#australian progressives

Running where: five states for the Senate (not TAS), plus a smattering of House seats across four states (not TAS or WA)

Prior reviews: federal 2022 (which links to my past reviews of most constituent parties), VIC 2022

For newly allied party Australian Progressives, see: federal 2016, federal 2019, federal 2022

What I said before: “It’s not as left-wing as some, it emphasises pragmatic reaction rather than ideological ambition, and some of the policies are clearly a little underdone in trying to reconcile five platforms, but most of their positions contain worthwhile goals.”

What I think this year: This is the longest review I’ve ever written, so if nobody sticks with me to the end then I understand. It’s also a much more negative review than in previous editions. This might surprise some readers, including a couple that I know have volunteered for Fusion before. But the more I worked my way through Fusion's materials, the more I came to dislike this party. The heavy use of images that are quite clearly from generative Artificial Intelligence made matters worse: superficial soulless visuals for a superficial soulless party.

Fusion coalesced in 2022 after Australia’s lax party registration laws were tightened. Its original name was FUSION: Science, Pirate, Secular, Climate Emergency, which embodied the names or main focus of the broadly centrist and left-wing parties that had joined forces. These parties retain an independent existence with individual websites, though these also direct the reader to the main Fusion site. The name has been updated to articulate some core principles of this union, or fusion if you will. As I have said before, putting party positions or slogans in the registered name looks ridiculous.

Earlier this year, Fusion formed an alliance with two extra parties. One, the Australian Progressives, is not too objectionable, although I hadn’t realised they still existed. They have gone from being broadly centre-left in their presentation to pitching themselves as not “‘left’ or ‘right’—we’re about moving forward, ie. PROGRESS”. They describe themselves as motivated by “evidence, not ideology”, which makes them a good fit with Fusion (I’ll discuss that claim more below), and state that they sit in the “sensible centre”, a phrase almost invariably used by people who are neither sensible nor in the centre (usually well to the right).

The other partnership that Fusion established is incredibly, unbelievably stupid. They have welcomed into their camp Democracy First, a decidedly right-wing anti-migrant vehicle of serial candidate Vern Hughes. Yes, the Vern Hughes. This is shockingly bad and raises serious questions about the judgement of Fusion's leadership. Hughes has belonged to more parties than you’ve had hot dinners in the last week: by my count, he has stood as a candidate for at least eight groupings, promoted numerous extra parties that never attained registration, and his most recent outing was in 2022 for the lunar-right Australian Federation Party (now the Trumpet of Patriots). Democracy First is openly Trumpian—they have a 12-point platform (more a rant) to “drain the swamp in Canberra”—and it is an unwelcome inclusion in the Fusion fold.

Democracy First worked through a bunch of monikers before settling on the current name, including Sensible Centre (that phrase again!). Their Twitter handle is still @sensiblecentre_ and I had to make a thread in September 2021 warning people to pre-emptively block them because they were searching keywords and aggressively trolling people and peddling anti-vax “plandemic” nonsense. Whether it was Hughes or not (and I won’t be surprised if it was him), it was and is discrediting to the group. Hughes is a self-interested crank whose ideology and principles are flexible, but flexibly right-wing. If he is presenting himself to Fusion as having had some revelation to disown far-right positions, more fool them; the bloke has long since proven himself disreputable.

What all this means is that if you have a Fusion candidate in your House division or Fusion is running a Senate ticket in your state, the people involved could believe in anything from techbro futurism, urgent climate action, or “sensible centre” right-wing aggression. This significant variation in approach and priorities means that you should look up the people standing for Fusion on your ballot because you might find yourself more or less favourably disposed towards them than the party as a whole.

I’m now going to turn to the policies and principles that the party has posted on the main Fusion website. Before I launch into my criticisms, let me note key things that I like: the emphasis on whistleblower protections, the promotion of university teaching and research, the strong emphasis on combatting climate change and restoring damaged environments, and many of the digital privacy policies inherited from the Pirate Party. I do, though, wonder if the Pirate movement’s time has passed: I agree that copyright and intellectual property laws need reform, but perhaps in different ways now that we need to protect authors and artists from AI companies who unethically use and even steal material to train their lake-draining hallucination machines (which, as I noted above, this party seems quite happy to use for illustrations rather than photos and art by real people).

Fusion articulate both a set of values and separate principles. They spent a shocking amount of words, including some diagrams, to say not much at all. Both pages are laden with buzzwords that can basically mean whatever you want them to mean, although some of the discussion of values is useful, e.g. that their approach to personal liberty is one of “maximum net freedom”, where one individual’s freedom to act can be restricted justifiably if it limits the freedom of others. The principles page is tedious jargon that reads like the sort of emails many of us would have received from senior managers who use fancy language to express banalities.

Two major conceits animate Fusion. First, they have a frankly naïve fantasy that they can bring together divergent political interests (e.g. greener-than-Green environmentalists and Democracy First right-wingers) to achieve something despite their disagreements. Second, they believe they can do this because they are uniquely focused on evidence, not ideology. These are the sort of people who think “ideological” and “evidence-based” politics are polar opposites.

In reality, all political actors are ideological, and to deny this is either ignorant or dishonest. It is akin to people who claim they do not speak with an accent, only people from other places have accents. Leo Puglisi interviewed Miles Whiticker (NSW lead Senate candidate) and raised this topic. Whiticker defended the party as not taking a “zealous theory-driven position” that is pursued whatever the evidence might be. He defines being centrist as having the attitude that “if the theory clashes with the evidence, we are more likely to support the evidence than the theory”, which is absolutely not what centrism is and basically everyone at every position on the political spectrum believes they follow the evidence.

(also, yes, I keep using interviews from 6 News because Leo is doing the lord’s work for political nerds everywhere, conducting detailed interviews with politicians beyond the major parties)

Let’s turn now to a specific policy: Fusion’s housing policy is a mess. It is a total mess. You are not prepared for how much of a mess this is. Most of Fusion’s policy pages are brief, with bullet points and short paragraphs. The housing policy reads as someone’s passion project and it runs to 10,700 words. The average person is not reading nearly 11,000 words from a party they’ve never heard of, even if they’re good words. And these are not good words. The main proposals revolve around tinkering with taxes. There are a bunch of proposals for much greater government intervention in the rental sector through apps and transparency websites that veer into micromanagement, running counter to Fusion’s own “our party” page that suggests if you support mandated regulatory approaches you’d prefer the Greens. Fusion’s rental proposals would be much more invasive and meddlesome than anything the Greens propose to reform the sector.

The policy jumps all over the show. For instance, it favourably cites NIMBY economist and former Sustainable Australia candidate Cameron Murray. For the purposes of this review, I asked a well-read YIMBY friend for his reaction if told a party was citing Murray favourably and he replied that it’s “almost certainly bad”. At the same time, however, the housing policy favourably refers to Auckland’s zoning reforms, which Murray has downplayed (to such an extent Stuart Donovan and Matthew Maltman absolutely savaged him in a piece reviewing the effects of Auckland’s zoning reforms last December). It’s a muddled assortment of ideas.

But the funniest part is the favourable inclusion of Saudi Arabia’s linear-city megaproject The Line, part of its larger Neom development. You’ve got to be huffing farts to think The Line is a good idea, but the best bit is the bumbling invocation of David Ricardo’s idea of comparative advantage. This concept, central to classical economics, states that countries should focus economic activity on specialisation in industries where they have the greatest efficiencies and lowest opportunity costs. Apparently, the comparative advantage of The Line is that it “will have the economic advantages of being in the desert, and having an uncharacteristic layout”. Is that the best you can do? The comparative advantage of being in the desert.

Another questionable policy is that Fusion wants to declare that ageing is a disease. They pitch this as promoting quality-of-life measures, not as a life-extension policy: if ageing is declared a disease, rather than a natural part of existence, they think this is the magic trick that will enable doctors to prescribe medications that have secondary anti-ageing effects to people who do not have the condition or problem the medication is primarily meant to treat. This has a host of questionable implications and potential for misuse. It’s all a bit silly: there are much better ways to promote quality-of-life measures and healthy ageing than to say the process itself is a disease. The strong whiff of techbro futurism that permeates the party makes me think this is really a policy for anti-ageing fans who think Bryan Johnson is something other than a muddle-headed weirdo.

I could pick on other aspects of their policies and principles but this is quite long enough and I don’t want to repeat the length of their housing policy. Although Fusion contains multitudes, much of it feels driven by the old Future/Science Party, which was very blinkered—the classic science bros who badly need at least a basic education in the humanities. If this is a party made for and by STEM bros, then you can consider me a HASS fellow.

Are there worse parties on the ballot? Yes, many. But they are straightforwardly terrible. Fusion had potential, and I was a fan of some of the parties that came together to form it. I’ve spent so much time on this review because Fusion sit much closer to the positions that I support than, say, Family First, and I think it’s worth articulating why—in 2025 at least—they do not represent a good option, especially not for left-wing voters.

(also, sorry Fusion bros, please don’t @ me: I’ve argued with some of you in DMs before about my reviews and it was very boring)

Recommendation: Give FUSION | Planet Rescue | Whistleblower Protection | Innovation a weak to middling preference. Some individuals might warrant a slightly better preference; any that are aligned with Democracy First should be ranked lowly indeed.

Website: https://www.fusionparty.org.au/

Running where: ACT and VIC in the Senate; the Divisions of Ryan (QLD) and Sturt (SA) in the House of Representatives

Prior reviews: federal 2016, federal 2019

What I said before: “Put broadly, the Progressives advocate for all the issues that tend to get a favourable run on much of the left, not to mention some of the more socially liberal, climate-aware folks on the centre-right.”

What I think this year: I thought this party would not meet the new membership threshold as I’m genuinely not sure who or where their voter base is. The constituency they are trying to talk to is already listening to similar but louder voices. The party clearly recognises this because they have a FAQ with questions asking how they differ from the ALP and the Greens. On the ALP front, the Progressives go for some both-sides hogwash that “both employers‘ and workers‘ rights are equally important” (spare me! I do not want a party of bosses!). As for the Greens, the Progressives struggle to explain how their attitude towards the climate differs from Green Party principles in any substantive way. As best as I can tell, they think they are able to incorporate evidence rather than opinion more effectively than the Greens? It is a very poor pitch to win over Greens voters.

The biggest topic on which the Progressives appear to be campaigning this year is a federal ICAC. When I loaded their webpage I briefly thought I had accidentally landed on the page for the Federal ICAC Now party, because that very phrase appears in capital letters as the first thing you see. It then scrolls through other headline policies, such as an ambitious target of net zero emissions by 2030: the Progressives oppose any new licences to mine fossil fuels, seek electrification of the transport grid with renewable sources (and unlike some electric car stans, they emphasise the important role rail must play here), and note that agricultural policy requires careful consideration to maximise the sector’s potential to contribute to positive change and protect biodiversity. I like their boldness here.

Their policies on poverty and homelessness include support for a Universal Basic Income and social security payments above the Henderson poverty line, as poverty activists have been demanding for some time now. Some of their tax policy is rather vague and it’s not clear how all of it would work or whether their proposals for reform will actually cover the policies they propose. The Progressives will not, for instance, support any tax bracket over 50%, so even the mega-rich will not be taxed more than 49.99% on, say, any personal income above a million dollars. Other policies include greater funding and independence for the ABC and SBS, abolition of the cashless welfare card, and a treaty with Indigenous peoples.

In general, the Australian Progressives tick the boxes for the urban centre-left but there is no distinctive attribute that makes them stand out. In particular, if you are already voting for the Greens, the Progressives do little to suggest you should preference them higher. And if you are a socialist (like me) or a communist, they go out of their way on the FAQ to tell you that “communist and state socialist ideologies failed to translate into social, economic and political progress and achievement”. This is nonsense; state socialism played a major role in the emergence of the modern welfare state. The famed progressive “social laboratory” of late 19th/early 20th century Australia and New Zealand was an outcome of state socialism—if, in the assessment of French observer André Siegfried, it was socialism sans doctrines.

Perhaps the main audience for this party is people in traditionally Liberal urban electorates who prefer the teal independents in the House of Representatives and are seeking a similar option in the Senate. If you are, say, voting for Zoe Daniel or Zali Steggall in the House of Representatives, then the Australian Progressives have a strong case for your first preference in the Senate. If you are, however, a longstanding Greens voter, or you have socialist inclinations, you might put the Progressives a bit later in your preferences.

My recommendation: Give the Australian Progressives a decent to good preference.

Prior review: federal 2016

Running where: five seats in the House of Representatives—all three in the ACT, plus Longman (QLD) and Sturt (SA).

What I said before: “The party’s platform is a good start. It touches on important issues and their core values align with a positive, inclusive vision for a fair and prosperous Australia. The origins of this party seem fractious and it is perhaps not yet entirely stable, so it will be interesting to see whether the Progressives can keep themselves together long-term.”

What I think this year: Well. The Progressives have regressed in their electoral ambitions. They contested the Senate in four states last time around; this year they are confined to a small handful of House seats. It’s a little curious that they are running for all three seats in the ACT, where they have never before fielded a candidate, while their presence elsewhere has contracted sharply. Perhaps they overextended themselves early on.

The website is pretty slick, if at times a bit hokey in articulating their values and vision, and they have developed policies in some more detail than previously. It’s what you would expect from a party called the Progressives in 2019: action on anthropogenic climate change, increased funding for public transport, stopping corporate tax evasion, raising Newstart (they don’t mince words here and call it “criminally low”), and greater funding to address violence against women.

Put broadly, the Progressives advocate for all the issues that tend to get a favourable run on much of the left, not to mention some of the more socially liberal, climate-aware folks on the centre-right. If you’re into socialist or other avowedly leftist action the party might seem a bit flimsy and wishy-washy. If you’re a Greens or ALP Left voter, you might want to give the Progressives a close look. I am curious if they can build any momentum.

My recommendation: give the Australian Progressives a good preference.