To help Launch the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice launch its latest campaign: En Masse, we are screening the exciting new documentary on remix culture: RiP: A remix manifesto.
In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers. The film features mash-up musician Girl Talk, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, Brazil's Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil and pop culture critic Cory Doctorow.
The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice’s En Masse Campaign has three main aims. To Rethink Copyright in our digital age; to Reclaim culture by encouraging people to step outside the current intellectual property regime; and to provide the tools to Redo cultural outputs, remixing them into something new.
The Your Voice In House website has recently been upgraded to make contacting your parliamentary representatives even easier.
You can now search for an individual member of any Australian parliament by name. As you type, a list of possible matches comes up. All you have to do from there is select the appropriate member and you will be able to see their contact details and send them an email.
We have also added the ability to search by portfolio. If you want to contact the relevant minister(s) about a particular issue it is easy to find the relevant minister and shadow minister to contact.
Both these improvements mean that you can be more directed in who you are contacting and save yourself a lot of time looking up who to contact whilst freeing up more time for you to do the actual lobbying.
We hope you like the improvements. Please feel contact us with any comments on the new site by emailing
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The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice is looking for volunteers to help our Lobbyocracy Campaign to expose the dodgie developments that donations have helped facilitate.
Whether it is the $300,000 donation to the Victorian Labor Party that saw the Walker Corporation get approval for the Kew Cottages redevelopment or the interference in the Port Phillip local council that will mean the redevelopment of the St Kilda Triangle – we want you to help us uncover the dirt.
The project will include working on the Lobbyocracy wiki (www.lobbyocracy.org.au) as well as the development of a google map to help illustrate the point.
Eager volunteers can contact the Centre by emailing
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- no technical knowledge required.
The recent election in Queensland saw Anna Bligh's Labor Government hold onto power by a narrow margin. This, coupled with new electoral boundaries, meant that we have had to completely overhaul the data we had for the Queensland Parliament on the Your Voice In House website (www.yourvoiceinhouse.org.au).
Having now done that, there has never been a better time for Queenslanders to get in touch with their newly elected members of parliament. They are fresh faced and open to new ideas when they are still in shock about actually being elected – why not exploit that?
The Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice is excited to announce the launch of our latest campaign: Your Voice in House.Check out the website today:
The "your voice" website enables you to contact your representatives in government. When you search on your Postcode or Locality you get a list of everyone that represents you at both the State and Federal level in all houses of parliament. You can then select the representatives you want to email and send an email through the site.
The site is still a “beta site”. This means that, as far as we can tell, the site is working fantastically and it is now available for large scale usage. There might be a few minor hic-ups along the way, but we'll be keeping a close eye on things and will tighten it up where we need to.
We think you'll agree this is a pretty exciting initiative. What is more exciting is that it is only stage one – we've big plans for this site. However, a site like this can only continue with your support. If you aren't a member of the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice, please consider becoming one today. With your support we will be able to further develop this site and promote it further so that it can be put to its full potential.
That Election Expenditure should be capped removing incentives for political parties and candidates to fundraise.
That there needs to be a centralisation of disclosure regimes and that the various state branches of a political party should be treated as one entity to provide a more realistic picture of the funding of political parties.
All donations to political parties must be banned with the possible exception of small donations from individuals to a maximum of $500 per financial year.
That the public funding of elections should continue to be made available but that:
there should be provisions for access to public funding for new political parties
that the money should be only made available for electoral expenditure and not an automatic entitlement
The rules of the system will help determine the type of politics that are engaged in.
It is our belief that with these changes there would be significant improvements to the transparency and accountability of political parties.
Because Australians currently have the ability to buy political influence, debate has been restricted in Australia and political parties have been able to ignore the concerns of their rank and file members. Why look to support from your members when you can just receive a handful of donations from large donors?
We believe that by making the above changes we would see a re engagement with the membership base of political parties which can only be good for democracy.
