Community standards

Blog comments

Where opinions flourish (within reason)

We love a good debate almost as much as we love a good meme. But let’s keep things civil, shall we?

1. Comments are welcome, but they’re like houseguests – we reserve the right to show them the door if they misbehave.
2. Penalties for abusing the blog comment section may see us:

• Remove comments faster than you can say “free speech”
• Put your commenting privileges in time-out (temporary or permanent)
• Suspend your membership or ban you entirely if you’re a repeat offender

3. This isn’t the place to:

• Promote other political organisations (seriously though, if you think the best place to sell the message of the Cannabis Party is on a completely different politician’s website, maybe whatever it is you think you’re saying is doing more harm than good)
• Sell stuff (your artisanal, organically sourced, blockchain-powered fidget spinners will have to wait)
• Spam (we don’t care about the hot singles in our area or how to make millions working from home)
• Post non-meaningful content (posting rickroll videos isn’t funny, was never funny, and will never be funny)

4. Basically, if it’s not related to the blog post or our work, maybe save it for your group chat. If you’re replying to another commenter, you have some license to stray, but even then there are limits: not every comment is an opportunity to tell the world about how birds aren’t real.

Remember, we’re not here to censor you, but we are here to keep the conversation on track and respectful. If you’re being rude or mean you’re going to end up alienating other commenters and we’re here to make sure everyone gets heard, gets respected and gets their chance to say their piece. You aren’t going to go far if you’re acting in a way that jeopardises that.

Email

It’s like a letterbox, but you can’t stick ‘no junk mail’ on it

We love hearing from you! Send us emails about whatever you like. Unlike public comments, you are very much free to give us a piece of your mind.

Here’s the deal:

1. We try to respond to everyone, but sometimes life (or an overzealous spam filter) gets in the way.
2. If you find yourself subscribed to something you don’t remember signing up for:

• Let us know, and we’ll fix it faster than you can say “unsubscribe”
• We’re a small team, and sometimes our tech gets gremlins. Not the cute kind – the mischievous ones that mess with our mailing lists

3. We promise not to flood your inbox. We respect your digital space and your dreams of inbox-zero. If you find the amount of emails you’re receiving from us to be too much, you can unsubscribe, or, if you’d like (and it’s what we’d prefer!) you can let us know, and we’ll drop the emails back for a while.
4. We will occasionally (only occasionally) mention how easy it is to make a donation to support Tammy’s campaigns. Donation asks are necessary in politics when you don’t have big companies or unions backing you up, and if we don’t ask, Tammy will be out of the job. Please recognise that we don’t do this to pressure you or make you feel bad if you’re not in a position to donate. We get it.

Campaigns

Where your voice becomes a megaphone

We’re all about people power, and our campaigns are where the magic happens:

1. Vote, suggest, and give feedback on campaigns. It’s like ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’, if it was about making the world better instead of avoiding trolls.
2. Play nice. If you try to game the system, we… we have ways of catching you. Trying to get your votes counted more than your vote should count for is cheating, and when you cheat, you deny others who are doing the right thing the chance to actually get represented. That’s pretty undemocratic of you!
3. We use a mix of AI and human brains to review content. It’s like if RoboCop interned for the Prime Minister.
4. We might tweak your campaign suggestions. It’s not personal; we’re just trying to make sure it has the best chance of success. Some tweaks might be for spelling or grammar, or for clarity, and others might simply be for length. We might not always get it right — we are human, despite our appearance occasionally — and if you think we’ve somehow misrepresented your idea or suggestion then let us know via email.
5. Our goal is to amplify your voice, not to turn it into a game of telephone where the message gets all muddled.

Donations

Donations are how good people beat bad politicians

Your donations keep us going, and we’re grateful for every cent. But even we have standards!

We might say ‘no’ to your money if:

• It looks like you’re trying to buy influence (Sorry, we can’t be bribed, even with really good chocolate)
• It’s not allowed by law (We like to stay on the right side of the AEC — and the law in general, come to think of it)
• You’re trying to be sneaky with the rules (We see you trying to donate in instalments of $9.99)

If you accidentally make a donation that’s for an amount greater than you intended to, let us know as soon as possible. We don’t want you to donate your rent money if it means you can’t make ends meet. And we don’t want to be greedy and say too bad.
So if we have the capacity to return whatever it was that you donated in excess, we will make every endeavour to do so. The chances that we can make that happen are greatly increased if you let us know early.

We run on a pretty lean budget; it’s not like we’re sitting on big piles of cash that we can simply dip into to compensate you for those slippery fingers. The longer it is between when you donate and when we hear about the error, the more likely it is that the money has been spent already. We don’t want that to happen either, so please let us know.

We monitor donation amounts so that if you normally donate $10 here or $5 there, and then all of a sudden a $5,000 donation comes through from you, we can flag that and reach out proactively. But, that proactive reaching out only works if we have a record of donations that you’ve made over time; first-time donors simply don’t have a record with us, so we don’t know if that’s normal or if that’s a glitch.

Therefore it’s really important that you not rely on us catching it, but instead get proactive as early as you can.