Pirate Party Unites In Australia 173
bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports that the Pirate Party has opened a branch office in Australia and is recruiting office bearers and supporters. The group updated the Australian website it registered last year and advertised for a president, treasurer, secretary, and supporting positions. A party spokesman, Rodney Serkowski, said the group was close to establishing a beachhead in Australia. He said that with 300 supporters it was on its way to signing the 500 it needed to become an official Australian political party. 'We are currently an online community, working together with the intention of becoming a registered party, and we're coming closer to reaching that goal,' Serkowski said. 'If we can get the required 500 members, and be registered by year's end, I think it is highly probable that we will contest the next Federal election in Australia.' At the weekend about two percent of Germans voted for the Pirate Party, although it needed five percent to gain a seat in the Bundestag."
Yarr (Score:5, Interesting)
I signed up as a supporter. If you're Australian and involved in IT so should you. Even if you're not but care about censorship and IP related issues, sign up. Dont let people whose policies are dictated by industries who only have how much profit they can squeeze out as their only lobbyists on such issues.
Help fight for your own rights, dont rely on others to do the work for you. Its time, step up.
Sign up! Sign up! Sign up!
Piratenpartei got 2.0% in german elections (Score:5, Interesting)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Pirate_Party [wikipedia.org]
This may not sound much, but it is actually pretty good for a new and totally unknown party with a scary name. Hopefully the aims of the party (internet Censorship, civil rights etc) will now get some public attention.
Not 2 percent in Germany (Score:3, Interesting)
Investigations are ongoing.
What we actually manages to do (Score:3, Interesting)
This is only the beginning. PP has shown that change is possible, that it is possible to reach positions where you can affect actual policies:
The swedish Pirate Party has one member in the European Parliament since this summers' election. This MEP is now one of the 14 MEPs in the group working with the european commission to work out a final solution for the Telecom package.
Re:Freedom is born where oppression reigns (Score:5, Interesting)
... inalienable rights of users to download content for free off the internet ...
Notice how the article takes the same outlook, it goes from "change the landscape of Australian politics by advocating fairer copyright, freer culture and ensuring the protection of civil liberties, sending a strong message to Mr Conroy that his censorship scheme is not welcome in Australia" to six paragraphs on getting free music.
The challenge is to inform the public that file sharing is only one part of one issue. Hopefully the AU pirate party can stay on message and educate people there's much more to be concerned about.
Re:In other news.. (Score:1, Interesting)
The numbers prove you wrong.
There were 27 parties in total, some with agendas far from the mainstream (i.e. "things which other parties oppose"). The Pirate Party was the one with the highest votes among the non-established parties, even beating the radical nationalists, which is quite significant.
Background note: In German federal elections, parties need to gain at least 5% of the votes (or gain at least three direct seats) in order to properly participate in parliament. Therefore some voters shy away from "wasting" their votes on small parties. It's kind of a chicken and egg dilemma - if a party doesn't already have many voters, your vote effectively doesn't count.
Re:Freedom is born where oppression reigns (Score:3, Interesting)
+5 Funny
...for suggesting the Democans and Republicrats have anything to fear in a first-past-the-post system. Or maybe "+5, Sad truth" but that's not a moderation. Europe is the big threat, because to *briefly* try to describe ~30 different political landscapes most have proportional representation, a 4-5% lower limit, a big socialist block, a big conservative block and some smaller parties. These smaller parties can be both between the blocks (greens, christians, liberals) and extreme left/right wing parties.
This will very often lead to a distribution from left to right something like 5-35-20-35-5, one major party on each side who's looking to gather some adjoining parties for a coalition. Here's a very central point - it's not so that each side will necessarily want all their "own" parties in it. For example, many extreme right parties are shunned by the rest of the right side - they'll rather look to the center. This means that if you can get past the 4% and be in the center, you're very attractive. It's often easier for the big parties to swallow making some environmental or social policy changes than cooperating with the extremes, that has a price of its own.
That said, it's not so easy to start a new party in Europe either, even though it's easier in the US. Since there are more parties, they also tend to shift more trying to close up gaps of voters that aren't satisfied. Already you see a lot of parties moving in towards the Pirate Party trying to keep enough voters away so that it won't pass the limit. It's usually many years between a new party enters the parliament, the last round was really the greens.
Re:Piratenpartei got 2.0% in german elections (Score:1, Interesting)
Can a German explain to me why the pirate party is even needed in Germany? There already is the FDP which has a strong civil rights wing and is, for example, opposed to goverment monotoring of private internet use by the secret service. Since the FDP already gets 15% of the vote, surely it would make more sense to just join that party and make sure they follow through on their civil rights agenda. As it is you split the votes between two parties, and especially with the 5% threshold, votes get wasted and nothing useful happens.