According to Andrew Bolt, voters are either Conservative like him, or Left, which is anyone who watches the ABC.

But surely being conservative isn’t something to be proud of, the thesaurus gives these other options; ‘conventional, conformist, unadventurous, and old-school.’

Which doesn’t sound like progress, however you look at it. Meanwhile, ‘Left’ seems to imply tree-hugging, anti-development anything, which leaves an awful lot of people swinging.

Right now, those of us who don’t consider themselves conservative or Left have been pretty much cast adrift from the collision between Australia’s two political warships, LNP and Labor.

You could jump aboard the smaller, sister vessels crewed by smaller parties like the Australian Greens or the Nationals, but once there, what next?

Both are beholden to the warships that caused the collision in the first place.

Next option?

Grab onto a potentially more unstable lifebuoy tied to independents like Katter’s Australian Party, Jacqui Lambie’s Network, the Glen Lazarus Team, or Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.



Or not.

We could look to Iceland where this week, the leaked Panama Papers revealed their Prime Minister was just one of many leaders found to have millions of dollars hidden in offshore tax havens.

That’s not the most newsworthy part though, what has come to light after the Prime Minister stepped aside is the stratospheric rise of the Pirate Party.



First founded in Sweden in response to the tougher copyright laws which saw the illegal download site Pirate Bay shut down, it spread to other European countries, including Iceland, on a platform of open democratic rule.

The Pirate Party believes democracy has been derailed by traditional political parties whose decisions didn’t reflect those of the electorate they were supposed to represent.



Sound familiar?

They had a mere five per cent of the vote in Iceland’s last election, this week after Icelanders took to the streets in mass rallies calling for the Prime Minister to resign, they were polled at 43 per cent, almost double the four governing parties combined, and are likely to take power if the Prime Minister resigns.

There is a local offshoot, the Australian Pirate Party, whose manifesto echoes increasing democratic participation and transparency based on ‘liquid democratic principles,’ which uses software for voting, as does the Pirate Party in Germany, Italy, Australia, Norway, France and the Netherlands, while Spain and Belgium Pirate Party have developed their own.

Australia has taken to streaming television and music services, is it time for our politics to be more reactive and responsive to what the electorate actually wants?

Chatting with a shop owner yesterday on this very subject, he whipped out a T-shirt bearing the logo of the Australian Liberty Alliance, another party that has sprung up to cater for disaffected traditional voters.

The ALA takes a hard stance against changing Australia’s Western values, but neither Labor or Liberal politicians are said to consider them a threat come election time, perhaps the vacuum they exist in Canberra prevents them from seeing how disaffected voters really are.

Might there be a Survivor-style blindside at the polls?

What about disaffected regional voters, not just in Queensland, but around the nation, created a party?

Like the Fair Go campaign across our mastheads, it would fight for regional funding.

Call it the Ultimate Party, with no political agendas and just one aim, to show us the money - make that two aims - and to hold some really good parties.

