Australian Citizens Party

Summary

Policies & Commentary

It’s fascinating to watch the LaRouchites, electoral cycle by electoral cycle. Every time, their policies are that little bit more polished, more centrist, more unobjectionable. And yet, for all that, the party remains a worked example of the simple fact that trying classify everything on a simple left to right axis distorts rather than depicts reality. They’re also a great example about there are very few destinations that there’s only one path to – I often find I agree with a number of their policies, but got there via a less conspiracist route. With that said, shall we?

The ACP has seven major policy areas, but this is largely a reorganisation of the same policies they’ve had for years into a different presentation. To be fair, some of these have been updated, many of them have not. Caveat lector.

National sovereignty
They want to Australia to Return to independent foreign policy, a statement that implies that Australia has ever had an independent foreign policy.⁴Actually, that’s unfair of me: since the end of World War Two, Australia has frequently pursued an independent foreign policy on any matter that the American government of the day didn’t care about. The ACP would like to see us free of entanglements with the USA or the UK – they wouldn’t have gone to Iraq, and they don’t wish to antagonise China, or to support Israel. They support a two-state solution for Palestine and Israel, and also think Australia should get involved either the Belt and Road program or BRICS. Or both.

Among other things, this would mean Australia leaving both AUKUS and Five Eyes, policies that stand a reasonable chance of happening one day – although not from Australia’s end – if the Trump Administration ever remembers that they exist. Not antagonising China means going back to the One China policy, which is bad news for Taiwan, and probably for any ethnic or dissident group in China too. There’s also the assumption that we’d actually be welcome in BRICS, or the Belt and Road program. Rounding this section out are policies to give Parliament, rather than the Prime Minister, the power to declare war (a common policy in this election, and likely a reaction to Trump’s autocratic reign in the States), and for Australia to become a republic. The last two sound good to me, the other sound like overly simple solutions for a complex world.

Economic sovereignty
Okay, this is the big one: ACP wants to establish a new incarnation of the Commonwealth Bank, returning to the original mission of the bank. This would be called the Aussie Post Bank, and all deposits made to it will be 100% guaranteed by the government. Multiple purposes would be served by this – breaking the stranglehold of the big 4 banks, supporting the Post Office (as PO branches will become bank branches for the new bank as well), making sure that regional Australia is well-supplied with bank services, providing low-interest loans to farms and regional small businesses, and making sure that ordinary Australians can get their money in cash form. This will apparently generate so much income that the new Aussie Post Bank (as they call it) will be able to invest in large scale infrastructure such as High Speed Rail (Drink!), the Bradfield Scheme (found in 2022 to be “completely unviable” by the CSIRO) and the Iron Boomerang railway (which began preliminary investigations in 2015, and is apparently still undertaking them ten years later).

The Citizen’s Party also wants a moratorium on bank foreclosures to prevent people losing their homes or farms when the inevitable bursting of the speculative real estate bubble occurs, and to enact legislation similar to the US’ Glass-Steagall Law (separating savings banks and investment banks from each other), to protect depositors from having their deposits seized by banks trying to save themselves in the aforementioned bubble burst. They would also like to restore government authority over the Reserve Bank, and more strongly regulate conduct in the banking sector, especially in relation to branch closures in rural areas, Honestly, most of this section is fairly sensible – although I do not know enough about the Reserve Bank to comment on that section usefully – other than the choice of infrastructure projects. Perhaps something more practical, like a Geelong to Launceston railway, could be built instead.

Return integrity to public governance
They want to abolish ASIC and replace it with a companies regulator and a specialised financial conduct authority – i.e. to replace it with two more specialised agencies. They also want those agencies to having sharper teeth than ASIC – they call for them to Replace ASIC’s hands-off philosophy of caveat emptor — “let the buyer beware”—which allowed financial misconduct to flourish, with an emphasis on “seller beware”, enforced by criminal prosecutions of financial predators instead of token fines paid by bank shareholders. It’s pretty hard to argue against greater regulation of corporate malfeasance at the best of times – and these are not those.

ACP also wants to reform NACC so that it actually serves the function it was supposed to serve, to ban political donations from anyone except individual voters (although with no caps on donations or changes to reporting requirements), to hire more actual public servants and fewer contractors, and better protections for whistleblowers. Returning once more to banking, they want much stricter controls over the finance sector to avoid a repeat of the financial crisis of 2008, and government to assist the victims of bank/finance sector malfeasance in seeking redress. There’s also an immigration policy, which calls mostly for better long term planning of our migrant intake and a greater emphasis on settling new arrivals in regional areas. In broad terms, these all seem pretty reasonable to me (other than the lack of real time reporting for political donations I mentioned above), although the immigration policy is very lacking in details of how it would actually work in practice.

Return to affordable housing
So the Aussie Post Bank⁵Remember the Aussie Post Bank? This is a policy review about the Aussie Post Bank will apparently be such a roaring success that it will be able to fund – in addition to the impractical money hole infrastructure projects mentioned above – a National Housing Authority to recommend necessary assistance to housing authorities in each state, including assistance on finance, building materials and labour. It will also provide loans to state housing authorities, at the recommendation of the National Housing Authority, to develop rental properties that charge only economic rents rather than market rates – a worthy end, but I remain unconvinced about the means.

They want a gradual phase out of Negative Gearing until it is gone completely – Abolish negative gearing for properties sold under a certain price (the threshold), with new built exempted. For existing assets, negative gearing still applies until the property is sold. In addition, they want to reduce the capital gains tax discount from 50% to 25% for assets sold under a certain price (the threshold). In both these cases, The exact threshold will be determined for each region after consultation with local authorities and reviewed on a regular basis – although it is not clear whether the same threshold figure applies to each of these (it does seem implied, though).

Revitalise our healthcare system
The Citizens Party is nothing if not ambitious on this one:

Australia must fund more medical school and nursing school places to train more doctors and nurses. Mobilise a dramatic increase in clinical staff (paramedics, nurses and doctors), equipment and technology, and beds and hospitals, to address the crisis besetting every aspect of the public healthcare system — ambulance services, public hospitals, regional health care, mental health, disability services, and aged care

That’s a lot, and while I don’t disagree that we need it, there’s no mention here of where the money would come from (although to be fair, the policies in the previous section will mean that the government is taking in more tax money, so maybe that’s it).

In addition, they want a Royal Commission into all aspects of the COVID-19 response, to learn lessons from the experience that can be applied to any future events, which – assuming it can be kept un-politicised – strikes me as an excellent idea. There could be another pandemic any time (especially considering how the US has recently cut back on health spending both at home and abroad, and is already experiencing a measles epidemic as a result), and learning what we did right and what we did wrong will help preparedness for next time – and that means fewer lives lost.

Return to energy security
Two major prongs here – returning energy generation and supply to government hands (although apparently this is the only market sector where they think privatisation has failed), and make nuclear power legal, although notably, alongside of and competing with other types of energy. There is no mention here of the cost or time nuclear will take, but I’d mark them slightly ahead of the Coalition on this one because at least they actually acknowledge that nuclear waste is a thing. It’s still a bloody stupid idea, but at least they’re slightly more realistic about it.

Invest in national food security and fuel security
Fuel security is to be assured both by increasing the current required stockpile amounts for petrol, diesel and jet fuel (paid for with money from the Aussie Post Bank), and also by reviving the 1974-76 Petroleum and Minerals Authority, to have a state-owned resources company that would guarantee domestic fuel security. Similarly, their take on food security is also a LOT:

Prioritise policies that support Australia’s family farmers who, unlike corporate agribusinesses, guarantee the nation’s food security. These policies include: cheap flexible credit from the public Aussie Post Bank; parity pricing that guarantees cost of production; expanded domestic production of farm inputs, including fertiliser and fuel (local refining and storage); tariff protection from free trade dumping; sensible land clearing and fuel reduction burning for fire protection; end Murray-Darling Basin water speculation to return more water to farms; regional infrastructure to support industries and towns; and encourage population growth in regional Australia to expand the permanent agricultural labour force.

Again, there’s not much explanation here of how this would all work, which is unfortunate given that I could probably write as much again as I already have about just that one paragraph. It’s definitely a mixed bag of ideas, and I really wish they’d unpack it more than they have. Also, in addition to the above, they want to end live export and break up the Coles/Woolies duopoly.

One of the most notable features of the Citizens Party is their complete lack of any sort of environmental policy – there’s a few policies that touch on the environment, but it’s pretty clear that most of their policy-making treats it as an externality at best. Although I agree with many of their policies, I find that I cannot in good conscience vote for this party. They will be well down my ballot, ahead only of the Australia First Alliance parties.