Andreas – Joakal

I have finished a working live version online: ShockSeat.com. This site features three major parts at present; Politics, Issues and Forums. A site to improve understanding of Australian politics and party positions without the intellectual snob.

Politics, boredom room

Politics section is aimed to provide simple explanation of politics as well information on parties for interested voters. Some future articles planned are glossary of political terms, marginal seats being great stuff (lots of benefits as candidates want your vote), safe seats being evil (safe seat candidates give more weight to marginal seat voters, why am I less equal?), duopolistic issues such as Internet Filtering scheme (check next section on Issues here). If you are looking for an well-written political articles, you'll be sorely disappointed as I am working hard to make it easy and simple so some stuff may be not enough (More from About).

But along the way, I was afraid all these easy articles would have the stigma of 'politics = boring' attached. Plus I wanted to know what each party stood for. You most likely read the newspaper or turned on the TV during the upcoming election campaign; what happens? Labor and Coalition trying to drown each other in attacks or policies. Where are the other parties? I sometimes see flyers but even then I have no idea what each party stands for and did not want to read through all the broadcasts for certain issues. I also noticed other people were like me, complaining that the major parties were drowning media in policies, political nonsense and indirectly spread apathetic attitudes.

Issues, to blow with

My initiative on issues would be to analyse as much as I can as to their exact position on issues in a simple way, for example "Most For", "Neutral", "Most Against". Plus to further make it unfair for the big shouting parties, I'm putting them on the same level as the minor parties. There's more ideas such as gauging best position (you say you do this, but you do opposite on voting on laws) but determining the best way is tricky. Despite this, if this issue initiative would be popular with visitors, it would show that party positions on issues that are unclear or going against clear election promises would scare voters away to parties that are able to carry out their promises or be clear for their voters about their position on issues.

At present are two issues I checked upon were "Japanese Whaling" and "Internet Filtering Scheme", already I found it quite interesting the positions of each party such as I assumed the Liberal party was against any form of Internet Filtering schemes in Australia but apparently they are looking for one that works. This would be of some concern to people who are against Internet Filtering schemes as both major parties show some support for it. I did notice the Greens did not have a statement or election promise anywhere that they were against not just the current filtering scheme but future ones. I would be interested to do some journalism and ask them but I do not have time (More on How Party Positions are determined).

Forums

I plan to have much more issues, but again, I don't have the time in which the Forums come in. If you want to suggest an issue, or direction, or help analyse party positions, you would be most welcome to post. Other than that, I will be trying to analyse ways to make democracy work.