Open forum discussion with Owen Miller, Fusion Party candidate in Aston

Owen Miller, Fusion Party candidate in the Aston by-election, took part in an open forum discussion on Reddit on Tuesday 7 March. In this discussion, he took questions from the general public.

In his opening, he stated that Fusion aimed to bring about a return to real Australian values, innovation and a fair go for all.

He further stated that: “innovations in our society are not being applied to improving our way of life − tech monopolies squeeze us and distract us. Governments have turned a blind eye to innovations and have now ceded the town square to American tech giants.”

Miller added that Fusion also support drug legalisation/decriminalisation, Universal Basic Income (UBI), classifying ageing as a disease and animal welfare.

When asked whether Fusion was the former Flux party, Miller replied that Flux was not one of the parties that had joined together to form Fusion, and that he wasn’t a big fan of Flux’s ideas.

Miller was asked whether he lived in the Aston electorate, to which he replied he lived in Brunswick, but intended to buy a house in Aston if he was elected.

When asked the three major issues he saw for Aston, Miller replied: “Domestic violence, mental health and cost of living. Our society is not being maximised for happiness.”

On the question of a UBI, Miller stated that the party hadn’t yet pinned down a model for it’s introduction, but suggested that Negative Income Tax (NIT) was also something they supported: “In that model, everyone gets $460 per week either as cash or off your tax bill.”

Asked about how ageing was a disease, Miller responded: “ageing goes hand in hand with Alzheimer’s disease, cancer; a whole host of health effects. Research from the likes of David Sinclair shows that ageing (as measured by telomere length) can be slowed or even reversed; and that this corresponds with a lower likelihood of developing cancer.”

Another person asked him the most disruptive policy Fusion could enact in the tech space for the benefit of local peoples, to which Miller replied: “Open-source LinkedIn. If governments funded software engineers to work on an open-source competitor to LinkedIn, we could align it to human wellbeing and job satisfaction, not recruiter fees and GDP maximisation.

“We could gather market data and present it to people entering the job market; even people considering what schooling they should take.”

Further to this, he added: “I feel that the government could fund Australians to work as software engineers on open-source projects that support government functions, or that directly compete with monopolistic, suboptimal or deceptive behaviour.”

Asked about his opinion on Chesterton’s Fence Principle, Miller explained: “We don’t wait to understand the economy before we make changes there! And our pursuit of GDP growth as a metric for humanity’s success is actively killing life on this planet.

“I’ve heard a saying before that engineers create new technologies, then scientists explain how they work.”

On the matter of the biggest challenges to small to medium businesses, Miller said: “The advances in software over the last 20 years have allowed scalable human thought to be applied to the creation of monopolies.

“I have had debates with people recently who want to argue over definitions etc, whether a monopoly has to be strictly 100%. Not important. It’s undeniable that Amazon for instance flexes its muscles and hurts both consumers and producers.”

Asked whether innovation was possible in Australia with our current % GDP spend on innovation and research, Miller replied: “Australia is indeed spending less than the OECD average on R&D. When Shockley Semiconductor got started in Mountain View, the compelling points for Shockley were that it was close to Stanford University, and it was just a nice place for him to live.”

Miller qualified this, adding that Australia is also a nice place to live and “Australia will have a more compelling case than Mountain View to be the new Silicon Valley; the new oasis of innovation that shapes the rest of the world.”

Miller had a lot more to say to expand on these answers, and the full text can be found at https://old.reddit.com/r/AustralianPolitics/comments/11kr4h5/im_owen_miller_fusion_candidate_for_aston/

Craig Hill is a Brisbane-based Social Justice Campaigner, Writer, Teacher and Business Consultant. He has campaigned for social justice in Australia, promoted human rights in China and worked with the homeless in Honolulu. He holds a Graduate Certificate in Business, a Graduate Certificate in Education and a degree in Management. He is also the General Manager of The Australian Business and Leadership School.

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