Comment policy

The purpose of this site is to engage as many people as possible in constructive discussions about Greens issues, policies and politics. So vibrant and open comments threads on various topics are at the heart of what we aim to achieve. 

However, to encourage open participation, and because the site reflects directly on the Australian Greens Party, Senators and members, there are limits to acceptable communication. It’s important to set out some ground rules up front to make sure the discussion is constructive and civilised.

Moderation

We welcome all kinds of comments and thoughts, supportive, dissenting, critical or otherwise, as long as they are made in the spirit of constructive and civilised dialogue. All comments will be monitored, not moderated.

However, the administrators will delete or edit comments that deviate from our rules of conduct, as set out below. Regular rule-breakers may be blacklisted.

General Rules

  • Keep it Clean. Please use polite language at all times. Coarse, racist or sexist language, abuse and attacks are not acceptable.
  • Stay on Target. Please do your best to stay on topic. While we appreciate wide-ranging discussions, we’d like to avoid derailed threads.
  • Keep it short. Please try to avoid excessively frequent or long comments, which may discourage others from participating.
  • No hawkers. The Australian Greens website is a place to discuss political, social, environmental and ethical issues related to our work. It is NOT somewhere to sell your goods and services.
  • Limit Links. The Australian Greens website is setup to automatically hold any blog comment with excessive links in moderation, which may delay your comment from appearing on this blog. Any blog comment with more than four links could be marked as comment spam.
  • Email Privacy. Email addresses used when commenting are not published on the blog, nor shared. They may be used by the administrators to privately contact the commenter, but will never be shared with any other organisation.
  • Trolling is not acceptable.
  • Anonymity. Pseudonyms are fine, but sockpuppetry is not.
  • Spam. All comments are filtered through spam filtering technology. The spam-filtering technology isn’t perfect, and from time to time it flags legitimate comments.

Legal note

The opinions expressed in comments threads are entirely the responsibility of the various contributors. While the Australian Greens will do everything within reason to ensure that they are not defamatory, we accept no liability for them or the content of links included in them.