Domestic Policy

The Irony Party is not a one issue party, solely focused on Irony and verbal sleight of hand. We are not focused solely on the ridicule of other parties, although as a modern political organisation it is, of course, a central plank of strategy. No, in fact we have many policies, and in fact, thrive on policies, and on policy making. We are replete with policy. In policy, we are abundant.We do not shy away from devising policy. This having been said forthwith and notwithstanding, once policy has been conceived, formulated, debated,critiqued, investigated, denounced, reformed, reconfigured, tabulated, endorsed and rubber-stamped by party members, it is made known without hyperbole, cant or delay to interest groups, to think-tanks and academic institutions, to the media, and thence conducted with expedience, efficacy and accuracy to the Australian public.

Embargoed until July 28th 2006

On the Persecution of Corporations

An unlikely Irony Party Government would discriminate against the for-profit sector without fear or favour in the public interest. Essentially, the questions corporations might be asked, in each individual instance are two: how does this organisation justify its existence in the public interest, and what forms of exploitation and profiteering does it practise that undermine its worth to the community? Any organisation of merit will easily pass judgement under these basic criteria. The others - those that profit unnecessarily and opportunistically through services or goods they provide the community - will be persecuted to their end.

It is hoped our policy will be welcomed by those who have had the distinct sensation of late when wandering supermarkets and malls that they are not being provided for in this modern century so much as farmed. For much of human history usury, or the charging of interest, has been illegal and the salacious, solicitous activities of merchants and middle-men considered contemptible at best. In our era we have set aside this sensible prejudice to our great disadvantage, and now find ourselves overrun by the most desperate, material, and talentless our society produces, elevated through their misdeeds to the eight-million strong global class of executives and millionaires. And these unimaginative and amoral creatures - together with the millions more who aspire to their class - have made a shallow farce of the world. Of late they have turned their hands to the farming of Western populations in order to supplement their wealth, and differentiate themselves from the commons. It is recognised there are difficult times ahead, and now is the time for the preparation of fortresses and bulwarks against the night.

The threads of historical necessity are in evidence here, and the symptoms of cultural decline. The corporations that once plundered the far reaches of the Earth in order to funnel wealth back to Europe have in this era of reduced resources and turned inwards and begun increasingly to milk the populations of the West.. The consumer and the worker generally find themselves to be one and the same - the twenty-first century peasant has two points of interaction with the corporate teat - firstly in the provision of undervalued skills and labour and secondly at the point of purchase of overpriced products.

Money serves increasingly not as a universally comprehensible means, but as a system of tokens through which the symbols of status can be exchanged, doors opened, freedoms purchased. Obviously it has no absolute value - its purpose is to differentiate the citizenry, a system of permissions preceded with the dollar sign and coded with numbers rather than colours or uniforms or titles. Salary and price tag, controlled by the executive class and the State, are innocuous-seeming markers of status and power that determine, in Australian society, very different levels of access to food, living conditions, freedom to travel, security for family and for the future, and the trinkets by which status is subtly and unsubtly displayed. The pretence is that somehow this system is linked with the idea of merit. In reality the cost of advancement is servitude and acceptance of the status quo.

Ancient and modern lore informs us that immortality confers a peculiar and inhuman attitude on the organism that possesses it. Corporations hundreds of years old, tentacles deep in the world's aristocracies and gerontocracies and in the 'parties' of the limited democracies of the West, are powerful entities, and their long-term intentions, by now, must be fairly chilling - and inconvenient - to the man on the street. The assumption appears to be that they should not be asked to cease operating, although their operation has not been measured against possible alternate models.

But corporations were never intended to exist in perpetuity. Historically, corporations were formed for a specific project, and then disbanded at its conclusion. This was an essentially capitalist model, providing for the profiteering of corrupt investors seeking to benefit from the ingenuity, labour, and resources of others. But the lifetime of the corporation's existence was limited, as was the scope of its defining project.

The Irony Party, in a bizarre alternate universe in which government somehow falls to us, would challenge the morbid assumption that the multinational corporations' power is unshakeable. In our view an emptied corporate worksite - be it a post-office, a printing-press, a cinema complex, a factory, or the hub of a communications service provider - is an opportunity, not a disaster.

The recent experience of Argentina indicates that the collapse and departure of corporations from national industry is not necessarily a disaster, since the essential components of the operation -infrastructure and a skilled workforce - are left virtually intact. Production continues without the parasitic class of middlemen. This model would apply as well at television stations and recording labels in Australia as it has at Argentinian steelworks.

Those who support the capitalist system that props itself up by the farming of its own citizens through work and consumption are quick to refer to the old dichotomy of Twentieth Century ideology that suggests Communism is the only alternative to the free Market and a culture of mutual rape. Any who oppose the notion of profiteering from one's compatriots must be the slaves of the idea of the all-powerful State that intends to minutely direct all human affairs.

But in making this convenient bifurcation the apologists for the peurile ideology of Dog-Eat-Dog are chiefly interested in creating distractions that reduce attention on their own preferred devices of control. And they ignore, or set aside, a third option, which presumes neither State control or the rapacious, amoral excesses accepted in the corporate era.

The model for the third option is also in evidence in today's world, although absurdly discredited and marginalised. The not-for-profit sector in the West is composed of organisations that in the main rely neither on shareholder patronage or direct State support. These organisations are committed to service provision, pay salaries to those who work for them, in short, play roles in society parallel to those of corporations. But they omit the institutionalised corruption that allows executives to 'earn' twenty or forty or a hundred times more than other employees, that permits the siphoning of the organisation's resources as 'profits' to undeserving 'shareholders' and normalises the regular economic exploitation of any who partake of the institution's services.

Not-for-profit organisations are often owned and operated collectively by those who give their time to them. They are capable of advocacy, of political action, of service provision to communities and individuals. People involved are paid, but remain because of their commitment to the activities of the organisation, less often for reasons of personal material advancement.

What is proposed here is merely the same system of manufacture and service provision that exists now, but without the rampant institutionalised corruption that cripples our own culture. It is a symptom of the problem that the argument for the removal of legitimised extortion and exploitation from the workplace and the marketplace needs to be put at all. The status quo, however extreme, normalises extreme conditions. It is easy to imagine this is so of other societies and other eras, while naturally, the status quo in our own culture appears normal to us. And it is easy to accept the perversions of other peoples, however morally bankrupt, inhumane or ideologically unsound, where we have no responsibility for endorsing and tacity supporting those social norms. The acceptance that something is seriously wrong with our own civilisation leads inevitably to the idea that someone - some of us -must take responsibility for producing a remedy.

Many will consider a project aimed at the resurrection of the idea that 'usury is sin', the end of the doctrine of Growth, of perpetual increase, implausibly difficult or too disruptive to be constructive. The decorporatisation of Western culture may seem an impossible project. Nonetheless, this - decorporatisation - is the certain aim and stated policy of the Irony Party of Australia, a commitment made in the historical surety of frequent, sudden and signicant political and cultural change. The historical and traditional antipathy in Western societies to the Merchant is an indicator of the brevity and of this era of Mercantilism - of economic fundamentalism founded on social Darwinism and the crude ideological dichotomies of capital and labour. And another secret of history, forgotten anew in each era, is that ideological and material empires fall far more swiftly than they can be established. And they always fall, when their credibility is exhausted.

If adverse economic conditions and other modes of persecution force corporate entities to leave Australia's shores, and new institutions of the same unpleasant contitutions are prevented from forming, it seems likely their functions will fall to not-for-profit and emergent community organisations, not corrupted over centuries by an ugly colonial heritage and the legitimisation of 'interest', growth, the 'profit motive', and the normalisation of extortion and mutual exploitation as a natural part of daily life.

Embargoed until June 29th 2006

The Abolition of The State

The abolition of Parliament is a satisfying object and a suitably radical policy for a modern, vibrant political party, with - potentially - substantial symbolic value in the rejuvenation of Australian political life, but upon long consideration of the sort that Messrs Fawkes and co. failed to indulge in, might prove somewhat nihilistic and self-defeating.

The offending entity from the perspective of the Australian, is not the Parliament itself, nor courts or councils or even the Monarchy, but the idea and the reality of the State. Therefore the Irony Party of Australia cannot condone any proposal for the destruction of institutions such as the House of Representatives and the Senate which, differently balanced, might become useful organs of a genuinely democratic government. Rather what we proposal is the rebuilding of these institutions, in the hope of their recovery from the damage done them by the 'executive', the hands into which the will and power of Parliament have fallen.

The Irony Party of Australia proposes, therefore, the preservation of the forms of these traditional institutions. But we also advocate the rejection of the worst of this European culture, as generations of Australians have since the beginning of the 'settling' of the continent.

'I came from old Europe, 16,000 miles across two oceans, and I thought it a respectable distance from the hated Austrian rule The old style: oppressors and oppressed. A sad reflection, very sad reflection, for any educated and honest man.

For what did we come into this colony? Chi sta bene non si move, is an old Roman proverb. If then in old Europe, we had a bird in the hand, what silly fools we were to venture across two oceans, and try to catch two jack-asses in the bush of Australia! ... I hate the oppressor, let him wear a red, blue, white, or black coat." - and here certainly, I tackled in right earnest with our silver and gold lace on Ballaarat, and called on all my fellow-diggers, irrespective of nationality, religion, and colour, to salute the "Southern Cross" as the refuge of all the oppressed from all countries on Earth. - The applause was universal, and accordingly I received my full reward: Prisons and Chains! Old style.'

from The Eureka Stockade, by Rafaello Carboni, published in Ballaraat 1865

In the name of an independent Australian mode of Government that is yet to emerge, we do advocate, therefore, the abolition of the state, the challenging of 'authorities', the removal of the tier of Government called 'executive', and the reorganisation of Parliament accordingly.

On first consideration it may appear that these institutions - State and Parliament, or are inextricably entwined - to some extent, in the modern Western context, they are. But in a broader context, the State is a unifying concept distinct from any particular social or political institution. The State can be operated by means of democracy, oligopoly, tyranny or theocracy. A Parliament, for example, or a High Court, is antithetical to some of these forms.

The Irony Party proposes rather the abolition of executive power, through the recognition of the organic nature of shifting power relations at the apex of any political or social system and the implementation of mechanisms to prevent monopoly at any level. The institutions therefore are not the object to be unravelled. The State itself, which harnesses the institutions of judiciary, can be seen in this context as the actual and symbolic manifestation of hegemony - the embodiment of centralised power. And in this context the State, characterised by material controls and inducements and a single hierarchy leading to executive power, can be seen as a damaging, artificial construct at odds with the operation of a free and democratic society and distinct from the separate institutions that have evolved, generally, as mechanisms for limiting rather than facilitating the free exercise of power.



Embargoed until June 25th 2006

The Australian Continent

Elsewhere in these pages, the Irony Party of Australia has announced its preference for the abolition of the State in its current form, in itself an innocuous enough suggestion hardly likely to raise an eyebrow. But for some the open advocacy of this adjustment of Australia's political affairs might appear objectionable inasmuch as it represents the dissolution of the concept of Australia as a 'nation.'

Others, however, attest that the idea of nationhood as imagined and promoted by the State is largely a phantasy, credible only where it borrows from genuine Australian community sentiment. The conservatives and patriots who argue that the laconic Australian character was forged in the common hardship of past generations usually neglect to mention the responsibility of State and Government for inflicting these hardships on the citizenry. Two glaring cases in point - the punitive conditions of Australia's settlement and the disastrous deployment of Australian troops to the Gallipoli peninsula during the First World War.

Certainly, these are common experiences of terrible suffering likely to create bonds in a new community. But these were not the experiences of politicians, or those with power within the hierarchy of the State. They were exclusively experiences of the victims, detractors, opponents and failures of the State. They were the experiences of those the British democratic state deemed unworthy and transported, or the experiences of young men sent away to be killed in wars of Empire.

The case for the alternative is founded on recognition that the concept of a nation is by definition non-pluralist - that it contains the idea of the eradication of cultural and political alternatives. That the centralised power of the executive is inherently damaging to the community, parasitic upon it, and not supportive of community aspirations as is so frequently claimed.

This is not to argue that there is no common sense of identity in Australia. Australians have a strong shared sense of identity, despite all that divides. The Australians identity is the identity of a people who have been hounded by those who set themselves up as authorities, proscribe laws, assume titles, establish tariffs and taxes and licenses and other paraphernalia, and appropriate the functions formerly provided as a matter of course by members of the community.

If today we are in practise a community obedient to self-anointed leaders, it is the result of centuries of conditioning by patriarchs that until recently was resisted fiercely, and on this continent. But the vestige of past revolt against bureaucracy and hierarchy are preserved in the modern perception of the Australian character, now perversely adopted by Prime Minister and State institutions as their own - as though this independent, unperterbable, harassed and 'national persona' could be somehow include the repressive State that is in reality the fire in which the iron was forged.

With this differentiation made, the character in question, it can be suggested, is not born of an Australian nation but of the Australian continent. This concept is not restricted to those who hold a Certificate of Citizenship granted by the State, but is inclusive of all those who have arrived and lived or been born on this continent in the last centuries of invasion and settlement, and those who were here long before. What is the purpose of drawing this distinction between nation and continent? To revive the old mistrust of power and authority so well proven in the short history of modern Australia, and once in the forefront of the minds of all of those who had been transported, invaded, or otherwise abused by the State.

The idea of a continent, in contrast to that of the nation, is essentially pluralist. A continent encompasses numerous smaller political and cultural entities, and endures despite shifting ideology and political allegiances. It is a region within which an individual might have multiple allegiances as well as a sense of belonging to the whole. The possibilities for the future Australian continent include a return to a continent of many countries, and a continent coexisting, contradictory narratives with no easily discernible, unifying story that binds us to an unassailable and punitive power.

Australia as a nation-state, it can be argued, is an implausible arrangement, if only because of the vastly different environmental and cultural conditions. Because of the vast distances involved a truly homogenous culture is impossible, and therefore real democracy or political unity also unworkable.

However, for those interested in control of the population, rather than any true representation of the will of the people in the decisions of Government, the sprawling arrangement of Australia's various communities is ideal for the purposes of centralised power. Distant cities and regions are bound to the hub by communications channels that affords the few with the greatest access an enormous advantage. Information flows outwards from the centre in a tide and trickles in, its dissemination to vastly different communities streamlined by the ownership of a few, and filtered by the shared and vested interests of media owners, corporate and political advertisers, and regulators - State authorities. Conversely, opposition to these same institutionalised powers is local, and cannot be easily corroborated across regions, particularly where mass communication channels cannot be refocused beyond the capital cities where the powerful have their glass citadels.


Embargoed until June 26th 2006

Decorporatisation

While devising policies for the Irony Party of Australia, an unregistered political party with a relatively low profile as yet in Canberra, a lowly researcher with the Party plugged the term 'decorporatisation' into Google, and got the following response in numbers of results:

decorporatization 232
decorporatisation 126
de-corporatization 731
de-corporatisation 599
decorporatise 31
decorporatize 92
discorporatisation 2
(search conducted 1st August 2006 from Australia)

Even allowing for a 'Google-bias' based on the distorting factor that the search engine is operated and owned by a large corporation, this low number of results for an Internet search of one word makes the Irony Party's bold new policy of 'decorporatisation' almost a coinage of the term.

(For a point of comparison:

ironyparty 865
"irony party" 3440
corporatise 49000
corporatize 40200
privatise 2,000,000
privatize 4,010,000
irony 44,000,000)

This use of the term 'decorporatise' is satirical to an extent in that it resembles the reified language of managementspeak. But this stylistic appropriation has the advantage of making the meaning of the term comprehensible - sans irony - to senior management.

The unsurprising omission of the term 'decorporatise' from the corporate lexicon that has permeated common language represents a large ideological gap that apparantly hasn't needed filling with a word - an unused meaning. The natural alternative to privatise - 'publicise' - has been appropriated for a different purpose.

The obvious implication is the ubiquity of the corporation. It's almost impossible to conceive of a Twenty-First Century without the corporations, however desirable the removal of this insidious vehicle of institutionalised corruption might be. And if removing the now universal phenomenon of corporations from modern Western culture is impossible, to voice the possibility is merely frustrating and unrealistic.

Alarming or unthinkable though it may be, the term 'decorporatise' does have particular application and currency for the present day, even when compared with near-synonyms. And for the few individuals and political parties who see the end of the corporate era as no more than a few deft legislative changes away, the exercising of the term and its associated meaning is essential for a policy designed to dismantle the local iteration of corporate culture and deprivilege our own cheesy executive class.

The once common term 'nationalisation', now considered as ugly and obsolete as 'eugenics' and 'Lebensraum' does the idea of outlawing profit-seeking organisations and implies the dichotomous alternative of State control. The term decorporatisation, while it hints at a world that is less commercialised, less mercenary and materialist, defines only the problem to be excised, and not the prescription for the alternative. It provides for the alternative of a society in which services are provided by not-for-profit independent providers, local co-operatives and community organisations - for the delineation of the profit sector as a problem in itself, distinct from its ideological foundations.

In this sense, the happy notion of decorporatisation is not an invitation for an invocation of Stalinist State controls over commerce and manufacture. It leaves behind the tedious Capitalist/Marxist dichotomy that still obsesses the portly, incontinent, and white-haired ghosts of yesteryear who are the longest-standing Senators and Members of our antiquated Westminster Parliament. Decorporatisation refers to the removal of a system of institiutionalised corruption normalised mutual exploitation, and legitimised amorality. Decorporatisation is the natural consequence of a reconsideration of the corporate entity in terms of its value to the people at large, rather than its value to a fortunate and ill-conceived few.

Considered in the context of the public good and the possibility of decorporatisation, it seems ludicrous that the exploitative conditions for work and 'consumer' that are the cost of being serviced by corporate culture.

Where economy, or resource handling, and trade is important to a civilisation, the idea that 'profit' or 'interest' or perpetual growth might be deliberately built into the system is clearly pre-emptive sabotage in terms of how that system will serve the citizenry. The idea that some salaries might be a hundred or three hundred times greater than others, or that those who position themselves for the largest salaries are somehow the most meritorious among us, rather than the least, is absurd. Take the perspective of any citizen of a less corrupted and Mercantile era looking at our society and the imposts, irregularities, and inequities we accept are preposterous and unprecedented in recorded history. The dominance of corrupt corporate institutions in our era is symbolic of a long period of decline in institutions and in the devolution of particular ethical ideals in Western civilisation. At one time the energies of rapacious corporations were directed outwards against the world, bringing stolen resources home from foreign lands. Now the corporations have turned inward and feed on the descendants of the populations that deployed them to the colonies.

The deeply ingrained, legalised corruption so objectionable to those who live, today, without the remaining dwindling comforts enjoyed by the commons in the West, that allows the wealthy to displace an ever-increasing proportion of the common wealth into private hands, also represent the emergence of old historical patterns - the establishment of an aristocracy, of implacable class boundaries based on wealth and power and birth - on access to the resources that might more reasonably be equally available to all.

The inevitable result is a civilisation of vast inequity, in which resources fall into the hands of the most devious and least compassionate - those best able to cheat and delude their compatriots. Worse, it supports those who in the absence of any passion, calling, art make their own security their first priority and turn their hand to improving their own situation relative to their fellows. Without the distractions of or the imagination or they become part of the hierarchical and parasitic managerial class that lives by harvesting the talent, goodwill, labour, and invention of more skilled and capable citizens.


The changes to legislation that remedy these damaging and corrupt elements of are in reality entirely conceivable and can be readily implemented. More, these remedies do not necessarily involve the creation of communes, the abandonment of personal property, or the construction of Gulags in remote regions of the country. For example, when a Fair Pay Commission, or some such body, is setting a minimum wage, it might be considered an opportune moment to set, concurrently, a maximum wage - the maximum conscionable multiple for the largest salary in Australia, when compared with the smallest and the average.

Whether a Fair Pay commission could conscionably set the limit at anything like the current multiples is an interesting question - actually it's surprisingly easy to imagine a Swiftian press release declaring that 70 or 100 times the lowest salaries is a reasonable benchmark for an executive maximum. After all the market sets executive salaries. And it's important for the board to retain senior employees of the highest quality, who can only be won with the promise of seven and eight figure remuneration.

While the Irony Party would prefer a total and immediate decorporatisation, a more prudent policy will see organisations given the option either to migrate to non-profit status over a period of a few short years, or gradually return all profits to the community in the form of sharply increasing corporate taxation (rising to 100% of revenue over a period of several years). As a matter of course, measures would be established to prevent the siphoning of resources offshore in the interim. Executives who fail to comply will these new laws - and the divestment of personal wealth - will be hunted down and killed by well-trained posses of concerned and committed community members.

Besides the obvious benefits decorporatisation will bring, it might be considered there is a great untapped potential for exciting a proper interest in the project among the citizenry. Properly exercised in the short term, decorporatist interests might easily obtain seats in Parliament on the strength of public disaffection with big business and the political and legal institutions that support it (although substantial funding may be difficult to obtain).

There is a wealth of historical material recording a litany of corporate crimes, abuses, exploitation and devastation that have affected every human alive in recent centuries, and always for the advantage of a few. Recently, resentment towards multinational oil conglomerates, for example, banks, and shonky private health insurance outfits have been an obvious and latent source of political capital that corporate-dependent operators from the major political parties have been unwilling to touch.

In general, this accumulation of latent resentment is the most significant weakness of corporate culture. In these difficult times the imperative of perpetual, endless growth means big business has no option but to bite ever more deeply, extract more from the populace than was taken the year before, and antagonise ever further the growing number of discorporatists who vocally advocate the dismantling of the profit sector.


Embargoed until August 4th 2006