should
look after itself more than it does already) and guaranteed jobs for all.
* They're also pushing for a four-day working week, which I don't think is a worthy cause given how
flexible working arrangements have become anyway in many industries. I'm completely out of touch
with that though.
* They say they're in favour of protecting privacy. Their policy claims are pretty vague on this
though. "Ban any future collection of phone and internet metadata without a warrant" is nice,
but I get the feeling this area isn't so high on their adgenda.
* I get a sense that they're pretty urban-centric.
* They're all for greater accountability of politicians as well, personally and their policies.
Nobody could complain about that.
* They still don't like religions. I'm far more ambivalent about this topic than they are.
* Very big on mandating 'inclusive' attitudes in many sectors.
As at the last election there are a few policies and attitudes that I like, and a few that I'm
ambinalent about. I still feel thay they're too much about 'inclusivity' to avoid conflict with
free speech, and their anti-religion adgenda seems a bit pointless to me. The main change is all
the expensive policies I see without much sound _reasoning_ explained as to how they can be paid
for. So far as tax goes, say that for business they want to "Decrease regulatory burdens and taxes
via a dedicated parliamentary committee", which is nice but sounds like another huge expense. I
don't see any attempt to find a way to pay for it all.
---------------------------
