FUSION | Planet Rescue | Whistleblower Protection | Innovation

Summary

Policies & Commentary

Fusion is back, even more fused than ever. They now represent a conglomeration of 7 separate parties, although only four of them get a major place on the website, with the others mentioned only in passing – mostly in the bios of candidates. The site makes extensive use of AI-generated art, which I will try not react to with undue negativity.

Interestingly, all but one of Fusion’s constituent parties maintain independent websites – it’s still not clear whether Fusion is actually a party, or more of coalition. In any case, the individual party websites are:

• Australian Progressives
• Democracy First
• Pirate Party
• Science Party
• Secular Party
• Vote Planet

Note that we will not be reviewing these six parties individually, but it is fascinating to compare what each one has to say to Fusion’s positions, and try to figure out who inspired which policy.

Fusion’s policies are divided into ten areas, so let’s take a look at them on that basis:

Climate Rescue
It’s a sad indictment of just how little the Albanese government has done environmentally that the Fusion Party’s environmental policies have not changed that much – they still want to reach 800% capacity from renewables, for example. But they have added some more policies beyond what they had three years ago. They want a high speed rail link (presumably electric, but that’s not specified) between Melbourne and Brisbane (drink!). They would also like to bring back the carbon price, invest in green hydrogen, drawdown and/or sequester carbon dioxide and support research and development into environmental solutions. This last in particular strikes me as an excellent policy both environmentally and economically, and a welcome respite from the relentless short-termism that dominates our politics. They also support the development of wider network of EV charging places, and financial incentives for the uptake of Electric Vehicles in general (explicitly including ebikes and scooters). Fusion would also like to see the agricultural and mining sectors brought to heel, and required to work in more efficient and less polluting ways.

Ecological Restoration
It’s not all bad news for agriculture though, as Fusion also supports the uptake of regenerative agriculture and soil enrichment. They also wish to cease logging of native forests and restore watersheds – including a review of ALL water licenses on the Murray-Darling. This last is very good idea just for legal and economic reasons, even leaving environmental concerns out of it, and it’s also something I don’t expect to see either the LNP or the ALP mention.

It’s their fossil fuel policies that really go hard though – there will be no new licenses for fossil fuel exploration or mining, a 2 year deadline to cease all existing fossil fuel extraction, an end to all government subsidies for the fossil fuel industry (and the logging and land-clearing industries too), and the establishment of rehabilitation bonds on all existing extraction sites to ensure proper ecological repair. That’s a lot, and I can’t help thinking that the two year window is impractically short – especially considering that you’d need to combine it with a massive uptake in renewable energy generation and EV uptake within the same period. It’s a good idea, but I suspect that circumstances would force it to be implemented more slowly.

Future Focused
Fusion emphasises their long term thinking here, and that’s definitely a thing we need more of in politics. They’d like to create a Ministry of the Future¹I guess there are some Kim Stanley Robinson fans in the party, with the responsibility to consider the longer term aspects of all decisions and policies.

More specifically, they mention High Speed Rail again²You should only drink once per party. Enjoy alcohol responsibly, people!, this time specifying that it will connect Brisbane, Sydney, Canberra, and Melbourne. (I’ll concede, that’s a trivial difference from above, but the lack of attention to detail is concerning to me.) They want to invest in “the industries of the future”, which include space exploration, fusion power, quantum computing and biological computing. The casual inclusion of fusion power there is something of a sleight of hand by the party. Three years ago, they were resolutely opposed to ALL nuclear power. We’ll be talking about this more below.

They also want to classify ageing as a disease. This is not actually as dingbatted as it sounds, at least, not if you click through to their more detailed explanation, which clarifies that they are less interested in increasing lifespan than ‘healthspan’. The distinction, as they draw it, is:

Lifespan is how long you live; healthspan is how long you are healthy, functional, capable and unburdened by the effects of ageing that gradually rob a person of their ability to live their life to the fullest, learn new things, adapt to change, and endure misfortune.

This actually sounds pretty decent, but it does seem like there’s probably a more accessible and less technocratic way to talk about reforming the aged care sector, but apparently this is how we need to support healthcare in the ageing population.

The last item in this section is something called Black-sky thinking, a term which is not explained anywhere on their site. A quick google suggests that it’s largely a rebranding of what we’ve spent the last decade or so calling ‘disruption’ – and like that term, there’s no consensus on exactly what it means. It does seem to be in general solution-oriented and open-minded, which are fine qualities, but as the aged care policy above shows, it’s as prone as any other method of thinking to people believing that whatever solution they devise is THE solution.

Education for Life
Their education policy starts off strong, with a call for the implementation of the Gonski reforms (although given that these are now 12 years old, perhaps an update is required?). They want to see a lot more use of technology in education, especially for distance and special needs education. An increase in the retraining of workers whose industries are dying is also supported.

For some reason, they find it necessary to say that they support the HECS/HELP scheme without any changes, which honestly feels like an own goal – it would have been smarter not to mention this at all if they’re not planning to change it – why draw attention to one’s LACK of a policy?

Overall, they want to see an increase in funding for the education sector, and at no point do they mention any of the thorny issues regarding the imbalance of funding between the private and public education sectors.

Ethical Governance
Under transparent government, the Fusion Party³They need a nickname, but what? The Fusers? The Fusoes? The Fusies? It’s a pickle. starts off this section pretty well, with calls for real time disclosure of donations above $1000 (something that would be as trivially easy as updating your bank balance after an eftpos transaction, if only governments wanted to do it), a better Freedom Of Information process, a restoration of ABC funding, and a removal of restrictions on the speech of public servants. Nothing much there to object to unless you’re a politician with something to hide (or you’re jealous that the ABC routinely shows as a more trusted institution than Parliament or government in polls).

They want an ICAC at a federal level. Now, while we already have one, it could certainly do with improvement (a LOT of improvement) – but the Fusion Party doesn’t seem to have updated the wording here since last election. The idea is good, it just seems like too little attention is being paid to events. They would also like to see greatly improved protections for whistleblowers and activists, and however you feel about activists, this country’s treatment of whistleblowers, under both Liberal and Labor governments, is nothing short of shameful. The simple fact that whistleblowers can be charged with crimes for reporting crimes, and prosecuted at taxpayer expense by the governments they’ve embarrassed, is both ridiculous and saddening.

Not gonna lie, I like this section and find nothing to disagree with here.

Fair + Inclusive Society
Okay, this section has five subheads, and I’m going to deal with the first one last, for reasons that will become obvious.

The second section is titled Universal preventative healthcare, and it’s both simple and hard to disagree with (although it may be harder to fund): Fusion wants to Add basic mental and dental health to medicare, to see Increased budgets for bulk-billing, telehealth and to Treat alcoholism and other drug dependencies as health issues. The latter would be the hardest sell to middle Australia, but I suspect that packaging the three together would make the medicine go down smoothly enough.

The next two sections are fairly boilerplate: their Universal Basic Income policy is nothing we haven’t seen before, and neither is their Recognition of Australia’s First Nations – although I do find the idea of a plebiscite to determine a new date for Australia Day (and their suggestion of December 10 – the day the Emu War officially ended) quite amusing. These do both strike me as good policies, but not ones that have significant differences from those of most other parties with policies in this area.

Their proposal for A more just society is also fairly straightforward: an emphasis on restorative justice, on rehabilitation for criminals, and measures to reduce discrimination.

Fusion’s LGBTIQA+ Rights is thorough, but contains few surprises. They support making trans surgery and other treatments available under medicare, Safe Schools back, federal funding for school chaplains out, the Sex Discrimination Act left in its current form, and age appropriate sex, gender and healthy relationship education [added] into the national curriculum. I have no issues with any of this.

And now, back to the start. Housing as a home. There’s a brief summary, which begins by declaring housing a human right, and there’s also a link to a (lengthy and not especially well-organised) more detailed explanation. And by “more detailed” I mean, in excess of 10,000 words. I’m not going to tackle that here (although axvoter did take a little time to tear it to shreds in their review), but it shows how seriously the party takes this issue. And also, how incoherent their ideas about it are. It really does feel like a policy that needed more time being workshopped and a firm editorial hand.

Their summary is reasonably cogent:

• Reduce the favourable tax treatments favouring owning over renting
• Replace stamp duty with land tax, better aligning government incentives to society’s real desires.
• Increase public housing from 3.2% to 10%.
• Relax the owner-occupier tax discounts to apply to spare rooms and granny flats, freeing up 13 million bedrooms.
• Fund an open-source site for real-estate listings and market data, competing with private interests who have different motives.

…although that last one does seem like a solution in search of a problem. The issues in real estate in this country are systemic, and you don’t fix them by creating an open source competitor to Domain.

Individual Freedoms
So, unsurprisingly, this party is big on free speech. They want to Remove censorship, blasphemy, and other laws against speech – which sounds great, except remember just a minute or so back when they wanted to keep the Sex Discrimination Act? It does seem like the falcon cannot hear the falconer, does it not?

Moving on, they want a constitutional Bill of Rights modeled on the American one (presumably not including their second amendment). Rounding out this section, they also want to see Voluntary Assisted Dying legalised – which is already is in every state, and will become law as of November 5 this year in the ACT. So this policy would only really affect the Northern Territory⁴where they are running no candidates at all., although it’s possible they may be talking about bringing the seven existing policies into step with each other – you wouldn’t think it would that hard to say so if that was the case. This strikes me as another place in which they have not troubled themselves to check how things are and just let the policy stand unchanged since the last election – only Victoria and West Australia had it before then.

Civil + Digital Liberties
They kick off here by saying that they want to restore the public domain – what they mean by this one can only infer from the rest of the section: presumably, one of their reforms to copyright law will be to reduce its duration, but they never come out and say so. They just talk about replacing the Copyright Act with a Creative Works Act, without ever troubling themselves to explain what the latter is or why it is superior. And despite all their talk about eeevil corporations in this section, there’s no mention at all of AI – no matter that it represents the single greatest theft of intellectual property in human history. It really does appear that Fusion wants to have it both ways on AI – they like it and (clearly) like using it, but they also want to get the credit for standing up to the eeeeevil corporations that run it.

Secular Humanism
This one’s pretty straightforward: under Separation of church and state they want to Remove religious prayers, rituals, and bias from government and public institutions and their documentation, and Abolish blasphemy laws; under Ethical education, they want to Teach ethics in school to expose children to questions of morality and truth, as an alternative to religious education and Replace the National School Chaplaincy Program with a National School Counselling Program, using trained counsellors suited to the role. All of which are policies I approve of, but again, why the differences between the school chaplaincy program policies in this section and in Fair + Inclusive Society, above?

Fair Foreign Policy
Last, and honestly, a reasonable contender for least, Fusion’s foreign policy section still consists of a bunch of motherhood statements about independence and a military focused on defence – although the mention of the need for alternative supply chains may be a nod to recent developments in Australia’s relationship with the USA. It does have some pro-asylum seeker policies that are unfortunately too rare in our political parties, but that’s about it. (They do have an Israel/Palestine policy, but it basically amounts to “bring everyone together and sing Kumbaya”, so I’m not going to detail it further.)

Not appearing in their policy section, but findable elsewhere on their site are their submissions to various Senate committees, as well as strong support for a two state solution in Palestine. Their submission to Senate’s Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) does not show the party in its best light, given that it is a poorly organised document that, occasionally, remembers to mention AI. It also – and this strikes me as odd given that two of their major policy areas are environmental – entirely fails to mention the environmental costs of AI. It’s possible that they regard this as a moot point in the event that their energy policies are applied, but it would be nice to have some clarity on this point.

The Fusion Party has always leaned somewhat technocratic or techno-libertarian, but they now seem to be rapidly approaching techno-utopian, and their policies are almost inevitably lacking in detail. Many of them are largely unchanged since the last election, which seems particularly odd given the two new parties who have joined the Fusion hive-mind in the interim.

Throughout, there’s a strong sense that more technology is the solution to almost every problem. In all honesty, I like most of their social policies – but the lack of detail and the general approach have me concerned about how the implementation of these policies would play out. And we are worlds apart on most of their technological policies. Most of their policies lean leftward, but in most of the world, technocrats lean rightward, and I’m not sure how long Fusion can continue to dance on that line.

Overall, there is a distinct tendency to keep policy statements airy and not get into much detail of what changes will be made or how they will be implemented. Certainly their policy suite is not tainted by any hint of costings. In addition, their policy suite largely ignores any economic issues (even when they are touched on, such as in their Murray-Darling plan, the economics of the situation are not mentioned).

In what apparently everyone agrees is a “cost of living” election, this shows a party that is out of step with the electorate. The there they want to go to is mostly appealing, but how we’re going to get there is largely hand-waved. The next time Fusion goes looking for new parties to fuse with, they’d be well-advised to try to find one that’s got some credible economic policies.

Moreover, there are numerous minor contradictions – or at least, unexplained apparent contradictions – in their policy statements. These may seem like nitpicking, and I might agree with you about that if it didn’t happen so often. There’s a lack of attention to detail, but I think it goes deeper than that. The big risk for a party constituted like Fusion is was always that the centre would not hold, and it does seem like that good old blood dimmed tide is about at the point of being loosed. No amount of shitty AI art will obscure the fact that their policy areas seem to be created in isolation from each other, with no one thinking it’s necessary to hammer out the little differences. It’s possible that come the next election, we will witness the unusual spectacle of a party wedging itself.

Fusion are going to rank somewhere in the middle of my ballot. They don’t deserve any better or any worse.