#susaus

Prior reviews: federal 2013, federal 2016, VIC 2018, NSW 2019, federal 2019, federal 2022, VIC 2022, NSW 2023, plus my friend’s b_auspol review for WA 2021

What I said before: “I am aware of some well-meaning people in this party with centrist or centre-left environmental views, but the overall thrust is NIMBY and anti-immigration and I cannot in good faith offer any endorsement.” (NSW 2023)

What I think this year: Sustainable Australia (SusAus) is the party that has never had a name it didn’t want to change. Starting life as the Stable Population Party, they are registered in WA as “Sustainable Australia Party—Anti-corruption”, while at federal level they changed from “Sustainable Australia Party—Stop Overdevelopment/Corruption” to “Sustainable Australia Party—Universal Basic Income” in November 2023. If they could simply stop tacking slogans or policy principles onto their name, that would be grand.

Anyway, these geniuses who can’t settle on a name have reached quite possibly the dumbest solution to the housing crisis: instead of responding to the current demand for housing in Australia by increasing the supply of housing, they want to reduce supply and somehow make demand disappear. This is fantasyland nonsense. Demand outstripping supply cannot be waved away. There is legitimate debate on how to best increase supply and the extent to which the state or the private sector should provide housing. But SusAus are not here for any of that.

Instead, SusAus are here to push their barrow about “stabilising” the population. What this means is reducing immigration to Australia and promoting measures to reduce population growth in other countries. This sort of talk very quickly leads to racist ideas about certain peoples “breeding like rabbits” and towards eugenicist policies to limit who can reproduce and when. Comically, SusAus now have a statement on their website that “SAP is a pro-immigration party”. This is “my shirt is raising a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” territory and recalls for me how Health Australia kept insisting they were not an anti-vax party while peddling anti-vax policies. If you want fewer people to come to a country, you quite objectively are not pro-immigration. SusAus are anti-immigration and they are population nihilists who would prefer it if you simply had not been born because you made the population go up.

Despite this, SusAus goes on about how they support “a science and evidence-based approach to policy”. There’s a good point in the b_auspol review from 2021 that “when people start waving that around as a banner cry, there does tend to be rather an overtone of ‘if you don’t agree with us then obviously you are being illogical and emotional’.” SusAus continues that they do “not [have] a left or right wing ideology”, and almost anyone who ever says that is either too cowardly or too wishy-washy to state their actual position on the political spectrum, and they usually turn out to be on the right.

To be honest, I am not terribly interested in engaging with the rest of their policies because their core principles are discrediting. If you are an urbanist or a YIMBY, this is not the party for you and never will be. I’m an urbanist and I’m at least YIMBY-adjacent; I like compact and dense cities for their accessibility and cultural vibrancy and agglomeration effects that make things like public transport, education, and healthcare more efficient to provide. (I am wary of some of the more fervent anti-regulation strands of YIMBYism, conscious as I am of the dire living conditions of unregulated housing for poorer communities in the past.)

SusAus have at least expanded their rhetoric to criticise housing sprawl but they continue to go on about “inappropriate high-rises” and lord knows what that is: a high-rise that dresses immodestly? An apartment that says slurs? No housing is “inappropriate” if it puts a roof over somebody’s head and allows them to lead a happy, healthy life as part of the community. Sorry folks but nobody will like the appearance of every building. For a party that bleats about evidence-based policy, SusAus's attitude towards denser cities seems to boil down to “I don’t like change and that new block of apartments down the road doesn’t meet my own particular aesthetic values”.

If you want to really talk about sustainability, you talk about densifying cities and reducing sprawl. You talk about replacing old housing stock that is no longer fit for purpose so that people who currently live in draughty, mouldy old houses can move into well-insulated, energy-efficient modern housing. You talk about giving people more options about where to live and how they live. You sure as shit don’t talk about restricting housing, retaining unsustainable and inefficient urban forms, enforcing your aesthetic preferences, or embracing “fuck off we’re full” attitudes.

So, to conclude, what I say to people who want to reduce Australia’s population is this: you first.

Recommendation: Give Sustainable Australia Party–Anti-corruption a weak or no preference.

Prior reviews: federal 2013, federal 2016, VIC 2018, NSW 2019, federal 2019, federal 2022

What I said before: “I have a very hard time finding their ‘we need a smaller population’ talk to be anything but eugenicist and racist. I have an even harder time accepting their absolute claptrap that Australia’s sprawling, low-density cities are overdeveloped.” (federal 2022)

What I think this time: It’s always a bad sign when a party tries to shoehorn a slogan into their registered name. Amazingly, this isn’t even the worst sin Sustainable Australia (SusAus) has committed against party names: they once had a hashtag at the start of their name.

This party has a habit of scooping up some votes from people who see the name and think “oh 'sustainable' sounds good!” They gain the rest from anti-immigration NIMBYs, at least some of whom think that their weird phobia of apartments is environmentalist praxis. SusAus have realised that people on the left are increasingly calling them out, so they try to claim they are pro-immigration and that they are jUsT aSkiNg QuEsTiOnS about migrant numbers. It’s rather easy to pick holes in their rhetoric and expose it for what it is: racist bullshit that won’t make Australia any more sustainable.

SusAus can’t even be bothered providing an actual policy platform for Victoria. Their page for the 2022 election just links to their generic policy platform, as if a suite of national policy priorities is in any way suitable. Each state has its own pressing issues, and state and federal governments have different powers. If you’re a serious party, you’ll provide a proper platform for each election you contest. SusAus are not a serious party.

So, their policies are just the same shit that I’ve reviewed before. Sometimes I’m even on the same page! Clifford Hayes, their member in the Legislative Councillor, voted to support trans people self-identifying their gender on documents without having had surgery. They really aren't all bad. But, especially on policies regarding the environment, heritage, housing, and migration, SusAus have deeply unpalatable motives that are at best conservative and often racist. Moreover, some of their objectives would prolong environmentally destructive car-dependent suburban sprawl rather than do anything positive for sustainability.

(I keep waiting for them to add a policy of removing “we’ve boundless plains to share” from the second verse of the national anthem…)

Oh yeah, and of course SusAus are one of the parties to have profited from the anti-democratic system of Group Ticket Voting. At the last election, Hayes got into the Legislative Council off 1.32% of the vote in Southern Metropolitan. This was one of the most egregious distortions of the GTV system: the Greens polled 13.46% but did not reach the threshold of 16.7% for a seat because GTVs harvested almost all relevant above-the-line preferences away from the Greens and towards SusAus in a manner that would literally never be replicated if above-the-line voters controlled their own preferences.

My recommendation: Give Sustainable Australia—Stop Stupid Party Names a weak or no preference. Remember to vote below the line on the large ballot for the Legislative Council so that your preference goes where you want it to go; all ballots with 5 or more preferences marked below the line are valid votes.

Running where: All states and territories

Prior reviews: federal 2013, federal 2016, VIC 2018, NSW 2019, federal 2019

What I said before: “This is the party of NIMBYs and people who really don’t want to look racist, but are.”

What I think this year: From their origins as the Stable Population Party, this party has worked their way through some of the cringiest names: if putting a hashtag at the start as #Sustainable Australia wasn’t bad enough, now they have chucked in a silly slogan. And this is not even why this party truly infuriates me. They do support some specific policies that I endorse as a left-wing transport activist, but they typically do so for the wrong reasons—we are on the same page by sheer accident, and I would rather we weren’t.

SusAus is committed to “lower population growth in Australia (and globally)”. The thing is, even if we accept their premise that global population growth should be lower, there is no reason why that need apply to Australia, a country with ample space to accommodate more people. But, of course, this is also a party of NIMBYs who are furious if you tear down a couple of mouldy, draughty old homes to build a warm new apartment block.

SusAus spends much of their “our party” page trying to claim they are not racist NIMBYs. They say they are “pro-migrant and and pro-immigration” but that they want a “debate on numbers”. Yet they want to cut Australia’s annual intake from around 200,000 down to 70,000, and tell 130,000 potential migrants that “sorry we’re full”. Congratulations, that means you are anti-migrant and anti-immigration.

Anyway, if you need a page on your website to rebut purported misrepresentations, either you are astonishingly bad at communicating your objectives or the criticisms are true. Most political parties do not need to do this: it seems confined to “we’re not anti-vax” anti-vaxxers and these “we’re not racist NIMBYs” racist NIMBYs. SusAus’s delusion that tightly restricting foreign ownership will provide for affordable housing reveals both their innate racism and their utter inability to comprehend the housing sector.

I have a very hard time finding their “we need a smaller population” talk to be anything but eugenicist and racist. I have an even harder time accepting their absolute claptrap that Australia’s sprawling, low-density cities are overdeveloped. We have some of the most unsustainable cities on the planet—constantly expanding low-density car-dependent suburbia—and yet this party proclaiming to support a “Sustainable” Australia is not campaigning on this. They are angry that you might dare to turn inner or middle suburbs into the sort of density that causes Australians to swoon when they go to Europe. It is genuinely maddening how many people in Australia visit European cities, laud their beauty and extensive public services and safe pedestrian spaces, and then come home and demand anti-density policies that make it impossible to have anything even vaguely close to a desirable European city.

My recommendation: Give Sustainable Australia—Cringey Full Name a weak or no preference.