Libertarian Party
Apr. 23rd, 2025 11:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
b_auspolLibertarian Party
Website: https://www.libertarians.org.au/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LibertariansAus
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LibertariansAus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/LibertariansAus/
(My review for the 2021 WA Election. My review for the 2022 Federal Election)
Formerly the Liberal Democratic Party, the party had to change its name due to the 2021 electoral legislation banning parties from using the same words in their names unless they have permission from the older party using it (in this case the Liberal Party of Australia). The party managed to dodge needing to make the name change for 2022 via some procedural chicanery over their registration, but three years down the track and the party has now had to rebrand to the more accurate party name of Libertarian Party.
Party Analysis
The Libertarians are a firmly right wing libertarian party, despite occasional gestures at the idea that you can have left wing libertarians. This year, their policies are presented in a 52 page pdf of a powerpoint, which has to be one of my least favourite ways to access a policy platform (individual pdfs for each policy linked from the website is worse). In the interests of my own sanity, I have only lightly skimmed this to check it’s got approximately the same content as the three website policy pages. This is not a party where I really care about the fine granular details of the intraparty debate over the gold standard.
The general financial policies for the party this year follow the traditional Libertarian cry of ‘the free market will fix everything!’ Quite how the free market is supposed to fix everything when the current American president is manipulating the international markets on a weekly basis over his tariff policies remains unaddressed by the free market true believers here. But in terms of more details, they want a flat tax of 20% for incomes over $50,000, and after so completely diminishing the national tax base, they’ll find savings by ‘scaling back regulatory agencies’ (so the people who check food and water quality? Track diseases? Make sure your boss isn’t underpaying you? Who needs them?), cutting the ATO staff by 50% (because taxes are bad, remember), and privatising everything possible, including those commies at the ABC and SBS.
While they’re privatising everything they’re going to also sell off national assets to reduce the government debt, even though one of the things about being a government is that you have control of your money supply, while assets are a finite resource. Personally it’s not a trade off I’d make, but then I don’t also think the Reserve Bank’s only focus should be ‘maintaining a stable money supply’. Also they want us back using the gold standard and Bitcoin, to ‘foster financial competition and stability’, because when I think of stable currencies, Bitcoin’s wild market fluctuations and crashes is exactly what I’m imagining.
In terms of energy policy, wind and solar are ‘destructive’ and ‘harm natural environments’, but nuclear, coal and gas mining are not worth mentioning the environmental impact of. Also they want nuclear power, even though even optimistic estimates are that a plant couldn’t be online in under 20 years. Also while we’re at it, abolish all renewable targets and net zero policies. Honestly, this is farcical ideologically driven policy for a party claiming that they want the free market to determine things, because renewable energy sources make up the cheapest fuels on the market and such greeny organisations as AGL and Eraring Energy are talking about how they can offload existing coal fired plant assets and instead pivot to cheaper to produce power like solar farms.
The Libertarians are convinced the government education department is useless and ‘stifling competition’. They don’t want public schools but instead want school vouchers, to further eliminate equal access to education for all children close to home. They also don’t trust those damn school teachers, as they want more home schooling and ‘micro-schools’. This is all in the name of catering to children’s needs, of course, and not any ideological desires of parents to restrict children’s experiences of the world.
Also there’s the standard transphobia we are seeing pop up in far too many countries around the world. The Libertarians want legal definitions of women, bathroom bans, trans athletes banned from women’s sports (which I am absolutely certain they watch religiously to have opinions on this), want restrictions over access to healthcare, and what looks like a coded request for bans on conversion therapy to be lifted. Generally a lot of panicking for no real reason.
Despite being all for the free market, this does not include people coming to Australia. The Libertarians want all new arrivals to Australia to pay fees to immediately buy into “public services and infrastructure” (yet they don’t want to pay adequate taxes themselves for these things), they want short term visas limited to 5 years only, but citizenship only accessible after living in Australia for 10 year, and they want to restrict access to government services like Centrelink to citizens only, even though permanent residents already pay taxes contributing to these. Also they hate international treaty obligations.
They want free speech (as defined by people not being able to tell them that their speech is dangerous and not allowed), they want to abolish Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (aka the section that says you can’t say or do racist and anti-ethnic things that would offend or insult people), and they don’t want legislation that could convict people for spreading misinformation or disinformation, and they want to sell off the public broadcasters who have a remit to allow the broader population to air their views. Free speech to be a racist and lie to people and not get called on it! What a desire.
They have a privacy policy, but that largely is “yay Bitcoin”, “let me say whatever I want on social media with no consequences” (so is defamation legislation also on your hitlist orrr??), get rid of the e-Safety Commissioner (aka the organisation that helps people deal with among other things invasions of their privacy like cyber bullying and abuse), and they’re mad about Digital IDs existing at all. Also they don’t like mass surveillance laws in Australia, but given their other policies I can’t help but feel part of the motivation is “stop spying on my potential domestic terrorism” and convictions that the government is just itching to hunt them down for Bad Thought.
Finally, their foreign affairs policy is to be isolationist noncombatants who do not provide any military aid or participate in sanctions against other governments, withdraw from all international treaties and organisations possible including the the WHO, OECD, ICC, G20 and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (so we no longer have obligations to take in and support refugees), and focus on trade agreements. They are also very convinced we are being coerced by foreign powers. How dare we have mutual obligations with anywhere else in the world.
In terms of candidates, this isn’t really a party where the quality of candidate can vary between jurisdictions, but given who’s running for the Senate in NSW I will call them both out. Top of the combined ticket with HEART and Gerard Rennick People First is Craig Kelly, former MP, formerly of PHON, formerly of the UAP, formerly of the Liberal Party, all around right wing conspiracy theorist, Donald Trump cheerleader and COVID crackpot. You already know him. The other Libertarian running is Steve Christou, the socially conservative Cumberland Councillor who exited Labor Right in the direction of the far-right. If you’re not as up on local Western Sydney Council politics as I am, his multitude of party affiliations will not make much sense, but he’s also flirted with One Nation and some of his highlights on council include: opposing not only drag storytime but queer childrens books, queer parenting books and books about diverse families in the local council library; getting mad about Racism Not Welcome signs as being ‘divisive’ for the community and in particular should not be near a park dedicated to Anzacs because that would somehow harm the memories of Gallipoli by calling out racism; trying to scrap Welcomes to Country and Acknowledgements of Country; and generally being antagonistic and terrible toward his fellow councillors. Every time he does something that hits a newspaper larger than the Parra News I have to sigh, because he’s an absolutely terrible advertisement for the area.
Is this party trying to kill me?
Not openly in the party platform outside of a desire not to know about international medical situations by withdrawing from the WHO. They haven’t got a single open gun policy, for once.
Is this party trying to harm me?
The Libertarians are all in on transphobia and clearly do not have any care about the fallout or impact such policies have on the community. They also want to significantly downgrade the government services provided to people living in this country, and they want to be able to be racist in public without getting called out and sued for it.
Conclusion:
If you want a second perspective on what the Libertarian party’s policies look like in practice, look no further than a whole lot of the stuff going down in the US right now. Unhelpfully for the Libertarians, a live demonstration of the effect of their policies seems to be sending voters running for the Labor Party in the polls, which to me suggests there is not a groundswell in the community for such policy platforms.
Website: https://www.libertarians.org.au/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LibertariansAus
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LibertariansAus/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/LibertariansAus/
(My review for the 2021 WA Election. My review for the 2022 Federal Election)
Formerly the Liberal Democratic Party, the party had to change its name due to the 2021 electoral legislation banning parties from using the same words in their names unless they have permission from the older party using it (in this case the Liberal Party of Australia). The party managed to dodge needing to make the name change for 2022 via some procedural chicanery over their registration, but three years down the track and the party has now had to rebrand to the more accurate party name of Libertarian Party.
Party Analysis
The Libertarians are a firmly right wing libertarian party, despite occasional gestures at the idea that you can have left wing libertarians. This year, their policies are presented in a 52 page pdf of a powerpoint, which has to be one of my least favourite ways to access a policy platform (individual pdfs for each policy linked from the website is worse). In the interests of my own sanity, I have only lightly skimmed this to check it’s got approximately the same content as the three website policy pages. This is not a party where I really care about the fine granular details of the intraparty debate over the gold standard.
The general financial policies for the party this year follow the traditional Libertarian cry of ‘the free market will fix everything!’ Quite how the free market is supposed to fix everything when the current American president is manipulating the international markets on a weekly basis over his tariff policies remains unaddressed by the free market true believers here. But in terms of more details, they want a flat tax of 20% for incomes over $50,000, and after so completely diminishing the national tax base, they’ll find savings by ‘scaling back regulatory agencies’ (so the people who check food and water quality? Track diseases? Make sure your boss isn’t underpaying you? Who needs them?), cutting the ATO staff by 50% (because taxes are bad, remember), and privatising everything possible, including those commies at the ABC and SBS.
While they’re privatising everything they’re going to also sell off national assets to reduce the government debt, even though one of the things about being a government is that you have control of your money supply, while assets are a finite resource. Personally it’s not a trade off I’d make, but then I don’t also think the Reserve Bank’s only focus should be ‘maintaining a stable money supply’. Also they want us back using the gold standard and Bitcoin, to ‘foster financial competition and stability’, because when I think of stable currencies, Bitcoin’s wild market fluctuations and crashes is exactly what I’m imagining.
In terms of energy policy, wind and solar are ‘destructive’ and ‘harm natural environments’, but nuclear, coal and gas mining are not worth mentioning the environmental impact of. Also they want nuclear power, even though even optimistic estimates are that a plant couldn’t be online in under 20 years. Also while we’re at it, abolish all renewable targets and net zero policies. Honestly, this is farcical ideologically driven policy for a party claiming that they want the free market to determine things, because renewable energy sources make up the cheapest fuels on the market and such greeny organisations as AGL and Eraring Energy are talking about how they can offload existing coal fired plant assets and instead pivot to cheaper to produce power like solar farms.
The Libertarians are convinced the government education department is useless and ‘stifling competition’. They don’t want public schools but instead want school vouchers, to further eliminate equal access to education for all children close to home. They also don’t trust those damn school teachers, as they want more home schooling and ‘micro-schools’. This is all in the name of catering to children’s needs, of course, and not any ideological desires of parents to restrict children’s experiences of the world.
Also there’s the standard transphobia we are seeing pop up in far too many countries around the world. The Libertarians want legal definitions of women, bathroom bans, trans athletes banned from women’s sports (which I am absolutely certain they watch religiously to have opinions on this), want restrictions over access to healthcare, and what looks like a coded request for bans on conversion therapy to be lifted. Generally a lot of panicking for no real reason.
Despite being all for the free market, this does not include people coming to Australia. The Libertarians want all new arrivals to Australia to pay fees to immediately buy into “public services and infrastructure” (yet they don’t want to pay adequate taxes themselves for these things), they want short term visas limited to 5 years only, but citizenship only accessible after living in Australia for 10 year, and they want to restrict access to government services like Centrelink to citizens only, even though permanent residents already pay taxes contributing to these. Also they hate international treaty obligations.
They want free speech (as defined by people not being able to tell them that their speech is dangerous and not allowed), they want to abolish Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (aka the section that says you can’t say or do racist and anti-ethnic things that would offend or insult people), and they don’t want legislation that could convict people for spreading misinformation or disinformation, and they want to sell off the public broadcasters who have a remit to allow the broader population to air their views. Free speech to be a racist and lie to people and not get called on it! What a desire.
They have a privacy policy, but that largely is “yay Bitcoin”, “let me say whatever I want on social media with no consequences” (so is defamation legislation also on your hitlist orrr??), get rid of the e-Safety Commissioner (aka the organisation that helps people deal with among other things invasions of their privacy like cyber bullying and abuse), and they’re mad about Digital IDs existing at all. Also they don’t like mass surveillance laws in Australia, but given their other policies I can’t help but feel part of the motivation is “stop spying on my potential domestic terrorism” and convictions that the government is just itching to hunt them down for Bad Thought.
Finally, their foreign affairs policy is to be isolationist noncombatants who do not provide any military aid or participate in sanctions against other governments, withdraw from all international treaties and organisations possible including the the WHO, OECD, ICC, G20 and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (so we no longer have obligations to take in and support refugees), and focus on trade agreements. They are also very convinced we are being coerced by foreign powers. How dare we have mutual obligations with anywhere else in the world.
In terms of candidates, this isn’t really a party where the quality of candidate can vary between jurisdictions, but given who’s running for the Senate in NSW I will call them both out. Top of the combined ticket with HEART and Gerard Rennick People First is Craig Kelly, former MP, formerly of PHON, formerly of the UAP, formerly of the Liberal Party, all around right wing conspiracy theorist, Donald Trump cheerleader and COVID crackpot. You already know him. The other Libertarian running is Steve Christou, the socially conservative Cumberland Councillor who exited Labor Right in the direction of the far-right. If you’re not as up on local Western Sydney Council politics as I am, his multitude of party affiliations will not make much sense, but he’s also flirted with One Nation and some of his highlights on council include: opposing not only drag storytime but queer childrens books, queer parenting books and books about diverse families in the local council library; getting mad about Racism Not Welcome signs as being ‘divisive’ for the community and in particular should not be near a park dedicated to Anzacs because that would somehow harm the memories of Gallipoli by calling out racism; trying to scrap Welcomes to Country and Acknowledgements of Country; and generally being antagonistic and terrible toward his fellow councillors. Every time he does something that hits a newspaper larger than the Parra News I have to sigh, because he’s an absolutely terrible advertisement for the area.
Is this party trying to kill me?
Not openly in the party platform outside of a desire not to know about international medical situations by withdrawing from the WHO. They haven’t got a single open gun policy, for once.
Is this party trying to harm me?
The Libertarians are all in on transphobia and clearly do not have any care about the fallout or impact such policies have on the community. They also want to significantly downgrade the government services provided to people living in this country, and they want to be able to be racist in public without getting called out and sued for it.
Conclusion:
If you want a second perspective on what the Libertarian party’s policies look like in practice, look no further than a whole lot of the stuff going down in the US right now. Unhelpfully for the Libertarians, a live demonstration of the effect of their policies seems to be sending voters running for the Labor Party in the polls, which to me suggests there is not a groundswell in the community for such policy platforms.
