Rodney Croome . gay advocate

Ethics and sustainability

This letter was sent by the Ethics & Sustainability Party to the Hobart Mercury on 18.1.10.

With regard to last weekend's article in the Sunday Tasmanian entitled "Bid by new green party", we would just like to clarify that the Ethics & Sustainability Party's Registered Officer Dr Petrovsky was in many ways presenting her own views in that article and the Party has a general ethos of respect for diversity and non-discrimination. The Ethics & Sustainability Party hasn’t set out specifically to oppose gay marriage. Rather it has sought to allay voters' fears that any substantial extensions to current Tasmanian social policy would be pursued by the E & S Party during the elected term if elected to state parliament.

It was concluded that the simplest way to do this would be to simply say, E & S Party social policy is to keep things the way they are. The simplicity of such a message furthermore aids it's communication by virtue of keeping it in the fewest of words for very busy voters to store in their memories. This overall social policy strategy of keeping things the way they currently are, has also been seen as valuable for differentiating E & S Party from Tas Greens and would thereby avoid taking votes from Tas Greens, something which otherwise would provide no advantage in the securing of overall extra votes for environmentally-minded state parliamentary candidates, that being one of the fundamental aims of the E & S Party. The no-change social policy also has yet to be ratified by party membership but is seen as a central plank in our election strategy. At the time of initially forming the E & S Party —Dec 16— , it was understood that the Tas Democrats were not on course to become registered in time to stand candidates at the state election. Hence urgent action seemed necessary at that time to avoid the recurring Lib/Lab vs Greens reelection standoff that has proved so unproductive in the past for fighting environmental (particularly high conservation value forests) degradation and the fast track assessment of the Gunns Tamar Valley pulp mill.

Peter Wilson, Interim Vice-President of Communication, Ethics & Sustainability Party, http://www.esparty.org