Become a Candidate


Suppose you are intending to stand as a candidate for parliament. Why should you stand as a candidate for the Mainstream Party? Why not stand as an independent candidate, or start your own party? At every election, people stand as independent candidates. Usually they get 20 or 30 votes. People don’t like to vote for a candidate unless he or she has some sort of agenda such as helping the workers or expelling foreigners. People will not vote for some guy just because he would sooner be a member of parliament than whatever job he is doing at the moment.

There are a few independent members of Parliament. They are always people who were elected as a candidate for a party, but then abandoned their party, claiming their party has deserted the agenda that it originally stood for. Most independent members of Parliament are in rural areas, and claim they want to improve conditions for farmers. They are successful because people associate them with an agenda of improving things in some way.

Clearly, you will not get elected by standing as an independent candidate, but you will need to either join an existing party, or set up a new party. Nick Xenophon is essentially an independent member of parliament, and he got elected by setting up his “No Pokies” party. His party is no more than a brand name, but without the brand name he would not have been elected. People support Nick Xenophon because they sense he couldn’t care less about being a member of parliament, and that he wants to make the country a better place. If you want to get elected, you will have to copy Nick Xenophon’s example.

Clearly, then, you will need a party name, either one that someone else has made up, or one that you have made up yourself. There are two types of party name, the first where the name suggests the agenda, as with “Labor”, and the second where the name does not suggest any particular agenda, as with “Greens”, and the voter has to learn about the agenda in some other way.

Picture the average voter in a polling booth, looking at the ballot paper. He sees a list of six names. Besides three of the names are the names of parties, “Labor Party”, “Liberal Party” and “Mainstream Party”. He knows that the Labor and Liberal parties stand for the status quo; more of the same thing. He knows that Labor and Liberal candidates are schmucks who are only interested in becoming “big shots”. He has never heard of the “Mainstream Party”, but he is impressed by the name. It kind of sums up everything he aspires to in one word. He thinks, “Maybe I should be voting for these guys.” Who do you think he will vote for after a few seconds of thought? Not an independent candidate, anyway.

But, you say, “I don’t want to be associated with a party that is seen as a hate group”. When you think about it though, all political parties are hate groups. The Liberal Party preaches hatred of refugees and the unemployed, that is, a third of the population. The Labor Party preaches hatred of various people such as gun owners who collectively make up two-thirds of the population. By contrast, the Catholics are about a quarter of the population. We are not preaching hatred of them, but rather, we are saying that a minority group should not be running the country, and illegally discriminating against mainstream people. The tail should not be wagging the dog.

When you say that you don’t want to be associated with a hate group, what you really mean is that you don’t want to be criticized. If you are trying to avoid criticism, what are you going to have as policies? You need policies to be elected, and your policies need to be sensible, and different from those of the major parties. If you are going to promote policies against the agenda of the major parties, they are going to criticize you. There is no way around it.

Say you were a candidate for our party. You might take part in a debate where some Catholic guy says to you, “I understand your party wants to deport me; what have I ever done to you?” Say you were a Liberal candidate, and the other guy was a refugee from Sri Lanka. The correct answer would be, “People like you don’t belong in this country”. A lot of people don’t have the guts to say that to someone. Imagine if you worked for the Immigration Department. You would have to say it every day. If you don’t have the guts to tell someone they don’t belong in this country, you should not be a member of parliament or in any other responsible position.

It is quite amazing that many Australian men like to think they would do very well in the armed services, but they will go to any lengths to avoid any sort of confrontation. But it is their social role, as men, to get into conflict to protect their wives and children. What sort of man is a bloke who is not even willing to speak out and say, “I don’t support political correctness”?

Mormon missionaries go around door to door in the worst neighbourhoods to promote their denomination. They have to spend a year doing this. It is a very salutary practice, and is perhaps even better than military training. It would be a good thing if all Australian men had to become missionaries for a year as a rite of passage before getting married. Mormon missionaries come from very sheltered homes, but they are given training, so they are quite comfortable with going around from door to door in Australian cities. They actually welcome meeting people whom they have never met before, and that is entirely the right attitude.

The Mainstream Party would ideally like to provide candidates with a training course along the lines of the Mormon Church training course for Mormon missionaries. Due to our current limited resources, we are able to provide only a correspondence course. This is similar to the Mormon training course in that it covers door-to-door selling. The topic that we nowadays call “salesmanship” used to be called “rhetoric” by the Romans. It used to be taught to Roman boys of noble birth. You could not very well be an officer in the Roman army unless you could convince the men to follow you. This process of persuading people to your point of view is called “salesmanship” or “rhetoric”. American academics have reduced it to a fine art, that anyone can learn.

Our training course for candidates includes the following subjects:

  • Law
  • Economics
  • History
  • Folklore
  • Rhetoric
  • Business Administration

The course works like this. There are nine consecutive modules. For each module, we will send you six books, either textbooks, or books by famous authors whom you might have heard of. You will have to intently read these books, taking as much time as you need. You will then need to pass a multiple-choice test. There will be 100 questions, and you will have 2 hours. To make things easier, when we send you the books, we will also send three sample tests with the answers for you to practice with. If you fail a test, you can try again at a later time. When you have passed the test, we will send you some more books, and so on, until you have completed all nine modules.

After you have completed the course, you should be able to do the following things:

  • Persuasively defend our policy platform
  • Confidently promote our party door to door
  • Provide sensible advice to members of the public
  • Arbitrate disputes in a way that is seen as fair by the unsuccessful party
  • Chair meetings so the meeting is not subject to legal challenge
  • Draft your own private member’s bills
  • Give meaningful instructions to senior bureaucrats

Once you become a Member of Parliament, the Mainstream Party loses any ability to control or influence you. In the final analysis, the only real power we have lies in our choice of the 54 books we send you as part of your candidate’s course. Through our judicious selection of these books, our aims and preferences will become your aims and preferences. You will become an entirely different person to who you would be if the books had been selected by the Labor Party.

Ideally, the course would be paid by the government. Books are very expensive these days, and it is usual for a textbook to cost over $100. We also will incur outlays for freight, and for invigilator fees for supervising your examinations. We can’t realistically provide this course for any less than $5000. This is payable in advance, and refunds will not be provided. If you are unable to complete the course for any reason, you will have to regard the fee as a donation to a worthy cause.

You may perhaps have already acquired the necessary knowledge. If you are a medical practitioner, your university degree will not have included any of the above subjects. The same would apply to most other professions and trades. Even lawyers do not study economics and history. But if you think you know everything that a politician needs to know, then you have a legal right to start your own party, rather than joining our party!

Our party has a different expectation of members of parliament than the major parties. Liberal and Labor politicians see their role as like that of hereditary lords, to be celebrities. We see a member of parliament as being a social worker and solicitor rolled into one. If a member of the public has a problem, and no-one else can help, they come to their member of parliament. Your role is to provide a solution to their problem. This could mean your having to do any of the following:

  • Providing sensible advice to the constituent
  • Ringing government departments on the constituent’s behalf
  • Writing a letter on a constituent’s behalf
  • Drafting a legal document for a constituent to file with a court
  • Writing a speech for a constituent to give to the Small Claims Tribunal about why he should not be evicted from his flat
  • Asking awkward questions in parliament
  • Writing a private member’s bill to deal with the grievance of a constituent and of others in his position
  • Paying for constituents to have medical treatment out of your own money

It is our aim that our members of parliament will provide these sort of services to all of their constituents, not just their mainstream constituents. The major emphasis will be on providing services to mainstream people, but they will provide services to everyone else as well. Many of the problems that mainstream people have are also problems for everyone else.

One of the best members of parliament ever was Lyndon Johnson, who eventually became president of the United States. We disagree with his policies, but the way he treated his constituents was exemplary. Johnson’s constituents were mainly hillbillies, that is, the sort of people shown on the television show, “The Waltons”. Whenever anyone in his district had a birthday, Johnson would send a card, “To John-Boy, Happy Birthday and Many Happy Returns from your Daddy’s best friend, Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson”. Johnson also used his connections to get power lines laid in his district, so his constituents could wash laundry using washing machines instead of by hand. We expect our members of parliament to follow Johnson’s example.

As a candidate for the Mainstream Party, your working hours will be Monday to Friday 4.00 pm to 8.00 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 8.00 am to 12.00 noon and 1.00 pm to 5.00 pm. When visiting peoples’ houses, you will deliver your sales pitch, then leave them with a business card or leaflet or other promotional material. If the household is Catholic, you might mention some policy that may appeal to them, such as how we will spend more money on the environment than the major parties.

Say they mention our policy of cancelling their citizenship, of course you don’t tell someone that he doesn’t belong in this country in his own home. You could point out that it is unlikely that we will be elected to form a government in our own right, but that there should be someone in parliament arguing to end discrimination against mainstream people. If he insults you, turn the other cheek and say that, if you are elected, he is welcome to come to you with a problem, in spite of what he has just said. If some guy punches you, don’t press charges.

To become a candidate for the Mainstream Party, you will need to meet a number of requirements. These are that you must:

  • be a member of the party
  • be married with children
  • be a professional person or tradesman or married to one
  • receive an income from investments of at least the average wage, not counting any salary you receive
  • be able to pay the party a franchise fee
  • have completed the party’s candidate’s course

We see politics as being similar to a franchise business like Pizza Hut or Kentucky Fried Chicken. With a franchise business, you buy a franchise from a company. The company provides you with training. If you do everything the company says, you are practically guaranteed a high income.

Similarly, the deal is, you do our training course and then buy a franchise from us. This entitles you to stand as our candidate one time. If you do everything we say, such as visiting every household in the electorate several times, this will more-or-less guarantee you will be elected. Once you are elected, you are virtually guaranteed a high income and high social status.

The franchise fee that you pay will be used 90 percent as advertising to get you elected, and 10 percent as running costs for the party. If you were to set up your own party, you would still have to pay the same advertising costs, so you would only be financially better off by 10 percent. You are not going to be that much financially better off if you set up your own party.

Our franchise fees are:

  • Ordinary electorate, $250,000
  • Senate ticket, first or second place, $500,000
  • Senate ticket, other places, free for youth wing members
  • Local council, $250,000

In theory, you could set up your own party and be successful, as Nick Xenophon did. And in theory, guys who set up McDonald’s restaurants could have been successful if they had set up their own generic takeaway food businesses. Do you think guys who have bought McDonald’s franchises have ever regretted not setting up their own generic businesses? Realistically, life is too short to stumble on the winning formula by trial and error.