The Australian Pirate Movement sets sail for new waters

Another year another Pirate congress. The busy weekend has left me sleepy and reflective which is good because there was a different vibe about Pirate Party Australia’s National Congress this year: new faces, new ideas and new attitudes are starting to make their way forward in the party. Slowly but surely.

One thing which came up more and more at every congress is the gender imbalance in the National Council, which is reflective of the active memberbase of the party itself. There is an interesting parallel to this regarding the ongoing migrants crisis as my Fijian driver gossips about his 41 years in Brisbane —longer than I’ve been alive! Let alone my 7 here after growing up in the far north. That’s certainly a comment on whether refugees and other overseas migrants deserve to live here any less than those already citizens.

One thing about the weekend which struck me was one Twitter commenter described us as “doing tech for tech’s sake, not because it’s an overall public good” and technocratic is one thing I would definitely use to describe some in the Pirate movement! It highlighted once again the strong focus in the movement to be tech and IT focussed — which has advantages in our development of technically literate evidence based policies. As I catch up what’s happened back home in Brisbane while I was at congress I’m blown away by the amazing things here just this weekend with the QUT hosted Team ACRV winning the Amazon Robotics Challenge in Japan, a huge GovHack 2017 crew participating out of the Gold Coast and just this morning the Cooking for Copyright events held at UQ, QUT, Griffith and the State Library of Queensland.

The drawbacks of our memberbase being so tech focussed are that they reflect the IT demographic: we tend to skew white male and our movement lacks wider perspective from that. The exception is that I’m endlessly impressed by is the number of farmers we have in the party. Particularly Tasmania for some reason.

The advantages are clear to broadening our memberbase — wider reach allowing us to grow the movement’s size and influence. The question we ask every year is how? How can we reach out to demographics the Pirate movement has always struggled to reach? How can we bridge the gap to become a more inclusive, activist movement? I personally consider it inevitable that a “mixing” effect of friends and family from other careers or backgrounds will gradually diversify the memberbase with the effect of enabling better growth, but inevitable could mean 100 years in the future so to make meaningful change we need to start taking action now.

The way I want to encourage that is by reaching out, as pirates, to get those in our life outside the movement involved within the movement and by those outside the movement reaching in to see what we’re doing and what they could bring to the movement. Although the Pirate movement internationally has always been fringe our tightly knit core of members is incredibly active in their own way with our Twitter accounts working as a hub for issues, events and announcements related to our platform while our Discuss forums feature discussion, concepting and ideas about how to expand our policies and bring them to a wider audience.

This is only the start. The Australian Pirates have set our goals high: elected members in parliament representing our platform — but it’s more important now than ever that we take risk in order to have a chance of effecting actual change. Happy sailing.