The upcoming West Australian senate re-election marks a significant chance for voters to have their views represented in parliament. In particular, it represents an opportunity for W.A.’s minor parties to get in on the action.
OUTinPerth had a chat to Fletcher Boyd, WA coordinator of the Pirate Party, one of Australia’s lesser known parties with an emphasis on free speech and wide access to information. He explained to me (a humble journalist) what his party aims to do for the people of our fair state.
“We’ve got a few main aims, primarily we’re looking at human rights and equality so that involves maintaining Australia’s human rights commitments that we’ve made as part of the UN and other agreements, so that’s including our asylum seeker policy, (which I’ll go into), and we’re also looking at a transparent party and transparent government. So, on a government level that would involve no secret negotiations, no secret international negotiations. On a domestic level we basically want everything to be public. At a party level we’ re putting our money where our mouth is with this, all our meetings and all our negotiations are public and everything is published online.”
According to their website, the Pirate Party is labelled as such because “everyone has been called a “pirate” for the last few decades… We in the Pirate Party have simply decided that if sharing a love for culture, knowledge and information with our friends and family makes us pirates, then that’s what we are and we’re proud of it. We’ve adopted the very term intended to demonise an entire generation for the completely natural impulse to share discoveries with those around us.”
Boyd further explicated on the party’s aims to reduce copyright restrictions. “Basically what we’re looking at doing is reducing the copyright term, which currently is set at the creator’s life plus 70 years and far longer for corporate copyright. So Australia’s committed to that through a few international agreements and is looking to add those provisions to agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, so that’s something that we’re looking to avoid obviously. The main reason that we’re looking to do this is because potentially 150 year copyright terms don’t benefit innovation and the copyright term after death doesn’t actually benefit the creator, there’s no way for that to actually happen. So what we’re looking at is a significantly reduced copyright term so that innovators can build on the work of their predecessors.”
Boyd says that copyright and content distribution laws are benefitting companies more so than creators, and such restrictions are a barrier to progress when it comes to sharing culture and information. “We’re seeing these companies basically blocking the attempts of technology to bring affordable alternatives to content distribution such as Netflix, which isn’t available in Australia because of the exclusive deals with Newscorp, which a lot of people do have the misconception that it’s Netflix trying to enforce this and somehow fleece Australians, but it’s simply because they can’t air things in Australia because it’s being locked up by an Australian company.”
The Pirate Party at present supports civil unions for couples of all genders, but not same sex marriage. “We advocate for civil unions basically because it takes any form of differentiation between parties out of the equation, so what we’re looking at, it doesn’t actually matter. We don’t care what either party identifies as or what the gender is, if two consenting adults want to participate in a civil union then we believe they should be free to do so.” Boyd says.
Given that the respective genders of the people involved does not appear to be the issue, I asked Boyd if he found the term ‘marriage’ objectionable. “I don’t find the term ‘marriage’ objectionable, but we found that because of the religious overtones there is a lot of resistance to any modification of marriage by government, so since as a secular party we’re looking for a complete separation of church and state, we don’t believe that marriage should be governed by the government. But we also don’t believe that marriage should effectively be recognised by the government either. If you’re going to have a marriage institution that discriminates against people then it shouldn’t be recognised by the government as official.”
The Pirate Party seems to focus primarily on laws relating to the public’s ability to share information, and a significant part of that is internet censorship, and whether that has any place in our society. Boyd seems to think not. “Internet censorship is essentially a bad thing. We’re very much for net neutrality in terms of carriers, for example, so what that means is, we don’t think that carriers should be able to throttle bandwidth to certain services to benefit their own services instead… There’s a few different forms of internet censorship that are being proposed and even if we did actually want to censor the internet, there’s no system that’s been suggested that would actually effectively do so. So such attempts are basically just a frivolous waste of the government’s time.”
Internet censorship in relation to the protection of children against issues such as cyber-bullying has become the source of much debate. Boyd explains why he believes the current government proposals to tackle the issue are ineffective. “The current legislation and policy changes proposed by the government are basically introducing a commissioner for child safety online that would allow cyberbullying on social media to be reported to them and if the websites didn’t take this content down within 48 hours, then it could be reviewed by the cyber bullying commissioner, and the only real power there would be for them to say ‘Oh no, this website is bad, they don’t support our efforts to prevent cyber bullying.’ The unfortunate part of this is that 48 hours in terms of social media is a really really long time. 48 hours is basically, it’s gone, it doesn’t matter after that amount of time. And most of these sites like Facebook have about a seven minute response time on reporting of content anyway, so it’s more of a fear mongering for people who aren’t familiar with for example Facebook’s reporting mechanisms. In terms of the actual removal of content, what we’re seeing the government try and do is influence international corporations in ways that really they can’t. ”
The Pirate Party proposes a more grassroots solution to the issue. “So what we’re looking at in terms of a proposed solution to cyber bullying… would be concentrating more on the social programs that we already have in place such as mediation and counseling before moving to an official judicial system, because we’ve found that the judicial system isn’t designed to benefit children. These sort of situations aren’t really suited to a report system and would be much better solved through mediation and only using the court as a last resort, at which point we could see a restraining order or that sort of thing. But that’s only in the event that everything else fails.”
The Pirate Party also opposes any sort of political censorship, such as what’s occurring in the United Kingdom at present. “Political Censorship, essentially, no that’s a terrible idea, we’re a democratic system and that’s ridiculous. It couldn’t be implemented in any way. In terms of some of the censorship we’re seeing in the UK in terms of pornography, which is also centered at protecting the children, what we’re seeing there is the government trying to legislate something that needs to be in the hands of parents. What we’re really looking at is awareness and the understanding that yes, this stuff is on the internet and the blocks being put in place by the government in the UK, they don’t work, there’s no way that they could effectively work without significantly impacting citizens.”
For more information about the Australian Pirate Party, look at their website.
Sophie Joske
