Lot's Wife Edition 1 2016

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
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