illustration by Julia Pillai
SOCIETY What the Flux? by Julia Pillai Lots of weird ads come up on my news feed. Sometimes, there are advertisements telling me that if I arrive without a visa I’ll never be able to settle in Australia, which is a shame. Other times, it’s sneaky ‘work for ASIO’ advertisements, which make me contemplate giving everything up to pursue my childhood dream of becoming a spy. Until, that is, I came to the shattering realisation that working for ASIO would probably lead me to stopping pesky people like me from settling in Australia. One time, an advertisement with a logo of little colourful triangles, with an ‘f’ in the middle popped up on my newsfeed. Another one, with the same logo, had a graphic of a hipster-y guy looking enlightened, and another one of a bunch of young people sitting down and looking at a sunset. From these visuals, these ads screamed tech start-up, or perhaps a travel organisation. However, the ‘f’ in the logo stands for Flux; a new Australian political party founded by Max Kaye and Nathan Spataro. The tech start-up feel doesn’t go away. Maybe I’m swayed slightly by Kaye’s background in IT, his citation of Bitcoin founder Satoshi Nakamoto as an influence for Flux, and his very particular analogies that he uses to answer my questions: describing Flux working “…like an app that runs in parliament. Normal apps let you do something with your phone you couldn’t do before; Flux lets us do things in parliament we couldn’t do before.” What makes this party interesting is that after contacting Kaye, asking many questions, and receiving very thorough responses, I cannot answer the standard questions that people usually ask about political parties. Questions like what their platform and ideology is, what are they aiming to specifically achieve, and what communities in particular are they appealing to, are irrelevant in the context of Flux. Some microparties that fit a niche audience, such as the Motoring Enthusiast Party, or a party with a specific platform, such as the Sex Party which have a platform based on libertarianism, sex worker rights and secularism. Flux, in the crudest of terms, has a populist platform. But compared to the Palmer United Party, a microparty that in 2013 many people were asking the same “what do they want to do?” questions, Flux has a distinctly usergenerated feel, rather than the charisma bolstered campaigning of PUP. While they are, in some senses, a populist microparty, Flux is a conventional entity in Australian politics, even if its methods are unorthodox. Flux’s platform relies on getting candidates elected into parliament, like any other party. However, when elected, members of parliament or senators do not act in an autonomous manner; every vote that they make would be decided by a vote of Flux members. With every bill brought to parliament there is a voting system within Flux including an initial vote, then an opportunity to swap votes and confer with other Flux members, then a final vote on how the senator or Member of Parliament should vote. This, in theory, flattens hierarchy within the party. However, there could be pitfalls. Members of Parliament and senators are, in theory, supposed Lot’s <strong>Wife</strong> | 19