Taylor Laine

I am running with Victorian Socialists, and we have a very clear preferencing of left to right.

This means that we do not do deals with any other political parties or individuals for any reason, and would leave the likes of the far right, such as One Nation, at the very bottom of preferences.

My position is that any and all development into AI data centres should be put on an immediate and permanent halt.

The pace at which these massive AI tech companies have been allowed to develop their infrastructure in Victoria shows a callous disregard to the working class people that will have to deal with the ugly effects of these developments, being built right next to residential homes, constantly polluting the area in a multitude of ways through sound, light and fumes, is unacceptable.

I think it is also important that we discuss the impact that AI will have on workers’ jobs is also a key point. What we will see with the implementation of AI is the loss of a lot of jobs that many people rely on, and forcing more and more people to take positions that will not be able to support them, or by making some job sectors disappear completely. This all done in order to maximise the profits of these already ludicrously wealthy tech companies and billionaires, with no regard to how it will affect the workers that live and work in these areas.

The way that this technology has been pushed for and implemented into our lives should be called out for what it is, a direct attack on working class people and the very livelihoods that they rely on in order to support themselves.

It is also correct to say that many of the uses for AI are not in the interest of workers either, filters, chatbots, editing tools and the like only make up a small part of what it is being used for. The main use of the large amounts of these AI systems are for military or surveillance usage, with the US military being the largest user for AI software, using it for drone piloting and targeting prioritisation.

Along with this, it is also being used in surveilling the general public, with the intention of ‘preventing crime’ that hasn’t even happened yet. This is terrifying, allowing an unregulated industry to be allowed such free reign over tools of destruction in this wholesale way.

How we get around shapes every aspect of daily life. Transport is a social necessity, and the system we have now is failing. Urban planning has been designed around the private car, locking millions of people into car dependency. This is very obvious in the way transport has been approached in the west, with the majority of transport infrastructure being pushed into the already over-capacity road networks that exist.

Our priority towards public transport should be building a genuinely usable network by establishing a turn-up-and-go model on all high-frequency routes, extending services so key lines run through the night, increasing bus, tram and train frequency across the network, and establishing a high-frequency orbital bus network connecting suburbs to each other rather than only to the city.

This can be achieved by reversing the privatisation of Victoria’s train, tram and bus system and infrastructure, returning it to full public ownership, without compensation to private operators.

Ending the funding to private operators and instead directing those funds to the running and maintenance of the public transport network. An example of what this would look like is the Better Buses initiative that has been discussed over the last few years. This initiative would be a great start to the tangible changes that can be made to our transport network that would greatly improve accessibility across the west.

Improvements to public transport which take cars off the road will go a long way to improving the air quality in the west.

In addition to that I will fight for the EPA to be properly resourced so that corporations that pollute our suburbs are identified and compelled to stop polluting through fines and legal sanctions.

The most important threat to our air quality, and actually everything that makes our environment livable is climate change. I will fight to phase out fossil fuels by reversing the Allan government’s 2025 offshore gas exploration program, prohibiting the development of all new fossil fuel projects and accelerating the closure of all remaining coal-fired power generation.

In general there is so much that could be done in order to fight air pollution across the board. The shift to clean energy would be a massive improvement, which would be focused on the way we produce energy, but also the ways that we consume energy, would greatly reduce the amount of pollution in the west.

By shifting to alternative energy for our transport would be a key way in which we can reduce pollution, prioritising electric vehicles for both personal and industrial use would be a massive start to this. We need to prioritise moving away from fossil fuels for basically everything that we do. The impacts of continuous use cannot be understated in how they are driving us towards a world that is unsustainable.

The housing crisis is getting worse and almost everyone is affected.

Political choices and profit-driven hoarding have led to housing for profit not people: the selling off public land to private developers, allowing big developers to land-bank undeveloped sites to drive up prices, and disguising the demolition of public housing estates as ‘renewal’.

Housing has been transformed from a social necessity into an investment vehicle and a source of profit for landlords, speculators and developers, at the direct expense of the people who need homes to live in. This would look like changing our approach to housing altogether, starting with putting in protections for those that are already struggling with housing insecurity and stress. A 25% cut to rents, followed by a 5 year rent freeze would immediately take a massive amount of housing stress off a massive amount of renters.

Stricter regulations for landlords also need to be implemented, with so many people either living in properties that absolutely do not meet minimum living standards, or having to constantly worrying about whether they will have to move at the end of lease due to unrealistic price increases, or even suddenly due to ‘change-of-use’ evictions. So many renters have such little control over their own housing, and so there needs to be stronger protections in place to ensure everyone has access to stable housing.

Renters aren’t the only ones that struggle with the system that is in place either. Owner-occupiers also get the short end of the stick when it comes to housing, being constantly priced out of the property market by big investment firms and taken advantage of by predatory bank practices that make mortgages crippling to most. The way in which investors and landlords hoard properties needs to be stopped, as it is creating a scarcity that is highly inflated and locking so many people out of having their own home.

Banks also can be to blame for the ridiculous rates on mortgages, which means so many people are paying way more to these institutions than is necessary in order to drive profits. Victorian Socialists policy is to establish a state owned bank that would offer homeloans at drastically reduced rates so that people don’t have to overpay.

I also want to note that Labor’s plan to demolish all of the public housing towers across the state is a reprehensible move, especially when there is no plan to provide any new public housing at all. This should be immediately stopped, and a move to create a Victorian Public Housing Authority, which would include a public construction firm that would not only be to deliver the construction of public housing, but also create jobs in a long term sustainable way.

The question of abortion should be a very simple one, they should be free, safe and accessible to all, as should any other type of healthcare.

The constant debate over abortion is very clearly one that only serves to continue to call into question the bodily autonomy of women. By continuing to attempt to limit the types of healthcare women are able to access, it serves to perpetuate the ways in which women are oppressed and objectified across all facets of their lives.

The continuous moral panic around the topic is ridiculous, and shows no regard to how our medical and healthcare sectors should be driven by evidence based measures, rather than the morality of certain groups that constantly push out unreliable information, or in most cases, straight up misinformation.

The trend of ‘law and order’ that has been pushed by Labor over recent years has very clearly not addressed the fundamental reasons as to why crime happens.

The vast majority of crime is driven by factors of poverty and lack of access to vital resources. The ‘law and order’ policies promoted by big business, media and their politicians seek to criminalise poverty and marginalisation, and simultaneously scapegoat people of colour and the poor and people with disabilities and/or mental health challenges for social ills, diverting public anger away from the systemic causes created by capitalism.

The most effective way of reducing crime is by transferring funding away from the increasingly punitive measures of the police and prison industrial complex, towards things that will tangibly change people’s conditions.

By adequately funding social justice policies would massively reduce crime, which includes universal housing, secure and well paid employment, properly funded public education, universally accessible and preventive healthcare (including mental health and drug and alcohol support), and a massive expansion of community services (such as neighbourhood houses, youth centres etc).

The diversion of public money to running prisons takes away from funding for such services, and from programs that help people to deal with social alienation and to break the cycles of criminal offences.