#democracy first

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/

This week, the Fusion Party—whom I reviewed at considerable length and not because I think they are a good option—posted how-to-vote cards (HTVs). Today, they retracted some of them and deleted posts from social media platforms. So, it's going well!

It seems there was very little vetting, with candidates not just free to allocate their own preferences but also with no review or questions asked before the HTVs were posted publicly. It speaks poorly of party processes that evidently nobody said "uhh hey what's going on here?"

Luckily, I saved a couple of the worst HTVs for individual seats, and the Victorian Senate HTV is still up. Shall we have a look? Let's begin with that Senate HTV:

I will get the obvious dunk out of the way: this is an atrocious design, busy and unpleasant on the eye. The emojis are completely unserious. But, look, HTVs are rarely artistic masterpieces. They should communicate a party's agenda concisely—which this one does not do, there's way too much text—and set out some preference recommendations to aid their supporters.

And hoo boy look at those Fusion preferences: Libertarians in 5th above Labor in 9th and the Greens in 10th. The Libertarians are one of Australia's most loathsome minor parties and they stand against what Fusion claims to be their core values, such as a denial of the reality of climate change that is at odds with the "Planet Rescue" part of Fusion's current registered name. How would you feel if you were a member of Fusion constituent party Vote Planet? I'd assume not great, although I also understand Kammy Cordner Hunt, the Victorian lead Senate candidate above, is from that wing. A penny for her thoughts!

Fusion have been taking some serious flak for this on social media. If you have a Facebook account, here is the announcement of the Senate HTV, with reactions and defensive replies by the official Fusion account and some candidates. People are not happy about that Libertarian preference, and the second candidate on the Vic ticket, Simon Gnieslaw, has been responding at length (hi Simon, I'm sure you're reading; yes I remember you getting upset in my DMs in 2022 because I called your centrism "waffle" and your website "amateurish"). I've screenshotted three choice replies below.

This is quite silly rhetoric and it seems that some Fusion organisers have been taken in by smooth talk from one of Australia's most distasteful parties. The Libertarians' lead candidate in Victoria is a literal con artist and the party are bad-faith actors. It is little wonder that in private they can make soothing noises of "good will" and massage the ego of Fusion delegates in preference discussions. Gnieslaw's comments (particularly that third screenshot) also evince a naive belief in "compromise" above everything else. Forever seeking compromise rather than sticking to principles is just a way to allow bad-faith actors to drag the Overton window towards themselves. This is delusional stuff.

As for the Greens, they have little incentive to deal with electoral lightweights such as Fusion. The Greens' preferences are certain to be distributed after Fusion is already out of the count, if distributed at all. Unlike the Libertarians, who as a fellow micro-party need all the favourable HTV treatment they can get and will say whatever it takes to get a good placement in the hope it pays off in the contest for the last Senate quota, Fusion are the ones who need to get the Greens to want to work with them, not the other way around. It seems Fusion can't play with the big kids who have built a seat-winning constituency in every state—possibly because Gnieslaw has a personal grievance against them over the Israel–Palestine conflict, as articulated on his candidate page. The HTV above claims Fusion is "the only party with a Tangible Peace Plan for the war in Israel and Palestine" (oh yeah sure you've solved a century-long conflict) and even more ridiculously suggests that Fusion is "already working in the background to deliver this plan" (solving the problems of the world over beers at the pub is not "working in the background"). You can read this Tangible Peace Plan for yourself; perhaps you'll agree with me that would be better summarised as intangible principles.

One more comment on the Senate HTV before I move on to some of the House HTVs: if you looked closely, you would have noticed that among the unnecessary emojis are three other symbols. One, a circle with 3 Rs, indicates support for the Climate Rescue Accord, which Fusion developed through negotiations with the Animal Justice Party, Australian Progressives (contesting this election as part of Fusion), and Reason (now de-registered, with Fiona Patten standing for Legalise Cannabis). It has reasonable enough objectives mixed with the sort of futurism about R&D into technologies that some would dub optimistic and others fanciful. The second is a Khamsa symbol, which indicates parties who have given in-principle support for Fusion's "Tangible Peace Plan". And the third is a symbol indicating support for a Universal Basic Income.

The thing about these symbols is that they mean nothing to the average voter, and although they are explained on the Senate HTV, Fusion has used them on HTVs for seats in the House of Representatives with no explanation. They're simply mysterious icons beside their name and that of some other parties. If you are even mildly inclined to conspiratorial thinking, you might wonder what they are meant to communicate and to whom.

So, let's turn to HTVs for specific seats. Remember, Fusion has recently incorporated the Australian Progressives (who, despite their name, now claim to be in the "sensible centre") and Democracy First (a fringe right-wing org of serial candidate Vern Hughes). It seems candidates had freedom to distribute their preferences however they wanted, and some went... off message.

First, the Fusion candidate in Melbourne, Helen Huang:

Yes, she is sending her second preference to independent Tim Smith and her third to the Liberals. Smith is not the disgraced ex-Victorian Liberal politician of that name, but a contestant from Married at First Sight who says that "I don’t like politicians" and promotes the "strategic" use of social media outlets like Instagram and Tik Tok to gauge public opinion instead of holding referendums (wait until this guy finds out about constitutional law!). As for why on earth the Liberals are third, above Labor or the Greens, the HTV itself says this is because of Steph Hunt's "credentials in peacebuilding to end wars and bring people together". Yes, Liberal credentials in peacebuilding. Ponder that one!

But the real humdinger is the HTV for McEwen candidate Erin McGrath. See if you can spot the issue among the preferences:

That's right: Family First is preferenced fourth, above any of the major parties. Yes, the Family First, the party of vile anti-LGBTIQ campaigner and professional eater-of-shit Lyle Shelton. They could scarcely be more at odds with core Fusion values.

But it gets better because people pressed Fusion about this on Twitter and they simply couldn't pick a lane. The original post has now been deleted—it just had some HTVs including McGrath's for McEwen—but if you have a log-in you can view a surviving comment chain here. One reply flagged some of the bizarre decisions, and the official account began by saying that they were made based on personal interactions:

So, at first, Fusion are fine with preferencing "one guy" from Family First for being "vaguely reasonable". Then, as the negative response grew, they deleted and offered this explanation:

Yup, apparently this was simply a production mistake. If that is true, it speaks very poorly for the party's internal oversight, because multiple people clearly did not think to say anything when making, approving, or posting the HTV. And when pressed on this, Fusion replied with an absolute gem:

Things had changed?? It's Family First. WHAT CHANGED.

The party says it is a mistake, but these contortions are worthy of professional gymnasts. It seems the reality is more straightforward. The party's own list of candidates includes a small logo showing which constituent of Fusion the candidate is aligned with. Some, such as Huang in Melbourne, appear to be unaligned, but Erin McGrath in McEwen is aligned with—you guessed it!—Democracy First. She's part of Vern's right-wing rabble. I am far more prepared to believe she genuinely sympathises with the Family First candidate than that "things had changed". The only thing that changed is people noticed this laughable preference at odds with Fusion's own stated values.

up and down the ticket

we must rid this generation of GOP/MAGA culture