The Pirate Party of Australia has been unhappy with the structure functioning of Pirate Parties International for some time and after the PPAU membership gave their board the power to potentially leave international organisation at their last national conference.

After making proposals to change the organisation’s statutes and to hold an extraordinary online GA before the scheduled GA that will be held in Warsaw in the first weekend of July.

At first the PPI board agreed to holding an online GA to be held on the 14th of March. However in a board meeting held on 8 February 2015 a formal motion to hold the meeting was defected with only two of the board members present voting for the motion.

As a consequence the Australian Pirate Party sent an email to PPI resigning from the organisation. That email is printed below. What this means for the movement in the future we will explore in following articles and it will give new impetus to the Pirate Visions series that we are publishing.

Dear members of PPI,

It is with a heavy heart I announce the resignation (termination of membership) of Pirate Party Australia from Pirate Parties International,effective immediately, as per a motion resolved unanimously by the National Council.[1]

The Party no longer believes that there is any potential for reform left in PPI, and we have spent all of the energy we are willing to in pursuit of that end. This was compounded by the callous abuse of power and outright hostile culture of the PPI board which has been very clearly demonstrated over the last week.

However, building a new model for collaboration starts today.

Pirate Party Australia will continue to collaborate on international projects, and we invite those interested parties to consider their options. Pirate Party Australia will be working with the Icelandic
Pirate Party to conceive a Pirate journal project in association with the Pirate Times which should allow a more in-depth view of the Pirate way of thinking.

We are also preparing a shared resource portal for all Pirate Parties,
but it is of course very early days as we did not expect to be forced
into this position so suddenly.

http://pirateint.org

It is intended that the wiki provided should be used as a common resource portal for Pirate Parties. Please do list your international contacts, available translators and any other resources your Party would be willing to share in order to support collaboration between Pirate Parties.

We have migrated our proposal for a collaborative organisation to the new, general international wiki. As we now no longer have the time constraints of the broken PPI statutes to deal with, we can slowly explore our future organisational options without pressure.

A temporary mailing list has been set up for the purpose of exploring future collaboration options. Shoot me an email if you’re interested and
I will add you.

Within a few weeks, we hope to have a Discourse[2] instance up as well to provide a safe, relatively self-regulated meeting place to discuss Pirate issues, provide a meeting point for international collaboration and give us an opportunity to break with the past on a completely modern
platform.

Never forget that PPI is not the movement. It was meant to be a organisation to help Pirate Parties work together. In the end, we only ever did this in spite of PPI, not due to it.

You are also welcome to discuss this with us on our IRC network, PirateIRC, which has been a cooperative effort between several Pirate Parties for several years with no formal affiliation to PPI.

We look forward to you joining us in this exciting new opportunity for the Pirate movement.

[1] http://pirateparty.org.au/wiki/Minutes/National_Council/2015-02-11
[2] http://www.discourse.org/

(This email also serves as our notice to the board.)

– —
Regards,

Brendan Molloy
President
Pirate Party Australia

Featured image: CC BY-SA 3.0 Marc Hatot

About Andrew Reitemeyer

I joined the Pirate Party of Lower Saxony in Germany in April 2012, once I found out that non citizens were welcome to join and become active members of the Party.
I joined the Pirate Times soon after it was started as a proof reader and am now an editor and author. Since then I have returned to my native New Zealand and joined the Pirate Party of New Zealand.
Politically I come from the libertarian left and have, up to now, not regarded any political party as having a solution for the democratic deficit that envelops the world. With the advent of the Pirate Party, which truly embraces grass roots democracy, I have found a political home. The Pirate Times is a way I can contribute to furthering the Pirate Movement around the world.
Skype: frithogar

 

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The Pirate Party of Australia has been unhappy with the structure functioning of Pirate Parties International for some time and after the PPAU membership gave their board the power to…