We now turn to the Mutual Party, which tells me that “Australians are fed up with adversarial politics. It runs against the Australian way of life – informality, give-and take, trust, working together, finding practical solutions. Mutuality.” Further statements talk about the number of Australians involved in mutual organisations, sporting clubs, self-help groups, etc, and exhort Australians to take back their government!
This could go in just about any direction – though as a former volunteer and employee of an umbrella network for self-help / support groups, I do find their premises promising. Let’s start by looking at their voting ticket.
The Mutual Party seems to be part of the little confederation of small parties that are new to me and that are preferencing each other, which I find mildly amusing. Their first few preferences go to the two ungrouped independents, the Sustainable Population Party, and the Freedom and Prosperity Party (oh dear), followed by Australian Voice, Building Australia, the Australian Democrats, and Katter. Rise Up Australia is worryingly high on their list, too. They seem to be leaning mildly to the Right and a bit more definitely towards the libertarian end of the spectrum – several of the lefty libertarian groups are relatively high on their ticket, though I find the juxtaposition of the DLP right before HEMP fairly amusing. Palmer comes in around 40, and Family First makes it into the ticket at 50. On the whole, large parties are not approved by this lot, and they prefer religious parties to parties like the Secular or Sex parties, and shooting parties to Animal Justice or the Greens. The Liberal Party finally makes it onto the ticket at 60, followed immediately by the Nationals, the Socialists, Labor, and the Greens at lucky last. The message I’m getting here is that the major parties are pretty much all alike, but God help us, let’s keep the Reds out for as long as we can.
The Greens being the Reds in this instance, of course.
As they so often are.
Let’s see what luscious and enticing policies the Mutual Party has to offer us…
