Welcome
Welcome to this second edition of the Democracy First Newsletter. We are building a big, bold, grassroots movement of Australians to reclaim our democracy from the failed political class of Left and Right. Subscribe and keep informed.
Australian politics is broken. There is no leadership in the country. Nothing is being fixed. We have paralysis in government, distrust of our institutions, capture of our political parties by career politicians, and widespread frustration amongst ordinary people. The country is drifting steadily towards national decline on every front.
The only strategy we know of to turn this around is the creation of a balance-of-power party to force reform of our political institutions on all players. Democracy First is our balance-of-power party for the next federal election due in May 2025.
We want to represent the 80% of Australians who know our system is broken and has to be fixed. We have a very specific goal – to hold the balance of power in Canberra to force reform of our democracy and political institutions.
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Profile: Menzies
Dr Heena Sinha is a businesswoman, entrepreneur, dentist, community leader and mother from Warrandyte in Melbourne. She will stand as a Democracy First candidate against lawyer Keith Wolahan in Menzies.
Heena runs two businesses. SimpleAI develops artificial intelligence solutions for not-for-profits. My Second Home is a disability accommodation provider operating in Qld, NSW and Victoria. Heena is the Rising Star winner in the Aus Mumpreneur of the Year Awards for 2024. She is a keen advocate for and supporter of women in entrepreneurship.
Heena speaks Hindi, Gujarat and English with a husband who speaks Mandarin and Cantonese. She works with many migrant communities in health and well-being, and in sexual health awareness. She is a worker for greater social integration and cohesion in Australia. She is a trained dentist who has chosen to work in other fields for greater social impact.
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Menzies is held by the Liberal Party. Heena's campaign will ask voters in Menzies for a mandate to lead in working towards a more innovative, more entrepreneurial, less dependent, and more cohesive Australia.
Our agenda in Menzies and other Liberal held seats:
1. Get career politicians and lawyers out of parliaments.
We need politicians who have actually started businesses and taken risks. Most of our politicians have never taken a business or community initiative in their lives.
2. Defund political parties, curb lobbyists and remove the duopoly from Canberra.
3. Build an innovative, entrepreneurial economy in place of crony capitalism and corporate welfare. Deregulate life for small businesses. Level the playing field for SMEs. Deregister the CFMEU.
4. Overhaul the welfare system to tackle welfare dependency and assist vulnerable people move into mainstream work and community. Make it a serious priority, as if we actually mean it.
5. Reform the school system so teaching and learning can be personalised for each child, with parents coached in how to be co-educators of their kids.
6. Fix NDIS and other dysfunctional service systems by empowering users of services and freeing up space for innovation.
7. Prioritise social integration and cohesion in our cities and schools.
The next federal government will be a minority government. We need a bunch of crossbenchers like Dr. Heena Sinha who will contribute to leading a sensible, mainstream minority government.
Media Reform
Media reform in Australia is essential. We have the western world's most concentrated media ownership and a journalistic culture of group-think. We can't become an innovative country without major change in our media.
The ABC and NewsCorp function as a media duopoly in our country. Both wield excesssive market power. Neither are committed to diversity of opinion. The ABC is obliged by its Charter to be impartial and offer viewpoint diversity - it has failed to do this since the 1980s. Weak governments (Labor and Liberal) have failed to reform it to bring it into line with its Charter.
NewsCorp is an aggressively partisan media company that pushes an ideological agenda on the nation. It's justification for failing to offer diversity of opinion is that it offsets the ABC's lack of diversity of opinion. In turn, the ABC justifies its lack of diversity of opinion on its obligation to offset NewsCorp's bias. In truth, both use each other to push a narrow and unrepresentative agenda on the country.
In Sydney and Melbourne we have two daily newspapers. One is aligned with the Coalition; the other is aligned with Labor-Greens. Neither offer diversity of opinion - we know what each will say on any given topic without having to read a sentence. They are tools of political polarisation and ideological group-think.
In Brisbane, Perth, Hobart, Darwin and Adelaide there is only one NewsCorp paper.
Free-to-air television is restricted to sport and dumbed-down junk programming. Its three stations are protected from competition and are a licence to print money.
This can't continue. Australia faces major national challenges which are beyond the capacity of the political class to solve. We need open and independent media to enable open public debate about these challenges.
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The two goals of media reform should be to breakup concentrations of market power and increase diversity of opinion in every outlet.
1. The ABC needs major structural and cultural reform to bring it into line with its Charter. The Australian Broadcasting Commission should be re-established with a new board and management committed to upholding the ABC Charter, to take over the assets and infrastructure of the current ABC.
2. News Corp's market power should be broken up. The ACCC should be empowered to oversee NewsCorp's divestment of outlets to reduce its market share.
3. Licensing for free-to-air TV should be removed. Open competition to the 3 incumbents should be permitted.
4. Global social media platforms operating in Australia should be made subject to the ACCC's anti-monopoly and pro-competition jurisdiction.
5. A Citizens Jury should be established within ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority) to adjudicate on complaints of unethical and biased coverage of public affairs which fall short of a new Media Integrity Charter, administered by ACMA, to govern the conduct of newspapers, radio and television.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is Democracy First?
A: Democracy First is a broad centrist political movement that aims to remove career politicians from our parliaments and restore Australia to being the well-run country we once were. We are a movement because we want large-scale involvement of everyday people in this process.
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Q: What do you mean by centrist?
A: We mean the social mainstream. About 10% of Australians are Hard Right, and about 10% are Hard Left. These two groups have a lot of influence, because they fill the political parties, they are appointed to government boards and agencies, and they do all the talking in the media.
The other 80% of us are unrepresented. Our voices are rarely heard anywhere in public. Because we want to represent this 80%, we say we are a 'broad centrist political movement'.
Q: If you hold the balance of power, will you favour Labor or Liberal?
A: The next federal government will be a minority government. We want mainstream people on the crossbenches who can hold the balance of power. We will use that leverage to negotiate with Labor and Liberal for big changes that they would otherwise never contemplate.
Q: Do you expect MPs to toe the party line?
A: We expect our MPs to work together as a team. But at the end of the day, every MP must retain a right to speak and vote in accordance with their conscience, at all times.
The Injustice of Small Business Regulation
by James Walker-Powell , Democracy First candidate in Warringah.
Small businesses face a growing burden of regulation and government-imposed industry levies. It’s not just annoying, it's completely unjust.
This is a justice issue for small business. Increasingly, governments impose levies on small business to bail out unrelated companies from financial difficulties. Just imagine builders being levied to compensate failed developers, listed ones at that. Well, a levy is being imposed on financial planners to bail out customers of Dixon Advisory Group who are now in administration yet their parent company Evans & Partners is still trading on the ASX.
Australia's 15,800 financial planners are not copping this injustice any more. We need a movement against unfair regulation from small businesses across the board. Three things need to change for financial advice small businesses.
1. Scrap the ASIC-imposed Fee Disclosure Statements and fee consent forms that have caused only confusion and unnecessary red tape for both client and adviser.
2. Ensure quality and industry experience standards for financial advisors by requiring at least 10 years of relevant industry experience or appropriate tertiary qualifications .
3. Halt implementation of the Comprehensive Scheme of Last Resort (CSLR) until a comprehensive inquiry has been conducted into several pressing issues:
- Why was Dixon Advisory Group (Dixon) uniquely subjected to retrospective treatment under this scheme?
- Why were all Managed Investment Schemes (MIS) not included in the scope of compensation under CSLR?
- What led Minister Stephen Jones and Treasury bureaucrats, who structured this legislation, to grant preferential treatment to Dixon over 191 other similar incidents since 2005?
We believe it is essential to address these questions transparently before proceeding with any further actions related to CSLR.
The manner in which Dixon was handled raises significant concerns about consistency and fairness within our legislative framework. There must be clear accountability as well as equitable measures applied across all cases involving failed financial products or advice services.
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Australia needs a movement by small businesses across the board against unfair regulation and unjust government-imposed levies. Governments tread very warily in relation to Big Business but take a sledgehammer to small business because they can get away with it.
This has to stop. Small business can hold the balance of power in Canberra if we get organised. We have the numbers.
Local Solutions Hub
Local solutions for local communities. Innovation in driving solutions. Solving problems rather than applying bandaids forever and chasing government handouts.
Politicians and governments all say they support local solutions. They don’t mean it, of course. If they meant it they would establish a process by which local solutions can be developed and implemented. But they don’t do that.
Innovators, problem solvers and doers can be found in every town and suburb in Australia. They are mostly ignored. Out-the-box solutions are rarely welcomed by local governments or state departments or big service providers.
Currently there is no process whereby innovators, problem solvers and doers can be brought together, locally, to turn their ideas into action plans. Those who are well connected may get themselves a grant, but if you lack the right connections this is almost impossible. And grants are made available only for certain kinds of projects, not for others. There are obstacles everywhere.
We will establish a Local Solutions Hub in each of 150 federal electorates.
Each hub will comprise a space (a shopfront or warehouse or community hall) in which we can generate better ways of doing things in family support, small business support, aged care, local job-creation, local power generation, inclusion of people with disabilities, natural disaster risk reduction, healthy living and illness-prevention. And in many other areas besides.
The first step in the process of establishing a Local Solutions Hub is the appointment of a Facilitator in each of the 150 federal electorates.
The role of a Facilitator is to put together a Team of people (up to a dozen) to develop the Hub.
CanDo people and natural networkers are invited to express their interest in these roles.
Each Facilitator and Team has autonomy in developing the Hub as they think appropriate for their community. In style and priorities, these will vary across the country.
Participants must be residents in their own electorate. Express your interest in these roles.
Democracy First Enquiries: Vern Hughes 0425 722 890
The Votergram Man. Political persuasion and bank debt solution strategist
1moYou have some really good ideas and valid points here, so I hope it goes well. I don't get into party politics as I run the Votergram service which deals with all MPs in every parliament in Australia. To be fair we have some excellent politicians and much of the blame lies with voters. We have learned that politicians mostly do what voters suggest by Votergrams as the go to every MP and parliamentary decisions are by majority view. Done that for 38 years now. The real problem with our democracy is that voters don't realise that when they elect people to REPRESENT them in the conference called "parliament" they also need to tell ALL MPs what they want and explain why.
Controller Operator at Paladin A to Z RAPS Platforms. ROV underwater citizen science, Ocean observing systems .
1moPatton said " if everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn't thinking" or as i and that 80% feel, nobody is facilitating our thoughts, as to how, all these elite projects imposed upon us, have been implemented at federal and state level with little or no democratic support. These policies all either fail, or produce far more diffilculties than they resolved or both. Solution, is Local Hubs in each federal electorate, notes are taken, facilitator forwards the data to Democracy First, who compiles, the contract document, that is filed through a court process, which then goes to The Government, reminding them of tbeir contract with community and puts them on notice, that they are not fulfilling their part with us.
Executive Project and Program Manager and Fixer + Business Consultant + Educator and Trainer
1moGreat points Vern and thanks. But I disagree on the ABC versus News Corps perspective. News Corps sells newspapers and content like Sky News into the market. It's "bent" is to what sells and what is profitable. The ABC on the other hand, has a statutory obligation not to have a "bent" and it has failed miserably for many years. By all means break up News Corp media but also think about breaking up the ABC which is across TV, radio, news, online and it even has a dedicated school stream. The ABC's reach exceeds News Corp by a significant margin I suspect.
Retired Family Medicine Practitioner, was self employed.
1moThank for the invitation to subscribe Vern Hughes . I was recently introduced indirectly to the Swiss system of democracy, where the people vote on issues, not parties or groups, which seems to me to be a more “centrist” way of achieving goals. However, it does require a highly politically and educationally literate population. Is there a path for this country to move towards such a system, or does our Constitution preclude such a change?