Australians can elect parliaments that work for them.
ACFP's release of Issue No. 7 of "Australia Together".
In 2025 Australians will vote in another federal election, this time to elect their nation’s 48th parliament.
Prior to the election, Australian Community Futures Planning (ACFP) will produce The State of Australia 2025. This is an update of a new type of report now being made freely available to all Australians regularly just before each federal election. It is a comprehensive report providing factual details and summarised information on whether, during the term of the outgoing federal parliament, Australia moved towards or further away from a better future of wellbeing and security for everyone. You can see the report on the 46th parliament (2019 to 2022) here - The State of Australia 2022. A video summary is available here.
With the upcoming report on The State of Australia 2025, Australians will each be able to make their own decision on who to vote for in the election of the 48th parliament based on sound evidence of the performance of the 47th parliament and the current government in progress towards a better future. They will also be able to assess whether the policies being offered by candidates and parties will help us become the nation we have said we want to be and take us to that preferred future via the safest paths.
Australian voters will be able to do this because, after years of research about the values and preferences of Australians, ACFP has developed a draft consolidated statement of what people who live here have said they want for their future. This draft is called the Vision for Australia Together and it assembles on one page a list of the preferences expressed by Australians for the best future they can imagine whenever they have been asked about that in the 21st century.
ACFP has also developed a structure for a plan that Australians can use to draft an integrated set of Targets and Strategies to make that Vision a reality. That plan is called Australia Together.
The Vision for Australia Together is essentially a list of the expressed preferences of Australians for the future of their society, natural environment, economy and democracy. It also describes the safe paths toward that future and, by extension, the paths we would prefer to avoid - some obvious ones being war, inequality, planetary heating, species loss and abuses of power and human rights. It is the agenda preferred by the people of Australia, not the agenda that political parties might be willing to offer or wish to impose. And it can help Australians easily and independently assess for themselves whether and to what extent candidates and parties are really committed to what is most important to voters, their children, their local communities, and their homeland.
This is a very new way to approach elections. By describing what we want to be and become as a nation - and by describing that before we go to elections - the Vision for Australia Together helps Australians rise above the short term horizons of politics and politicians. It gives them a clear yardstick by which they can assess the fitness of candidates for parliament based on their demonstrated commitment to what Australians really value for themselves and future generations. It effectively provides political candidates with a job description - an outline of the ultimate purpose for which we are electing them.
The fact that we try to run elections without a job description for candidates is part of what is making our election system dysfunctional. Nowhere else do we run competitive selection processes to employ someone without telling candidates what the job is. Nowhere else do we let the candidates set the job description themselves. And nowhere else would we expect such a process to attract candidates suitable for the job we need done. So the sooner we stop holding elections without describing the job, the better off we and the candidates will be.
With the Vision for Australia Together functioning in effect as that overarching job description we can keep politicians’ eyes firmly fixed on what we the people of Australia want to build together as a nation. In short, the Australian people can set the overarching agenda for their nation. Rather than wait for politicians to set their narrow agendas, we can tell them what we value, what we are trusting them with, and what will constitute an abuse of our trust.
Any candidate or political party willing to commit to the Vision for Australia Together will readily emerge in this process as one more likely to deserve our trust. Any candidate or party whose policies are at odds with that Vision will emerge as less likely to deliver the future we prefer. It’s a simple extra step that we can take to help us select parliaments that will work for us.
The whole process of drafting the Vision and drafting a plan to make it a reality helps Australians to make informed decisions about the best parliamentarians, free of distractions from mainstream media, social media, adversarial political point-scoring and lies.
Of course the success of this new way of running elections depends on how well we draft the Vision and the plan itself and whether all that truly reflects what Australians value and want. This is why comment channels are always open on the ACFP website on the drafts of the Vision and the plan.
Having said that, the Vision for Australia Together is fully aligned with and supportive of what Australians themselves have said they value and want for their future. ACFP hasn’t made up the Vision to suit itself. It’s the words of Australians about what they aspire to. You can find out how closely the Vision for Australia Together is aligned with the values of Australians in this Fact Sheet: Does the Vision for Australia Together reflect what Australians have said they value and want?
The current draft of the Vision for Australia Together is freely available on the ACFP website at all times. If this describes the life and country you want by 2050 or sooner, then with Australia Together and The State of Australia 2025 you can help make this Vision a reality.
Making the Vision for Australia Together a reality.
As I’ve said, ACFP has distilled the draft Vision for Australia Together from the community’s responses over the last couple of decades in surveys, community engagement, focus groups, local planning forums, and other types of research about what Australians value now and for the future. Australians are very consistent and coherent about what they want for their future and this has made it quite easy to assemble a draft Vision in which we can have a high degree of confidence that it does actually reflect our preferences for our future as a nation.
View a Fact Sheet about the alignment between the Vision for Australia Together and what Australians value and want here.
Comments are always welcome on the draft Vision here.
Having developed the draft Vision, ACFP has then been able to assemble a structure for a long term national plan that will help Australians make that Vision a reality. We’ve called that plan Australia Together.
Read the latest draft of Australia Together - Issue No. 7, February 2024 - here.
The structure of the plan helps Australians work together efficiently to build their own agenda for safe passage to a better future. It is designed to help them select the safest paths to that future – for instance, the paths that will ensure no increase in poverty or inequality, no reduction in our capacity for peace, no exclusion of minorities, continuing national prosperity, a safer climate and a sustainable natural environment, fairness in society and the economy, and ethics in our governance system.
Australia Together, like any other long term plan, is a work in progress. The first issue of what we call the “starting draft” of Australia Together was released in May 2021 and six more issues have since been released, each one building on the last. View them all here. With each new issue, the plan is becoming stronger in its potential to make the Vision a reality.
It’s been relatively easy to build this strong plan – because once we know what Australians want for their future, the safest paths toward it become obvious. Arguments about which polices will take us to where we want to go as a nation - and which ones won’t - simply fall away when this transparent, common sense approach is taken.
However, it will be a lot harder to get politicians to stop arguing and to support the Australian community’s preferred agenda above their own sectional agendas. That is the purpose of the reports being produced by ACFP on the progress of the nation toward or away from the Vision for Australia Together during each term of federal parliament.
ACFP’s aim in providing these consolidated reports on the state of Australia at the end of each parliament’s term of office and just before each election is to help political parties and candidates understand what we the electors want them to do and to start doing it sooner than they otherwise might. It’s about getting parliamentarians to work together in future terms of office to deliver the community’s preferred agenda. It’s about helping them see where they need to pick up their game.
To ensure that we can write a full report on whether, during the life of the current 47th parliament, Australia has been moving towards the community’s preferred Vision via the safest routes (or away from it), ACFP has recently updated Australia Together. Issue No. 7 was released in February 2024.
View Issue No. 7 of Australia Together here.
There will be more updates throughout 2024.
If, as Australians, we can get politicians into the habit of attending to our preferred agendas rather than their own, both we and they will be substantially better off. So over the next few weeks I’ll be providing articles about what’s currently in the starting draft of Australia Together. These articles will feature some of the most important Targets and Strategies necessary to make the Vision a reality. They’ll cover strategies for:
fixing Australia’s housing crisis;
reforming Australia’s Constitution;
stopping climate change;
achieving peace, security and independent defence of Australia;
ensuring prosperity through lifelong educational opportunities;
establishing a National Accord on Wealth, Welfare and Wellbeing between Australians and their parliaments and governments, including a social wage or "universal basic income" for all adult Australians; and
reforming Australia’s electoral systems and their funding.
Looking inside Australia Together
Australia Together is a big, serious plan for a big nation facing serious challenges. It contains data and information about more than 300 indicators of our current wellbeing, environmental health, economic strength and resilience, democratic health, international standing, national security, and our capacity for peace. It also contains Targets and Strategies for every one of those indicators. When we put these together they add up to the safe solutions we need to overcome the challenges. The plan has been structured with unlimited capacity to add more indicators, targets and strategies as necessary. And it’s been structured to integrate them so that they are coherent and don’t disable each other. This is how the plan is gathering strength - the strength that is necessary to make the Vision a reality safely.
The latest draft of Australia Together - Issue No. 7 - contains 36 new Strategies and Targets dealing with challenges in housing, planetary heating, constitutional reform, human rights, whistleblower protection, war, national sovereignty and independence, Medicare, and reform of governance in universities. Read about these in Issue No. 7 of Australia Together.
Next week I’ll begin the series of articles looking into the Targets and Strategies in Australia Together. First up: Strategies to fix Australia’s housing crisis.
Feedback on the Vision for Australia Together and suggestions about the Targets and Strategies in the plan is always welcome. You can provide feedback via email at info@austcfp.com.au or by accessing forms for feedback at https://www.austcfp.com.au/survey-forms.
It is easy to suggest a Target or Strategy for inclusion in Australia Together. Find out how to do that on the ACFP website at https://www.austcfp.com.au/make-a-suggestion.
New episodes coming soon on the Australia Together Podcast
Over the next few weeks as I release articles summarising some of the most important Targets and Strategies in Australia Together, ACFP will intersperse these with a new podcast series of short conversations about Australia Together, starting with a chat about how the plan can help Australians elect parliaments that work for them and following up with episodes in which we look at what’s in Australia Together and how the Strategies will help us build a better future safely.
ACFP is working this year to help more Australians understand what Australia Together is and the opportunity it offers to make our democracy work as well as it needs to if we are to prosper in the 21st century. The first of these conversational podcasts will be released this week. We hope you enjoy them and share them with your friends.
Click here for the Australia Together Podcast.
Find out all about ACFP
Become involved in building plans for a better Australia here.
