| Consultation: | Winter General Meeting 2026 |
|---|---|
| Agenda item: | 3. Motions of Policy and Organisation |
| Proposer: | Lachlan Carbery (Green Party) |
| Status: | Published |
| Submitted: | 01/23/2026, 23:12 |
Summary:
As Young Greens, we should be guiding the Party's choices of technology and
platforms of communication towards solutions that are ethical, sustainable for
the planet, and supportive of the party's ballooning membership and its ability
to engage meaningfully and easily.
The Young Greens note that:
Surveillance and authoritarianism is a growing global concern as elites try to
crack down on political organising, dissent and freedom of speech.
Current member-to-member communication structures within the Party can mean that
organising occurs over many disconnected group chats, platforms and email
exchanges.
The infrastructure for sustainable and ethical methods of communication is
present and developing at pace, especially in the open-source-software space.
The dominance of Big Tech solutions in internal communications solutions
presents longer-term issues for the security and sovereignty of important data,
especially with companies based in an increasingly monopolistic and extractive
United States.
The Young Greens believe that:
Adopting and embracing new methods of collaborating and organising is important
for the Party's continued resilience.
The values of transparency, accountability and social utility deserve to be at
the heart of such fundamental operations within the Party.
Vix Lowthion - as our newly-elected internal communications co-ordinator -
should be supported in her vision over her two-year tenure to drive member
engagement across the party, improve mechanisms of information sharing, and
adopt new and radical strategies for transforming internal communications.
The Young Greens resolve to:
Vocally support - and materially so wherever possible - opportunities aimed to
increase the Party's independence from Big Tech owned solutions through
investment in and research into suitable and idealistic alternatives.
Comments
Eugene McCarthy:
Don't use Instagram?
Lachlan Carbery:
And it's about doing it in a way that's sustainable and ethical while maintaining viability. So this could mean promoting usage of alternative platforms (e.g. those by infomaniak, matrix.org, Proton etc.) rather than always WhatsApp, Slack and others in the longer term, as there are numerous platforms that I believe embody our environmental and social values much better.
It may seem like a difficult transition to approach right now, but I think even the small decisions can move us in a more productive direction, and set us up for As for social media, I fully recognise its essentiality, and so it isn't really the focus of this motion.
Lachlan Carbery:
Haydn Osborne-Brookes:
Lachlan Carbery:
The motion is aiming mostly to draw attention to the importance of looking ahead towards potential alternatives, the work that is already being done in the party from the top down, and the solutions that are available to look into. I agree completely that shifting everyone to unfamiliar platforms quickly would be counterproductive to meaningful activism.
It's about encouraging experimentation and forward thinking about how we approach comms, and gradually taking positive steps in that direction to ensure readiness for greater change down the track.