A couple of months ago (December 2012), I resigned from the Australian Democrats.

People who met me and found out I was actively involved in the party, would always — and I mean always — open with the same question: why the Democrats? And the answer is not so much to do with the party as it is to do with me.

I don't like being a whinger when it comes to politics. Okay, correction: I don't like being just a whinger. I want to be doing something to fix the things I rant about. I don't think that anyone, any voter, is simply entitled to have their political representation magically appear out of the ether, with all of the policies and platforms that they want to see enacted. If you want those policies to be enacted, or those politicians to exist, you have to work for it. You have to support them, and compromise for them, and carry heavy shit around for them. Not everyone has the privilege of being able to do that, but I certainly do, and I wouldn't feel good about wasting the opportunities I have.

I thought the Democrats would be the ideal way for me to participate in Australian politics because I broadly agreed with their policies and principles, and I saw how I could contribute to the party. But I was wrong.

If you're expecting to read some sordid, tell-all, self-serving tale of what happened over the last few months, you won't find it here. There are still some viable, promising candidates in the party, and I don't want to undermine either of them.

I will, however, continue to extend the offer I made to members before I resigned: you may ask me in good faith about anything I've said or done, or about anything said about me; I will answer, and I will provide evidence for everything I say. (Here's a rough guide to what I mean by good faith: framing a question around a clearly absurd or defamatory claim that you've taken at face value does not qualify.)

The best thing about my time in the party was working with some of the most amazing, enthusiastic, productive and effective activists I have ever met. These people would come up with idea after idea, they would follow through on the best ones, and they would move on to the next plan before the echoes died away. I sincerely hope that I will get to work with those people again.

I've been involved with political parties of one kind or another for almost ten years now — on and off, as my sanity ran out or was replenished. To help those who might be thinking of making a foray into the world of politics, I've made this handy chart.

The Sun comes up*, Australian journalists speculate endlessly about the Australian Labor Party leadership. Or, in fact, repeatedly fail to find fuel for the story.

Journalists can write whatever they want, really. But one bit of rhetoric in particular is really starting to aggravate me, a spooky, sinister incantation, reminiscent of Miyazaki's more sinister creations: The Faceless Men.

Who — or what — are the Faceless Men? This amorphous group of unidentifiable entities were, of course, the ones behind the 2010 leadership spill that saw the ALP substitute one Prime Minister for another without even telling any journalists at all, not even the ones that stood around outside parliament house every morning for days and days, where it's really frickin' cold you know and WHY DIDN'T YOU TELL US THIS WAS GOING TO GO DOWN GUYS?

The funny thing is, it took only a cursory effort on my part to find out that these people do, in fact, have faces. Yes, a whole one each! Identities too, and careers, and for all that they might plot and scheme and conspire... they do so within systems that have these very well documented rules that basically anyone can get a copy of to read at their leisure. Amazing!

This is a modified cross post from the WA Democrats' site. I posted it here because it's a nearly-perfect snapshot of my own state of mind at various points over the last ten years. It encapsulates all of the frustration I felt when I decided to re-engage with politics. So it might be a little out of context here, but if you know me at all, you should read it.

A version of this article was originally published in the June 2011 edition of the Australian Democrats' National Journal as a call for us to create a new science and technology policy. I am now the National Policy Coordinator for Science and Technology, and will be running public forums on science and politics to get input from the people closest to these issues.

In early March this year a rumour emerged regarding possible budget cuts of up to $400 million to medical research. It was one rumour out of several floating around; it was not part of a call to arms or outraged opinion piece, just another party leak that made it into the news cycle.

But the response from the community was phenomenal.

Within days, the Discoveries Need Dollars campaign was launched. Soon it was all over Facebook and Twitter, there were pieces written about it on Crikey and ABC's The Drum, and eventually there appeared editorials and human interest articles in the Australian and most state papers. More than 12000 people turned up to rallies in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Canberra, Perth, Darwin and Brisbane — not just scientists, but administrators, scientific support staff, survivors of diseases made treatable by Australian research, and relatives of those whose lives were lost to disease but still improved by medical science. Central business districts became a sea of white coats, orange signs, business attire, petitions, clipboards and cameras.

All over science.

If this proves anything, it's that although science is not a high profile issue, and it's certainly not as well funded as most scientists would like, Australia does not take it for granted. Not always, anyway.

The other day, Queensland Public Sector Union secretary Alex Scott resigned from the Australian Labor Party — and his rather articulate letter of resignation struck more of a chord with me than I would have thought possible.

You see, I wasn't always swirling at the centre of this powerhouse of Australian politics, here in the Democrats. I was once, in fact, proud to call myself a member of the ALP. Now, normally I'd just leave that behind me — after all, I haven't been in the party for more than six years and I have no first hand knowledge of what's going in there now. But recently it's come up a few times while talking to current ALP members (Democrats National Executive: if you're reading this, don't worry, I didn't tell them about the secret installation or Plan Zeta). They ask me why I left (or suggest I come back), I tell them this story, and they all make exactly the same expression and go hmmm.

It's old news, and I was a nobody in the party, but here's the story anyway — meant as a biographical side note for people who know me, not as some deep or meaningful analysis of the ALP and its current woes, and not as party bashing. You're all adults, you can make up your own damn minds.