Policy Foreword

Policy Goals

We aspire above all else to pursue ideas which are good; whether they are original, or interesting, is entirely secondary.

As a party we have one primary and overriding goal: to improve Australia through the implementation of our policy platform. This should in fact be the purpose of every political party, but we feel many existing parties have partially lost sight of the purpose of politics and have allowed the means to displace the ends.

Policies are not things you invent to try to win elections: elections are things you try to win in order to implement policies. We would rather see all of our ideas faithfully implemented without ever having a candidate elected to parliament than to win large numbers of seats yet be unable to convert this electoral success into the passage of actual reforms.

To this end, we will always be transparent in our policy objectives. While policies under development will not be published while incomplete, we will never (as major parties do) delay publishing policy ideas we intend to carry to an election in order to minimise the opportunity for criticism. Rather we welcome honest and constructive criticism, which is essential to improving the quality of any new idea.

We will certainly not hold back on publishing policies for fear of other parties “stealing our ideas”; on the contrary, we absolutely encourage any other group that wants to share some of the same policy objectives as us. And conversely we are proud, not defensive or ashamed, of the fact that many of our policies were dreamt up by people outside our party, including people with political affiliations to different groups and ideologies. We aspire above all else to pursue ideas which are good; whether they are original, or interesting, is entirely secondary.

 

Federalism

we propose to achieve our policies in areas of State responsibility through a mixture of State/Federal cooperation

This policy is the platform of the Federal Science Party. We acknowledge that the implementation of many of our policies are affected by the constitutional distinction between state and federal responsibilities. We do, however, believe that many of these issues require national coordination, or already have some form of federal administrative oversight.

As a party currently constituted at a Federal level with near-term plans to establish State branches and contest State elections, we propose to achieve our policies in areas of State responsibility through a mixture of State/Federal cooperation and, down the track, State political activity. Where we have specific mechanisms of State/Federal cooperation in mind for a given policy objective, we will provide the details of such.

 

Costings

As a new and growing party the Science Party does not yet possess the significant financial resources needed to have all our policies fully costed by an independent agency. The leadership and much of the membership base of the party consists of professionals in a variety of quantitative fields, including applied mathematicians, statisticians, software developers, finance researchers, and analysts. We have thus performed our own preliminary costings analysis on those policies with significant fiscal implications.

However, specific figures listed should be considered provisional. If elected, the Science Party would have these policies independently costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office to confirm their viability before making any attempt to pass legislation.