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Members of the Australian National Party, on April 15, 2009 I hope to see you all at the polls exercising your right to vote for the next Party President. As you no doubt have guessed, I will be running for this office. Since my start in the ANP, I have always been an active member in what shapes our party. I have been a congressman for two terms now, always active in discussions. I was our party Historian, and the Deputy Minister and later Minister for Heritage and the Arts under Derek Apollyon . With those roles, I updated Australia's pages, as well as the ANP page. I even created Australia's current system for updating and displaying each month's congressmen on the wiki. Just last month, I campaigned for the Party Presidency. At the end of the day, the polls were tied, and Alte Altus won by default based on experience level. Either way, we were both great candidates for the job as the votes would say, and he appointed me as Vice President.

Almost two weeks ago, our own party founder calibur decided to leave eRepublik with a bang. In doing that, he vandalized, a good friend and past e😜arty member, TheBlackAdder's organization, sold his companies, and took his money. Many pitched in to help him out with some generous donations. Later, calibur went onto our party forums using his Admin access and wiped the boards clean. Despite these acts of tyranny, the ANP has persevered, using the ANP section of the Aus forums to hold discussions, mostly about the future of our party. I will tell you now that this party is not about any one man. It is about its members and its beliefs for the greater good of Australia. Calibur was a great man while he was in the party, but now that he has disgraced himself, I am ready to bring the ANP back to where we belong. We are a party founded on the beliefs of capitalism and democracy, and that is what I will stand for as your next party president.

I have created our new party forums, which are located at http://anp-tbp.forums-free.com. It says "TBP" in there because we have been talking quite a bit about a coalition of sorts with our friends in the True Blue Party. This is because we share some of the same ideals and if we work together, then we can both become stronger. We are both advocates for economic independence and a capitalistic market. Their party president corny-ratbag is a reliable friend.

Our regular policies seem to be doing the job, but I think that our representation in congress needs to be tweaked a bit. The ANP has been stricken with high numbers of congressmen leaving without warning. We must ensure that our representation in congress is reliable, active, and educated. Our primaries did a fair job of allowing our own party members to decide their representation in congress. With a new selection plan for our primary elections, we will ensure that our representation in congress expresses the ANP's ideals and is also reliable and active.

Activity is such a huge problem. When someone joins a party, they don't get a welcome message; they get nothing that tells them about the party or what to do next. No one even knows they're there. I would like organize a party-wide census every few weeks that would not only let us know how many members we have, but will also knock on the doors of those who are sleeping and increase activity. There is a tremendous need for an unbiased newspaper that our party members could subscribe to; it would have up to date information on the party and will keep members informed. We also need to show our members that participation on the forums is half the game, and that even the member that no one has heard of can talk on the forums and have an opinion. Seriously, the forums is where everything goes down. That is where every single one of the decisions made concerning the well being of this party is made. Please be sure to join the forums.

I would also like to add some more responsibility to the members of this party with some council positions. Our current positions consist of a forum director, three advisors , and two supreme court justices. We need some more positions that affect the greater influence of Australian politics, to get players ready for the challenge of a cabinet position and to become an influential member of the party. These would also act as a grounds for studying up on the ins and outs of certain aspects of the game. Some of these positions could include:

- Communications: keeping information up to date on the wiki, publishing the ANP newspaper, keeping in contact with members of the party.
- Industry/Treasury: studying the Australian economy and perhaps running the ANP's first party sanctioned company (hiring only party members and using profits to further our success).
- Foreign Affairs: looking into Australia's interactions with other countries and looking for ways to increase diplomacy.
- Statistics: With our new census implemented, it would be beneficial to have a council member in charge of statistics; he would keep track of everything numbers, from activity to forum posts, from congress votes to Prime Minister votes. This would definitely mean you should like math, statistics, a little creativity, and perhaps some programming knowledge for use with the eAPI.

These positions are mainly specialties, and members must work hard to reach them, but the effort put forth to reach them will ultimately help the ANP and Australia.

Thanks for reading. To sum things up, the Australian National Party needs to stay unified under our banner of democracy, gain support in congress with higher representation, increase activity by outreaching to our members, and allowing our members to experience a taste of Australian politics. I hope you elect me as your Party President to ensure that we have a strong, united, active, and influential party.

Have a nice day,
Mr. Awesome