If the map convinced you, you may already be one of us — and bristling at what comes next. A political party? Voting? Democracy is mob rule. Fair. We hold that too. Here’s why we’re on the ballot anyway.
No contradiction is required — only a distinction the tradition has always drawn: between sanctioning a system and defending yourself with the only lever it hands you. This is where liberty folk gather to hash it out — including over at Liberty Australia.
“They assume individuals cannot run their own affairs — yet assume those same individuals are equipped to vote for the experts who will. The political sphere of open demagogy is the one place the mass is deemed competent.”
Hoppe’s rule: use democratic means for defensive purposes only — an anti-democratic platform, an anti-democratic constituency, to roll back the State’s reach over your life and property. The ballot becomes a megaphone for the ideas, not a blessing of the machine. A candidate isn’t honourable because he was elected — if anything, that makes him a suspect.
Rothbard’s answer to the non-voters: the State surrounds you with a situation of institutionalised aggression and offers a narrow area of partial choice. Using that choice in self-defence no more sanctions the State than handing over your wallet sanctions the mugger. To insist voting creates the State is to adopt the democrat’s own myth — that mass participation makes it voluntary. It doesn’t.
A candidacy is a platform to expose the system and draw people to the ideas — running against the office as it’s currently understood. As Leonard Read put it, the only force that turns indifference into acceptance is the power of attraction. Win or lose at the count, the argument gains ground. And we never sell the principle to look practical: the moment you concede “of course some taxes must be levied,” you’ve betrayed the cause.
“Majority rule and private property protection are incompatible. The idea of democracy is nothing but mob rule parading as justice.”
If you reject the whole arrangement, the system gives you no honest way to say so. A donkey vote — numbering boxes straight down the card — still flows as a full, valid preference to whoever sits at the top. An informal vote — blank or spoiled — is simply discarded and counts for no one. Neither registers dissent. Both are read as noise, then ignored.
A vote for Taxation is Theft, War is Murder is the missing option: a counted, recorded, unmistakable no to the entire premise — not a wasted vote, but the only one that means what a blank ballot wishes it could.
Both, and unapologetically. Registering a federal party in Australia takes 1,500 members and a constitution lodged with the AEC; candidates need valid nomination and a deposit. We intend to clear that bar and appear on the ballot.
And it is not unprecedented here. In 1975 the Workers Party put a plank headed “Taxation is Theft” into its platform — “taxation, which is legalised coercion and robbery by government, is no less immoral than coercion and robbery committed by private individuals” — and sent John Singleton onto the ABC’s Monday Conference to defend it in front of a studio audience that had come to disagree. Read what happened. It is this argument map, played out live, fifty years ahead of us.
But “serious” cuts both ways. We’re deadly serious about the ideas and entirely unsentimental about the office. The aim isn’t careers in Canberra — it’s to put the argument somewhere it can’t be ignored, and give people a principled box to tick.
Then the job in office is to shrink the office. A representative votes against every new tax, every new invasive law, every expansion of the budget; refuses to enforce aggressive laws where there’s discretion; and works to repeal and devolve power rather than wield it “better.”
Rothbard’s test: an officeholder who acts purely libertarian is licit; one who sells out and votes statist becomes a criminal aggressor. We don’t promise to manage the State well. We promise to dismantle what we can and obstruct the rest.
Australia has compulsory, preferential voting — you’re forced to the booth and forced to number boxes. We treat that as a constraint to use, not a mandate to honour. Put us first to register support for the principle, then order later preferences toward whoever would most reduce aggression.
How we preference other parties isn’t decided in a backroom — it’s thrashed out in the open. Each election we run that debate in the open, alongside Liberty Australia, weighing every party against a single yardstick and publishing the reasoning behind the order.
The rule that debate must satisfy is simple and non-negotiable: least aggression first.
The legal floor: be an Australian citizen, on the electoral roll, and not disqualified under Section 44 (no dual citizenship, no office of profit under the Crown, etc.). Council, state, and federal all count — standing locally is often where the argument travels furthest.
The real prerequisite is being able to defend the non-aggression principle plainly and calmly under fire. Read the foundations, sharpen your case with others who’ll push back — Liberty Australia is a good place to start — then get in touch, and we’ll help with nomination, the deposit, and the mechanics.
The ballot is the smallest part of it. Most of the work is cultural and personal:
And don’t do it alone. Locals coordinate, argue, and organise through Liberty Australia — the easiest place to start is to get in touch.
Sources: Workers Party Platform (1975) & the 1975 Monday Conference transcript, via economics.org.au · Hoppe, What Must Be Done & Democracy: The God That Failed · Rothbard, Nations by Consent, the 1972 anti-voting interview, the 1982 letter to Wendy McElroy, & Man, Economy, and State · Spooner, No Treason · Leonard Read, The Power of Attraction.