Policies
Climate Change
Sustainability
Climate Change and Local Government
Local government has a number of key roles they can play in responding to climate change.
Politics
Health
Social
Law and Order
- Rapid ten year emergency transition to a net negative emission society
- support workers, communities, companies and disadvantaged in transition
- 100% renewable based electricity grid and large energy efficiency roll out
- large and small scale diverse renewable based grid systems including demand management
- solar access rights
- energy efficiency retrofit of homes and businesses
- high energy efficiency standards for new buildings and energy using products
- fund low income energy efficiency home and appliance upgrades
- new minimum standards for rental buildings
- no nuclear energy
- end fossil fuel use - close the dirtiest power plants first and get off gas
- Transport system based on renewable electricity
- massive roll out and upgrade of walking and cycling infrastructure
- conduct an audit of needed key cycle infrastructure upgrades to make cycle friendly cities and towns and implement these findings
- massive roll out and upgrade of electrified rail (light, heavy, super fast, and freight)
- expand rail in rural areas as medium fast rail
- super fast rail from Adelaide to Brisbane via Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney
- light rail for medium to large rural towns
- support electric car infrastructure by
- funding at least two fast charge stations in each local government area
- fast charge stations at all service stations on freeways and major highways
- offer an initial round of subsidies for fast charge stations to businesses / tourist information centres / etc who are willing to install fast charging stations in combination with provision of food and other amenities along key transport and tourist routes, aiming for at least 1 charging station per 100km along key regional routes.
- massive roll out and upgrade of walking and cycling infrastructure
- Limited sustainably grown bio fuels for remote applications
- End native forest logging and broad scale land clearing
- compensate land owners
- allowed previously logged areas to recover as carbon sinks and ecological reserves
- increase minimum area of native vegetation for each bio-region to 20%
- move fibre production to hemp and agroforestry, restorative, and analogue forestry on already cleared or damaged lands
- pay farmers for storing carbon
- Agricultural Emissions
- immediately switch to a low emissions diet - you can remove beef, lamb, and dairy from your diet now.
- minimise waste of fertilisers and associated emissions
- build soil carbon
- re hydrate the landscape using a range of techniques including those develop by Peter Andrews.
- use biochar from waste biomass to drawdown and store atmospheric carbon and support soils
- Create a global cooling
- reducing methane production by an immediate reduction in methane production from sources such as sheep and cattle, fossil fuel extraction on production and rice growing.
- sequestering atmospheric CO2 in soil, reforestation, and biochar
- use safe and reversible geo-engineering options such as painting roofs white to speed cooling
- return to 300 ppm CO2 or less
- Limit growth of cities and towns
- create urban boundaries
- protect and expand urban open and green space
- protect suburban backyards
- reduce car use and dependency
- Support organic and local agriculture
- support urban agriculture and farmers markets
- full labelling of country of origin of fruit and vegetables at point of sale
- ban imports of food products if there is any associated bio security risks
- ban suspect chemicals or chemicals already banned in other countries
- chemical free water catchments
- run a publicly funded education campaign informing people of the hazards of pesticides in food
- Build community resilience to climate change
- re-build community connections
- support localised food production
- extreme weather safety strategies for flood, fire and heat wave
- ensure vulnerable members of the community are looked after
- Reduce population to sustainable levels by allowing birth rates to decline naturally
and reducing immigration rates - Accept regional climate refugees and commence migration of drowning pacific island communities
- Make climate criminals pay
- Transition to a non material growth based economy while driving knowledge and service and technological improvements growth
Sustainability
- Biodiversity
- increase no-take marine parks to 15% of our coast line and coastal waters
- a minimum of 20% native vegetation in each bioregion
- fund restoration and revegetation projects
- implement ecological burning regimes
- make deer a pest species
- Agriculture
- support organic agriculture
- support urban agriculture and farmers markets
- pay farmers for storing carbon
- ban harmful chemicals or chemicals already banned in other countries
- makers and users of biocides or genetically modified lifeforms will be held liable for contamination or drift
- support grazing and cropping systems that build soil carbon over those that dont
- chemical free water catchments
- recapture nutrients from the urban waste stream
- Waste
- ban plastic carry bags
- container deposit legislation for all recyclable containers involved in the drink industry
- introduce requirement for compostable packaging where possible
- introduce requirement for compostable eating utensils etc at festivals
- enforce a return to manufacturer of electronic waste
- move to a new waste collection system using two bins, organic and recycable (almost all waste should be in either category), and annual or bi annual pick ups for hard waste and toxic waste.
- make asbestos disposal non cost to avoid dumping
- Pollution
- ban industrial release of carcinogens or highly toxic material
- move car fleet to zero emissions over ten years
- restrict smoking in public places to designated areas
- no nuclear industry
- compulsory labelling of materials containing nanotech
- Genetic Engineering
- make GE seed and plant sellers responsible for the cost of any genetic pollution and removal of any GE modified organisms that escape into the environment
- ensure rights of people to use and access open source plant varieties
- government funding of open source plant varieties only
- Economy
- transition away from a material growth the based economy and monetary system, while maintaining knowledge and service growth and technological improvements
- reduce corporate power and influence while creating a social and environmental responsibility as part of their corporate charter
- promoting global equity
- fair trade not free trade
Climate Change and Local Government
Local government has a number of key roles they can play in responding to climate change.
- ensuring council operations are carbon negative
- public education
- emergency assistance
- facilitating local food growing including education and increasing the number of community food gardens, especially for the disadvantaged and those living flats or with limited growing space
- supporting the most vulnerable
- building and facilitating zero emission infrastructure such as bike paths, lanes and parking
- rebuilding a sense of community and community support networks
- support mitigation programs such as renewable energy production or energy efficiency retorfits
- have a low emissions purchasing policy i.e. no native forest products, no beef, lamb dairy
Politics
- Clean politics
- Hold candidates and parties accountable for action on climate change.
- No political deals: preference on policies and track record supporting parties that take a strong position on climate change or have policies that are part of the solution.
- Secular Politics
- Remove religious institutions, practices and ceremony form our political institutions, public service, public education system and military.
- Strengthen democracy
- Do away with "first past the post" system
- Use a non exhaustive preferential system (so people can cast formal votes and only have to vote for the parties they want to).
- Use multi member electorates and proportional representation system.
- Limit role of political donations particularly including banning donations from corporations.
- Reduce costs for people to participate in democratic processes (the recent doubling of the cost to run at federal elections at direct attack on Democracy in this country designed to hurt small players who are not backed by big business or big unions).
- Do away with "first past the post" system
- Free childcare for all children after 3 months.
- Improve education outcomes for children in early childcare by improving funding and wages, and ensuring well trained specialists involved in developing and delivery of education programs. Studies show that this period is the most critical in the child's development.
- Adopt worlds best practice schools systems with a view to whole if life outcomes.
- Develop free programs for all parents of new children to encourage adoption of parenting techniques that lead to higher educational and social outcomes. Incentivise attendance of these programs for the most disadvantaged members of society.
- Ensure a free breakfast program at primary and secondary schools. A significant number of Australian students go to school hungry.
- Fund secular education programs only.
- Allow teaches to discipline students and hold students accountable for actions that prevent others from learning, while providing support for the student to develop appropriate non disruptive behaviours.
- Provide opportunities to follow non academic paths in schools, including reopening of technical and other specialist schools.
- Adopt practical education around growing and preparing healthy organic food in all primary schools.
Health
- Compulsory labelling of transfats in all foods
- Compulsory labelling of genetically modified material in all foods
- Heath warnings on all high sugar and high GI foods
- List total kilojoules on the front of all packaged food and a large font.
- Restrict smoking in public places to limited designated areas.
- Ban smoking near children.
- Legalise voluntary euthanasia.
Social
- Australia is dropping the ball on sexual discrimination. Sexist language rather than gender neutral language is common, violence continues again women on a large scale, and there is a tolerance of blatant cultural and religious repression of women by our legal system and some elements within our society.
- Insistent of use of gender neutral language.
- Improve sex discrimination education and compliance at all levels of society from primary school to workplaces.
- Ensure no job is denied to women because of their sex including all jobs in the defence force.
- Provide accessible third party resources for people to use when suffering sexual discrimination, bullying, or violence in the workplace or home.
- Provide proactive programs to reduce violence against women.
- Name and same sexual predators and organisations complicit in this conduct.
- Remove tax deductibility status of any religious or education organisation that teaches or practices sexual discrimination.
- Pass laws to make coercion of wearing full face veils, arranged marriage or female genital mutilation a crime. Provide proactive programs to educate people and communities why these behaviours are unacceptable from the point of view of human rights and the Australian culture
Law and Order
- Reduce costs and increase efficiency of our legal system
- Our legal system is designed to make lawyers wealthy at the expense of clients and justice and needs a significant restructure.
- Create a separate career path for judges similar to the French system
- Adopt a civil legal system similar to that in Germany or France to reduce civil court costs
- Crime
- We need to think about the role of the prison system and deal with people involved in crime.
- Our first approach is reduce the instances of crime by ensuring we have excellent social services and education systems to help people avoid crime and break social cycles that lead to crime.
- Secondly we need to re-envision the point of our prison system and instead of focusing on a system of punishment to one of rehabilitation and securing the safety of the broader society.
- Fund any community programs successful at reducing crime rates or re-offending and returning a positive cost benefit to our society in terms of both social benefits and the budget bottom line.
- Ensure that jail systems for first and second time offenders are focused on rehabilitation and separate from the remainder of the prison system.
- People leaving jail should be provide with ongoing support, housing and secure work. It is cheap to do this than let them got back to jail.
- Repeat offenders of violent crime and significantly antisocial crimes (such as assault, rape, armed robbery, sexual assault, child pornography, large scale fraud, reckless drive endangering numerous lives, terrorism) need to be assessed as safe to be returned to society prior to release. There should be no third offences committed for these crimes.
- Serial offenders of non violent crimes such as theft or fraud should have restricted access to broader society if they cannot be rehabilitated.
- Fines and punishments for commercial and business related crime should include potential jail terms for responsible individuals and fines that discourage businesses from undertaking criminal activity in future such as making sure fine are 5-10 times any likely profits made during the commission of the crimes.
- Creating Safe Roads
- Increase funding for dedicated policing of our roads. Ensure a proportion of the fines collect by road policing are returned to the transport division of the police service as an increase above the base funding, enabling the service to expand and contract overtime depending on the success of the road policing strategies.
- Include video recoding devices on all police vehicles.
- Sharply increase the number of red light and speed cameras in operation and conduct a strong public education campaign linking being caught with social irresponsibility.
- Provide at least two speed cameras for use by local councils targeting low speed streets. Include a community nomination system for the placement of at least one of the cameras. Funds raised from these cameras are for use by local councils for improvements of walking and cycling infrastructure.
- Compulsory third party insurance for all vehicles driven on roads.
- Unregistered cars being driven on the road are impounded when discovered.
- People who repeatedly drive without a valid licence have their vehicle impounded and adequate disincentives for further repeating including jail if other programs and incentives fail.
- Significantly expand the number of cycle police but also have them regularly policing car related issues in areas visible to cyclists.
- Vehicles breaking sound or pollution standards are immediately impounded.
- People who "block the box" at intersections receive at least three demerit points and a significant fine. Run police enforcement campaigns in cities till this no longer culturally acceptable behaviour.