2019-03-22
It’s been a busy few years for our policy team, who’ve done some incredible work since the 2016 election. And they’ve got a lot more ahead of them – with some exciting new opportunities for you to get involved.
By Travis Jordan
The National Policy Coordinator’s (NPC) main job is facilitating a group called the Australian Greens Policy Coordinating Committee, which is the national working group that reviews and finesses our national policy platform and helps our federal party room with some of their work.
One of our great strengths as a party is that policy decisions aren’t just made by MPs out of reach of regular members, but made collectively by all our members. Everyone is given the opportunity to propose policy changes, workshop them and have them taken up by our National Conference. If you’re not a member yet, that’s a pretty compelling reason to join.
Our vision for the future is a collective one, and what better way to live that vision than by working together to discuss our ideas, goals and plans for our future?
We achieve that vision by taking on those member suggestions, filtering them through state-based expert action groups, policy advisory teams and local branch meetings. Our national delegates then come together to hash out clear principles for our party room colleagues to strive towards. Finally, our party room colleagues use those principles to guide their development of fully-costed and actionable election initiatives for us to hit the doors with each election time.
Almost all policy work happens at the state level, so you don’t often get an opportunity to hear from or contribute to the national policy process. But rest assured that all your state delegates are hard at work every month, building a better and better platform for our party.
Member discussion groups
The national Policy Coordinating Committee has set up a few Member Discussion Groups to help guide our work over the next year.
These MDGs will operate from our National Conference in July this year until our National Conference in November. Over these five months, the MDGs will be tasked with reviewing our existing policies, identifying gaps and issues, and writing a discussion paper and possible platform changes.
We’ve set ourselves the target of developing three new policies and an MDG will be tasked with one each:
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Synthetic biology (which will replace our GMO policy);
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Rights of nature; and
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Industry and manufacturing.
Now, these MDGs aren’t going to be talkfests. Joining these groups means putting in hard work researching and writing. The work you do will directly influence our policy work over the next few years.
After each MDG presents their papers to the National Conference in November, the Policy Coordinating Committee will develop the ideas into concrete changes to our policy platform and consult on them with each State and Territory member body and our key stakeholders. Hopefully we’ll be in a position to bring these changes to the National Conference in May 2020 to make them official.
If you’d like to join one of our MDGs, you can email policy@greens.org.au.
If none of these topics interest you or you’d prefer a more general policy discussion, the best way to get involved with our party’s policy work is to contact the policy committee in your State or Territory to help them out.
We will be rolling out the next National Policy Review after the federal election. Your state policy groups are currently writing feedback on how the last review went and reflecting on how the next one will run. They’re also thinking about how our platform works to communicate our values to the public and media. If you have any thoughts on that, please get in touch with your state group.
2016-18 National Policy Review
Speaking of the National Policy Review, I want to say a big belated thank you to the national policy team for all their hard work in landing the 2016-18 National Policy Review.
Your National Policy Coordinators were joined by experts and advisers from our party room and delegates from each state and territory branch in working through over 1,000 policy proposals.
I’d especially like to thank my predecessors – Catherine Garner, Rod Swift, Rosanne Bersten and Sean Mulcahy – as well as the Directors of Policy and Strategy in Richard Di Natale’s office, Rod Goodbun and Larissa Brown.
In the end, 448 changes were made to the policy platform between the 2016 federal election and the November 2018 National Conference. While most of these changes were technical, grammatical or relatively minor, the process saw some major shifts in our policy positions to better reflect the views of our members.
If you’ve been following our team’s updates in Green Magazine, you’d know some of the big changes already. These include a new Community Participation and Civil Society policy focused on safeguarding community groups and NGOs, and a new First Nations Peoples policy developed in collaboration with the new Blak Greens, which shifts the emphasis onto Treaty and the sovereignty of clans.
Our team was hard at work in the second half of 2018, and the November National Conference saw big changes to our Employment and Workplace Relations, Drugs, Substance Use and Addiction, Economic Justice and Constitutional Reform and Democracy policies, as well as a new Public Service policy on how Greens in government would manage and support our public service.
Some of the highlights include:
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calling for a referendum to ditch sections 44 and 45 of our Constitution and replace them with a fairer, clearer corruption disqualification that doesn’t exclude people based on where they come from;
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acknowledge in our Constitution the right to self-determination for residents of Australia's offshore territories like Norfolk and Christmas Islands;
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working to legalise the production, sale and use of cannabis for recreational use, as well as to decriminalise the personal use, possession and non-commercial sale of all drugs and expunge convictions for drug use or possession when that drug becomes legal or decriminalised;
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requiring publicly-listed companies to have worker representation on their boards, and for public sector remuneration tribunals and executive appointment panels to have worker representation, too;
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supporting communities to turn major industries that provide critical local jobs into worker-owned cooperatives when they’re shut down or sold off;
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calling for a transition toward a four-day working week with no reduction in overall pay, and adding no fewer than four more national public holidays;
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abolishing any impediments to the right to strike to allow for multi-enterprise industrial action, the provision of guaranteed social security to striking workers, and the end of penalising unions for exercising their fundamental right to strike;
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removing religious exemptions from employment laws, which allow religious institutions to discriminate against LGBTIQ people in employment, and creating stronger protections for transgender and intersex people against employment discrimination;
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calling for increased penalty rates and overtime for workers working unsociable hours or on weekends;
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reverse casualisation by increasing casual loadings and giving casual employees the right to convert to permanent work;
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calling for a legislated minimum wage of no less than 60% of the median Australian full-time wage;
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decriminalising sex work and legislating to prevent discrimination against sex workers;
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massively reducing outsourcing to private consultants, phasing out the use of labour hire and external contractors for jobs that would normally be public service jobs, and abolishing efficiency dividends and other blanket budget cuts; and
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legislating for the right of public servants in their private capacity to engage in politics and activism – including running for public office, participating in their union, and representing activist organisations.
Travis Jordan is the Australian Greens National Policy Coordinator.