13 June 2008

Community Alliance Party Launch Event - 7:30pm Thursday 12 June 2008

| Jonathon Reynolds
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The Community Alliance Party are having their official launch tonight at the Albert Hall.

They have put an open invitation up on their website with the event starting at 19:30 this evening (Thursday)

Their guest speakers are:

  • Tony Powell AO – former Commissioner for the NCDC
  • Dr. Jenny Stewart – associate Professor of Public Policy at University of Canberra

Their MC is Ian MacDougall (a local musician) who will also be performing a new rendition of a classic Woody Guthrie song.

They will also be unveiling their first batch of candidates. Megan Doherty from the Canberra Times ran a piece today.

I was given the privilege of being invited to film their studio recording session of their launch song that Ian MacDougall will be performing tonight, and I will also be filming the entire launch event for the CanberraVotes web site.

[Ed. (Jazz) ABC online also have a short peice on the candidates which include RiotACT reader Norvan Vogt]

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Inspired by Tom-Tom and SmackBang, I checked out the lyrics. Priceless. I don’t think that this could have been serious, but 1 April was a while ago. McGonagall seems a fair comparison.

And why ruin a classic of folk/protest like “This Land is My Land”? Why not “I’ve Been to Paradise, but I’ve Never Been to Me”? Or, indeed, the Chicken Dance? The lyricist (and I use the term because he did) had the grace to apologise to Woody Guthrie. But apologies to humans in earshot might have been a better idea.

Wow. There’s a certain weirdness about those lyrics that reminds me of Kurt Kennedy and his palindromic music. (Anyone here remember that?)

I wonder if CAP will announce policies to give everyone free fruit trees, encourage relatives to live close to each other and dig holes in their garden?

have a look on their website for the song lyrics…… we have a talent to rival William Topaz McGonagle in our midst

My 2c on 2 issues in this thread:
In unicameral systems like the ACT & Qld, the committee system is crucial to accountability. It’s there that MLAs can grill Ministers and public servants in detail. Unfortunately, historically the ACT crossbenches & Liberals haven’t used it well, & the media have been too lazy to pay attention to it much. The exception has been the recent coverage of Estimates over the power station. This does show that we can have a stable majority govt under Hare-Clark which can still be held to account. It’s just a pity that most of the heat has been Liberals misleading the public or the beating up of relatively minor aspects. Hopefully the local media will continue its increased focus on ACT committees after this issue subsides; our democracy would be better for it.

The trouble with CAP is that it is a weak coalition of NIMBYs, whose views on most issues (e.g. positions at CoAG meetings? Hospital funding?) are unknown, with no grasp of the larger issues facing Canberra. They have no clue as to the consequences of their positions, like banning community groups from using old school sites. If any of them got elected, they’d split from each other & their party almost immediately.

I am a strong supporter of anyone who can actually become the third force in politics in this territory. But the reason that these sort of parties never work (in my view) is that they claim to be normal parties, but really are single issue parties dressed up to cover more topics. Following my reading of their site it would seem that they are really only interested in re-opening the closed schools. All the other points on open-government etc flow from the closing of the schools. They really need to spell out more of what their ideas are.

Which leads to Miz’ point, what is good policy? I don’t know. It is really up for the individual to decide on their own. For me, government funded happy hours with bikini girls – good public policy. For someone else, maybe not. CAP should really outline what their policies are, so that voters can decide if they will vote for them or not. While I liked the Democrats “keep the bastards honest’ approach, it didn’t really work out in the end. I’ll give them a bit of a break as they have only existed as an entity for a short time, but hopefully they can come up with some decent policy.

However, CAP strike me of one of the many, many parties that run on the more services, less tax approach. Good luck with that. Services, unless delivered on a cost-recovered basis (which means people pay), will cost the government money. How exactly is an increase in costs going to be covered with a decrease in revenue?

The candidates seem like a nice bunch of people. I could hug some of them. Would I trust them with my stamp duty? Not yet.

I can think of some good meanings to put behind the shortened version of the Party name.

CharlieBell – Committees can work well – most of the Senate Committees do most of the time and I understand that some of the State parliament committee systems work reasonably well.

The problem with the Assembly is …. ummmm ….. talent. If you’re on the Labor side (nine of them) and you are capable of spelling your name correctly some of the time, you get to be a Minister (five of them). So, what’s left to be in Committees are the dregs of the ALP plus Foskey and Mulcahy plus the Libs. And the Libs are weaker than the ALP – Pratt, Burke and Dunne would be liabilities in a pre-school class. Smyth and Stefaniak are too busy being bitter and Zed …… well, he’s just too busy playing at being a boy Opposition Leader. It is depressingly hopeless.

If we must have the current system – and I can think of better ones – we should require that those who nominate meet some minimal standard in the area of reasoning ability. And we should look outside the major parties – but not to fantasists like the C(R)AP which stand for nothing except wanting power.

You need a local council style of government with everyone working towards the same goals. Brisbane City Council has a budget bigger than Tasmania and manages to get things done and more. The ACT style is about petty politics and who is in government and strutting off to China and the US. Stanhope and his cronies are small time pollies with big heads with egos that extend beyond their abilities.

But who can be a trusted chief minister? we’ve had so many that have been under a cloud of controversy,
what with painted stadium grass,
DUI – “but i had to have a glass of wine to steady my nerves”,
the entire bushfires saga:
– from not telling us the fires were likely to hit,
– to taking to coroner to court over her findings,
– charging the survivors GST on their re-building (court charges could have covered that one)

NO DRAGWAY!!
and lastly, the power station in macarthur.

give the job to the one person who wouldn’t do any of these things, the Pope.

A government with free reign to do whatever it wants, and not going power crazy? Yep, fantasy land.

You are absolutely right, and I am not supporting Stanhope’s government here. I am just saying that it is my belief that strong leadership can only happen with a majority government. Rightly or wrongly, the best chance of that happening is with one of the mainstream parties, and those interested in running for local government would better serve the city hooking up with one of them.

Hardly fantasy land, wouldn’t you think?

“One strong and focused party in charge is the best way to go… “

In 20 years of self government in Canberra that has never happened. The Stanhope government presents itself as strong, but it’s really just arrogance. We’ve never had an ACT Government with focus.

Get out of fantasy land.

And further to that, the opposition can then do what it should do … Oppose!!!

CB, the committee system stinks!

The type of government that relies on cross party committees and/or dealmaking with other parties will ultimately lead to half-arsed weak and compromised policies.

Minority governments sound good in theory but ultimately are bureaucratic nightmares. One strong and focused party in charge is the best way to go… and if you don’t like what they do, you get a chance to sack them every four years.

I can just imagine this motley collection of community do-gooders getting a couple of seats and throwing a well intentioned spanner into every work.

I thought he said he didn’t want to be a party pollie . . . ?

@Crikey:

Indeed.
They admitted it in ShittyNews a week or so ago.

Is this the mob that Frank Pangallo pleaded to run with but they didn’t want him?

VicePope,

Here is a suggestion for change to the style of ACT government that would make things better than they are now, and we don’t need any legislative change.

Actually use the committee system.

Committees are cross-party groups that can spend a lot of time consulting and researching to provide a decent report for the Assembly to act on. Lots of input, lots of discussion, and outcomes that benefit the majority of Canberrans.

Committees also give the opposition members something to do. The current government has 4 ministers who do most of the “work” and 5 back benchers who do the rest. The opposition just “opposes”. Let’s make all 17 of them do some work.

Also, if we take away the power of majority government we might get some open discussion before decisions are made, rather than a government that tells you what they have decided afterwards. But that’s something for the voters to do.

Miz – but (a) what is the standard for judging a policy “good” or “bad”? In any policy formulation process, there will be some winners and some losers. For example, if the community needs a power station, it’s got to be somewhere; if we are heading to having more schools and teachers than students, we have to close some schools; if we have $X to spend on health, some things get done and some don’t. Macro policy is deciding that it needs to be done; micro policy is allocating who bears any pain and who gets any advantage. And it’s in the area of micro policy that community needs get bushwacked by nimbyism and naked populism.

So, they want the fabric of self-government unpicked and the concept recast. So would many other people (like me) – the question is how is it to be replaced. The present situation is, in many ways, a good one for the Commonwealth – where is the incentive for it to agree to make any changes? As a thought (which I’m not advocating at present), would we do better to move the seat of government from the ACT to the Parliamentary Triangle as an exclusively Commonwealth fiefdom, and put the rest of the ACT back into NSW?

I went – they will support any GOOD policy, whether from their own team, another party or any other source.

They are particularly keen on getting the local govt working creatively – eg, they will look at getting a new self-govt agreement with the Cth, to update and properly balance the outdated 1988 one that clearly was just a federal handwashing exercise. They aim to turn Canberra around, away from the decrepit state it’s in, by reducing the majority and getting rid of the ‘we are in charge, not you’ govt attitude.

They are keen to focusing on LOCAL issues (roads, rates, rubbish etc), and get taxes/charges etc on par with Qbn’s so Canberra is not disadvantaged. They also expressed respect for the neighbourhood design of the city, which has recently been gutted by school closures and undermined by awful new suburb (slum) design. They have promised that some schools would re-open (Flynn was one).

[Personal rant: I hope they unpick the stupid and contrived ‘amalgamation’ of Caroline Chisholm High (amalgamated with one of its four feeder primary schools – see, already it’s dumb! What about the other primaries??). This amalgamation has foisted a daft, yankee ‘middle school’ artifice on Caroline Chisholm High despite that school already having a superb and acclaimed sub-school system. ]

CAP intend to listen and not be heartless (unlike this current mob, who have put people who value and preserve ACT heritage on the street, and try to set great stinking noisy power stations near Canberra homes. Let’s face it, some things should never be privatised, and utilities are some of those things.

Personally, there’s been so many bad policies lately I think a change would be a breath of fresh air.

EL – even if one person does, that’s a wasted vote.

It doesn’t matter, VicePope.

No one will vote for them.

This mob has no policies. Candidates who are marginally less anonymous than store dummies. An express interest in ending ALP government (per ABC radio, this afternoon). It sounds just a bit like a Lib front to me. A conspiracy theorist might assume the breakaway business alliance gets the conservative vote and this lot get the clueless populists and together they get the Zedsters and their dynamic slate of candidates (such as Pratt, Dunne and Burke) over the line.

Who gets their preferences (to the extent that they can allocate)? Who would they support if they had the balance of power? Do they stand for anything other than exercising power and stopping others from exercising it? An election is only a few months away, and it is cynical to be at this stage without either a political record or a clear statement of what one intends.

Are they announcing any policies, or do we have to BYO?

Groups like this come and go at every election.

Music, but no interpretative dance? What kind of political party is this?

launching the party but still no policies, the mind boggles

“Launch song”: mwah ha ha ha!

Jonathon Reynolds3:58 pm 12 Jun 08

Sorry folks that should be 19:30 NOT 17:30

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