It’s been a busy few years for our policy team, who’ve done some incredible work since the 2016 election. And they’ve got a lot more ahead of them – with some exciting new opportunities for you to get involved.
By Travis Jordan
The National Policy Coordinator’s (NPC) main job is facilitating a group called the Australian Greens Policy Coordinating Committee, which is the national working group that reviews and finesses our national policy platform and helps our federal party room with some of their work.
One of our great strengths as a party is that policy decisions aren’t just made by MPs out of reach of regular members, but made collectively by all our members. Everyone is given the opportunity to propose policy changes, workshop them and have them taken up by our National Conference. If you’re not a member yet, that’s a pretty compelling reason to join.
Our vision for the future is a collective one, and what better way to live that vision than by working together to discuss our ideas, goals and plans for our future?
We achieve that vision by taking on those member suggestions, filtering them through state-based expert action groups, policy advisory teams and local branch meetings. Our national delegates then come together to hash out clear principles for our party room colleagues to strive towards. Finally, our party room colleagues use those principles to guide their development of fully-costed and actionable election initiatives for us to hit the doors with each election time.
Almost all policy work happens at the state level, so you don’t often get an opportunity to hear from or contribute to the national policy process. But rest assured that all your state delegates are hard at work every month, building a better and better platform for our party.
Member discussion groups
The national Policy Coordinating Committee has set up a few Member Discussion Groups to help guide our work over the next year.
These MDGs will operate from our National Conference in July this year until our National Conference in November. Over these five months, the MDGs will be tasked with reviewing our existing policies, identifying gaps and issues, and writing a discussion paper and possible platform changes.
We’ve set ourselves the target of developing three new policies and an MDG will be tasked with one each:
Synthetic biology (which will replace our GMO policy);
Rights of nature; and
Industry and manufacturing.
Now, these MDGs aren’t going to be talkfests. Joining these groups means putting in hard work researching and writing. The work you do will directly influence our policy work over the next few years.
After each MDG presents their papers to the National Conference in November, the Policy Coordinating Committee will develop the ideas into concrete changes to our policy platform and consult on them with each State and Territory member body and our key stakeholders. Hopefully we’ll be in a position to bring these changes to the National Conference in May 2020 to make them official.
