Australia First Party

Can the Australia First Party help fix the plight of ordinary Australians?

The statement of 10 January 2011 from the Provisional Management Committee of the Australia First Party-10jan11"> included below was submitted as an anonymous comment on 1 February 2011. As The Australia First Party seems not to have its own usable web site, it was published here but not as a front page article. Of course it would have been more appropriate for such a lengthy document to have been published on an Australia First Web site and linked to from here. The (http://www.australiafirstparty.com.au) as returned by a with the terms "Australia First" (quote marks ommitted) could not be reached. Because this dodcument appears not to be published where I can find it on the web I have decided to publish it here, but with my own comments.

Can the Australia First Party help fix the plight of ordinary Australians?

My own view on the Australia First Party has not been firmly fixed either in its favour or against it. In its favour, the Australia First Party tries to address a lot of critical issues which seriously affect our environment and our quality of life which all but very few other political organisations will go near. The most critical of course is population growth caused principally by high immigration. On the negative side are questions about the past of its leaders, including Jim Saleam, which have yet to be addressed as far as we can tell. As has been said before, whilst past membership of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party of Australia is not necessarily reason to dismiss a person for all time, I believe ordinary Australians, whose support the Australia First Party is seeking, are entitled to an explanation as to how, even if forty years ago now, a leading member of the Australia First Party found so appealing an ideology that any mature, decent, right thinking person must find morally repugnant.

What also does not help is the use of the terminology "refugee hordes". Of course, any person who wants to preserve our way of life and our living standards must be concerned about how the arrival of large numbers of new people, whether legal immigrants or destitute refugees will affect us, but the use of such terminology could be taken as denying their humanity and as racist.

The statement below says that the Australia First Party "wages community campaigns of all sorts to build links with fellow Australians."

If this is true and if it can be shown how its contributions have actually helped community groups win their campaigns, this would be a point in which the Australia First Party could compare itself most favourably with just about every other political organisation in the country, large or small, from the far right to the far 'left'. In reality, even the parties of the supposed left such as the Greens and the have again and again failed to constructively contribute to community campaigns. If they had, I think many more of those campaigns would have been successful.

So I would be interested to know what campaigns like those which are publicised on the pages of candobetter, the Australia First Party has been able to help.

I think the most effective way to fight injustice in this country would be to make law . There is no way that Australia's political rulers would have been able to get away with making so many harmful changed to our ways of life - privatisations, financial deregulation and other 'free market' 'reforms' the GST, high immigration, destruction of our environment, sending our soldiers to fight in unjust overseas wars, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan - if Australians had the constitutional right, as do the Swiss, to force any decision by any parliament, local, state or federal to be put a referendum, provided enough signatures can be collected on petitions.

If the Australia First Party, as well as addressing other concerns raised above, were to energetically launch a campaign to make part of the Australian Constitution, it would almost certainly very quickly come to be regarded as a relevant political party by many more Australians.