Fusion Party Australia

The message from Football Victoria and the club that overrode a girls' fixture is damning. An under-12 girls' points match was stopped at halftime so an under-11 boys' team could take the field. The girls waited 40 minutes, then were directed to a waterlogged, unsafe pitch. The match was abandoned. One young coach left in tears.

Football Victoria says it's 'reviewing expectations' and running a Member Protection process. That's not good enough. The damage isn't hypothetical. It happened in July, on the ground, in front of families who now have to explain to their kids why their game mattered less.

Fusion's principle is floor, not ceiling: equal access, equal respect, equal opportunity. Every player gets the same floor to stand on. No review can repair the moment a girl learns her match is less important than a boys' game. The only fix is making sure it never happens again.

#auspol #sport

Australians are doing the sensible thing: buying EVs and hybrids to escape $2/L petrol. Nearly one in two new car sales now. That's 0.4% quarterly spending growth and the RBA sees it as demand that keeps rates high.

We're punishing households for trying to save money. The bank's model treats a rational cost-cutting switch as 'inflationary spending.' But where is the same scrutiny on corporate margin expansion? Coles, Transurban, the energy retailers all post record profits without a peep.

Fusion's take: EVs are structurally deflationary. They cut household exposure to volatile oil prices and link transport to cheap solar. The short-term 'demand bump' is a transition cost, not a signal to hike rates. The RBA needs to see through the noise, and the government needs to accelerate the transition, not slow it down by letting rate fears drive policy.

Ask your MP: why is household cost-saving treated as inflation while corporate profiteering isn't?

#auspol #inflation #EVs
https://www.theage.com.au/business/the-economy/australians-are-flocking-to-electric-vehicles-there-s-a-hidden-cost-20260903-p60u4j.html

Every day CityLink rakes in $2M in tolls and every dollar goes to Transurban shareholders. Not back to the Victorians who paid for the road. Fusion has a better idea: a Citizens Dividend that returns the income from our common assets to the people who own them. We start small, around $112–$418/week for tenants in VWHF homes, and scale toward every Victorian as the fund matures. No raids from Treasurers because the dividend is paid only from the fund's own surplus, not from consolidated revenue. To get there, we need a party big enough to write the anti-raid mechanism into the VWHF Act from day one. Join us and help lock in a permanent economic floor for every Victorian. #auspol #vicpol

https://go.fusionparty.org.au/9skHr

Communities locking farm gates against transmission lines gets framed as NIMBYism. But a new study of three WA towns tells a different story.

In Busselton, residents said consultation came too late to influence anything. In Kojonup, some landowners got investment opportunities while neighbours got disrupted views and zero benefit. In Albany, a wind farm that has been running for two decades now powers 80% of the city and draws 200,000 tourists a year. And the locals love it.

This is not anti-renewables sentiment. It is the predictable outcome of a system where private developers capture the upside and communities bear the risks.

Scotland mandates a minimum £5,000/MW/year community payment. Denmark runs energy cooperatives where locals own a share. Australia's model: hope nobody notices until the bulldozers arrive.

Fix the deal structure: community equity, revenue sharing, genuine co-decision. Then the opposition vanishes. Until then, every stalled project is self-inflicted.

#auspol #energy

Metro Trains and Yarra Trams pocket public money whether they run on time or not. Franchise contracts guarantee availability payments regardless of performance, and penalties are too weak to shift behaviour. The next Metro Trains contract renews before November 2027 – once signed, the figures stay hidden for another decade. Fusion's fix: a windfall levy on franchise profits when service standards fail. Miss the standard, give it back. A Fusion MP would compel profit disclosure and make a third extension politically costly. The public funds the network, the public should know what operators pocket. Join us to force that showdown before the contract locks in. #auspol #vicpol

https://go.fusionparty.org.au/Q6oQZ

The state spent $13.48 billion building the Metro Tunnel's five underground stations, then left the land above them for private developers. Fusion Victoria's policy: mandate public housing and public income retention at every major station precinct. We will use the Victorian Wealth and Housing Fund to build at cost, retain the assets, and collect the rent. Hong Kong's MTR model gets 40% of revenue from property. Singapore's HDB houses 80% of the population. This works. We just need the political will. Joining Fusion means building the party that will take this into parliament. Sign up today. #auspol #housingcrisis

https://go.fusionparty.org.au/GyRqF

The Victorian Budget says 2026-27 is a surplus year. But the entire $1.05 billion figure is funded by a single one-off payment: $1.145 billion from Tattersall's for a 42-year lottery licence extension. Strip that out and there's no surplus — just accounting tricks. Fusion is demanding an independent forensic audit. One MP in PAEC can force Treasury to release the real numbers. Join us to help make that happen. #auspol #vicpol

https://go.fusionparty.org.au/e4Cqa

Victorian toll road contracts are classified. You can't read them. The West Gate Tunnel deal extended CityLink to 2045, locked in behind commercial-in-confidence rules. The Metro Tunnel's fixed-price PPP cost $11bn at announcement and at least $13.48bn by September 2024, with extra payments of up to $888m in 2024 alone. The 25-year availability payment clock started in 2026, but no single reconciled total has ever been tabled.

Fusion will declassify and publish all toll road agreements. Then we'll table PAEC questions demanding DTF produce a reconciled cost statement for the Metro Tunnel: original contract price, all amending deeds, the post-reset availability schedule, and the projected total over the life of the concession. If DTF refuses, we'll request a formal Phase 3 performance audit.

We can't claw back the station retail rights without triggering compensation clauses that cost more than they save. So we'll redirect land-value uplift from the five station precincts into the Victorian Wastewater and Housing Fund via Windfall Gains Tax and Infrastructure Contributions Plan levies, without touching the Project Agreement.

This is crossbench power. A single Fusion MP can force this disclosure. We need more members and donations to run these campaigns. Join us today. #auspol #vicpol

https://go.fusionparty.org.au/Wprzf

Chanel Contos wants to make social media algorithms opt-in. That means you get to choose how your feed is curated, not some opaque machine trained on whatever keeps you scrolling longest. This is floor-not-ceiling logic: the state sets a minimum standard for how algorithms treat you, then gets out of the way and lets you decide. The opposite is the current model, where platforms extract your attention with no meaningful consent enforced.

Contos is right that the same structural forces that push misogynistic content onto young men are baked into the profit model of infinite scroll. Making algorithms opt-in doesn't ban anything; it just means the default isn't surveillance. That's a progressive, libertarian win for anyone who'd rather not have their feed engineered by an engagement-maximising black box.

#auspol #onlinesafety

https://www.fusionparty.org.au/individual_freedoms

Fusion's policy: citizen-initiated referenda for Victoria. No more cabinet making 42-year monopoly extensions or committing lottery revenue to 2068 without a single public vote. We want to make 'nothing about the people without the people' law. A petition threshold + deliberative panel (citizens' assembly) stops capture. In a minority parliament, we'll push for a government-initiated advisory referendum per term. This is how we build real democratic muscle. Join us to make it happen.

#auspol #vicpol

https://go.fusionparty.org.au/MPzTz

After decades of campaigning, including a three-week sit-in at the park in 1994 and another in 2002, the Waanyi people have formally regained ownership of Boodjamulla National Park. More than 247,000 hectares of their ancestral land, including Lawn Hill Gorge and the World Heritage Riversleigh fossil deposits, has been returned. The land is leased back to the state for continued public access, with equal representation on a board of management. As Hayley Iles, chair of the Waanyi PBC, put it: 'Our elders fought very long to let everyone know that this is our country.' Many of those elders did not live to see this day. That's why this handback is a tribute to their resilience. It shows that persistent, organised community action, from protests to legal negotiations, can win back stolen land. This is a genuine win for Indigenous sovereignty and for all Australians who want to see justice done. Share this story to honour the Waanyi elders and the generations who never gave up.

#auspol #landrights
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-04/boodjamulla-national-park-lawn-hill-gorge-handover/107102104

Labor's migration overhaul is a textbook duopoly panic. One Nation and the Coalition push for cuts, so Labor scrambles to slash net migration from 300k to 225k. They killed the Graduate Diploma of Management, a dodgy course with 41k students, 18k of whom never studied. But the real story? Industry says they can't find local workers because the training system is broken. Hotels paid $74m into the Skilling Australians Fund, yet hospitality training is de-prioritised. Now backpackers, who make up 44% of the harvest workforce, are being squeezed. One Nation feeds on the anger, but their solution is scapegoating. Fix the training, regulate the shonky providers, and stop treating migrants as a political football. #auspol #migration
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/pub-test-albanese-faces-dire-warnings-that-migration-plan-risks-shuttering-hotels-20260903-p60tzl.html

Victoria's pothole crisis is getting worse. Complaints up 46% in a year, 10k more this year alone. The government's solution? Inmate labour for roadside mowing. But experts say the real fix is a data-led resilience plan, like Queensland's foam-bitumen stabilisation that survived Cyclone Debbie unscathed. Victoria has no public database tracking road hazards, and the NTRO only collects data every two years. Queensland has 13 years of continuous data. Labor's $352M pledge and the Coalition's $5B plan both miss the structural issue: underinvestment in proper engineering while outer suburbs wait for basic repairs. #vicpol #potholes

https://vic.fusionparty.org.au/policies/fix-transit-deserts

Subject scaling is supposed to make the ATAR fair across different Year 12 subjects. But in practice it systematically rewards students at advantaged schools and punishes everyone else.

2025 Victorian data: a raw score of 30 in Latin (offered at a tiny number of elite private schools) scaled to 46. A raw 40 in agricultural/horticultural studies (top 10% of the subject) scaled down to 34.

The pattern is stable year after year. Students from low-SES backgrounds and rural schools are more likely to take subjects that scale down because those subjects are the ones their school can offer. Meanwhile kids at elite schools with a full menu of 'hard' subjects get a free boost.

The system doesn't create inequality. It just measures it stamps a rank on it and calls it fair.

Reform the funding formula. Resource every school properly. This whole algorithm becomes obsolete.

#auspol #vicpol #education

https://theconversation.com/how-does-subject-scaling-work-for-year-12-and-why-is-it-unfair-289217

https://vic.fusionparty.org.au/policies/fund-the-outer-suburbs

Victoria spent $11 billion on the Metro Tunnel. Land values around stations soared because the state built the infrastructure, yet landowners captured the gain. The Windfall Gains Tax catches some uplift at rezoning but misses land already zoned and sitting idle. A surface car park near a new station can appreciate for decades and pay nothing.

Fusion's fix: a compounding annual surcharge on commercial surface car parks and single-use sites within a kilometre of a station. The levy rises each year the site stays undeveloped. Build, sell, or pay; the free ride on public infrastructure ends. Revenue goes into a Transit Capital Fund for the precinct improvements that create the uplift.

This is a targeted, achievable reform with the legislative design ready. A Fusion MP in the upper house can force the question into budget debates and require Treasury to model the cost of land-banking. We need members to make that seat a reality.

Join Fusion and help close the loophole that lets corporations pocket the value the public created.

#auspol #vicpol

https://go.fusionparty.org.au/gvCyS

Democracy doesn't have a table charge. Fusion Party Victoria will ban corporate cash-for-access fundraisers and mandate public registers for all minister meetings. This isn't about your side or our side. It's about whether a $10,000 table buys a private policy discussion that the rest of us never hear about. Victoria already bans property developer donations. The same principle applies here: no one should be able to purchase access to an elected representative. We'll require real-time disclosure of every corporate table purchase. The one-seat deliverable is transparency: show every minister meeting in a public register. The ban follows from whichever parliament is willing to take the next step. If you believe democracy shouldn't have a price tag, join Fusion and help us clean up Victorian politics. #auspol #vicpol

https://go.fusionparty.org.au/ozZ8G

Labor used new cancellation powers for the first time to shut down a graduate diploma it says is being misused by international students to extend their stay. Transfers into the Graduate Diploma of Management (Learning) jumped from 510 in 2020 to 4,000 in 2025, with 77% coming from higher education. 452 providers deliver it, with 41k active enrolments. The government says it's protecting integrity, but this is a reactive fix to a broken system. The Coalition left a 'shocking mess'; Labor is slapping band-aids on one course at a time. Genuine students need proper visa pathways and quality protections, not ad-hoc cancellations. The duopoly has failed to build a managed migration system with real floors for student rights and sector quality. This is policy by admin veto, not by plan. #auspol #migration

Brisbane City Council sat on 17 state school transport grant applications from suburbs like Fig Tree Pocket, progressing just two to nomination, while Townsville and Cairns pushed through over 60% of theirs, leaving grandmothers and primary students waiting in the rain for basic bus shelters a state program could fund if the council bothered to apply.