Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Country Party of Australia (founded 2014)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was no consensus, default to keep. I can't see the discussion below converging towards either a keep or a delete consensus within another week so I'm closing this as NC. There are calls for this to be deleted as a recreation, but the history of the article (AfD deletion → refund → draft → move back to mainspace 2 months after closure of the previous AfD) precludes such a claim and this AfD should be treated as a fresh AfD of a fully rewritten article. Deryck C. 07:25, 7 April 2015 (UTC)

Country Party of Australia (founded 2014)

 * – ( View AfD View log  Stats )

Previously deleted at Articles for deletion/Country Party (Australia). Why anyone would think this was OK to start a few months later without it passing a deletion review I have no idea. Either way, it's still WP:TOOSOON. It's unregistered (generally the benchmark for party notability), it's almost certainly never going to be registered under this name, practically all of the coverage is surrounding its founding. This is also not a new thing; people try to get "country parties" going all the time. Frickeg (talk) 23:44, 22 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Australia-related deletion discussions. Frickeg (talk) 23:45, 22 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Delete - yeah, no.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 00:02, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Organizations-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:41, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 00:41, 23 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Keep. I didn't !vote in the earlier discussion but I remember having a quick look at the article, and I would definitely have gone for deletion at that stage. The party certainly wouldn't pass any notability guidelines specific to political parties (no registration and no elections contested), but I think BDD's work in expanding the article pushes it over the line when it comes to the GNG. Two non-trivial articles from the ABC, three of the same from The Land, and one each from Queensland Country Life and Farm Weekly is a lot more than many AEC-registered parties, and definitely significant coverage in my book. The ABC is definitely an WP:RS, and I'd strongly argue the same of the three rural publications. I'm not a regular reader of them by any means, but I have come across them on several occasions (for Wikipedia and non-Wikipedia purposes), and I would suggest their quality meets or even exceeds the standards of the capital city dailies – they of course don't have the readership level, but they're on a completely different level to the free community rags you get in the metro area.  IgnorantArmies  (talk)  11:55, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep. Oh, someone is reviving the Country Party?  Again?  But this time, there is non-trivial coverage in reliable sources, so I view this as meeting the WP:GNG.  Lankiveil (speak to me) 12:49, 23 March 2015 (UTC).
 * Keep: So far, I haven't seen a Delete rationale that comes within a country mile of policy. I'm not seeing a single guideline or policy that says political parties have to be registered to qualify for articles, or disqualifying articles for being same-old-same-old.  (Never mind that "yeah, no" and "it needs to go" are the sorts of rationales we see from sockpuppet anon IPs.)  This meets the GNG.  It's got substantial coverage in multiple reliable sources.  Period.  Nha Trang  Allons! 20:44, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
 * No, those are the sorts of rationales you get from Australians who actually understand the background and know that this is probably the fourth use of that name for a loose political grouping this year. In Australia, we have the National Party which is a conservative political party that claims to be "from the country" (rural, bush, etc) and used to be called the Country Party. Problem is, plenty of people don't agree that is what they represent and there is a culture of independents (non-aligned candidates) running against the National Party because the largest opposition party (the Labor Party) don't do as well in the country. A few times a year, someone proposes to bring those independents together as the "country party" (a kick in the pants to the once-Country Party, now National Party). I'm not even sure all the sources are talking about the same iteration of that nonsense proposal. This isn't a real thing but every time someone suggests it, they get coverage in rural press because it is more interesting than cattle prices (actually, probably not, but they have the room to run both). This is not a "revival" or a "party" or even a "proposal" - it's just the latest brain-fart from someone who thinks they can organise a bunch of fiercely independent politicians into some loosely (no-very-cleverly-named) collective. There is nothing here to cover and we'll be back in 3 months when someone proposes a slightly different version of the same thing. The announcement wouldn't even pass WP:EVENT.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 22:40, 23 March 2015 (UTC)
 * And that's a big fat "So what?" There are a lot of articles out there based on things I think are stupid, but I don't get to unilaterally delete the Kim Kardashian article just because I think she's a media whore who's the 2000s' answer to Zha Zha Gabor.  Nha Trang  Allons! 18:35, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
 * At no point did I say the subject was stupid, but if you want to paraphrase me more accurately, the fact that we're covering it is stupid. There's one-day coverage but this still fails WP:NOTNEWS, WP:EVENT and WP:ORGDEPTH.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 22:41, 27 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Speedy delete. This should have been speedied as a recreation of a previously deleted article, but since it is receiving keep votes I'll again point out why this should be deleted. They are not registered with either the Australian Electoral Commission or any state and territory electoral commission, lacking even the extraordinarily low bar of 500 members (Australia has something like thirty federally registered parties). There is no evidence that they will ever be registered, and are particularly likely to not ever be registered under this name due to legislation around party names. They're a bunch of dudes intending to start a rural political party who sent out a press release announcing that intention that got picked up, on one occasion, by three rural-focused magazines and have subsequently gone nowhere. I am a staunch inclusionist on actual political parties, and if and when they actually make it to becoming a registered party, I will ardently argue the article should be kept; until such time as they actually achieve that, they're just another bunch of random dudes in a shed claiming to be a political party. The Drover&#39;s Wife (talk) 10:31, 24 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete. The GNG is not a bright-line rule. Getting two or three news articles written about you online doesn't mean you're guaranteed a Wikipedia article forever and a day. So much is clear from the statement in WP:GNG itself that the guideline establishes a presumption of notability. Not a guarantee. Here, even if the presumption is established, it is rebutted. It is rebutted by the fact that it is a micro-micro-party with no formal status and a handful of members. And that the media coverage of its inauguration was fleeting at best. --Mkativerata (talk) 19:53, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete - Not notable. The candidates have less press coverage than I'd expect for an independent with any chance of getting elected. The group couldn't find enough people to nominate a group that gets an "above the line" box on the ballot paper so their How-To-Vote leaflet includes voting below-the-line for all of their candidates and at least one other to make a formal optional preferential vote. If they do pull a significant vote on Saturday (definitely if one is elected), I'm prepared to revisit this assessment; otherwise WP:TOOSOON to tell if they will ever become notable. --Scott Davis Talk 13:45, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Don't strongly disagree Scott, but if one of them is elected it would be as an "independent", not as a member of this non-party. They would still have to formally register the party after the election and then seek leave to join it as a Parliamentarian. Until that point it remains a non-party without an elected representative and nothing but a day's worth of coverage in local rural press.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 22:56, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I don't really agree with this, for the record, but the thing is 0.0001% likely to actually happen so we needn't discuss it till then. Frickeg (talk) 23:50, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Ha ha, which part? (Not that it matters - feel free to take it to my talk page).  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 03:14, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
 * I said "revisit" not automatically reverse my assessment. i don't expect it to become an issue. --Scott Davis Talk 03:21, 27 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Spot on; I think we're all on the same page (broadly). Ha ha.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 03:29, 27 March 2015 (UTC)


 * Comment: Country Party-endorsed independent outpolls Labor in Murray (18.8% on first preferences with 62.3% counted). Third in Wagga Wagga (10.0%, beating the Greens) and fourth in Northern Tablelands (0.4% behind the Greens).  IgnorantArmies  (talk)  13:31, 28 March 2015 (UTC)
 * So best-case scenario is that one of their informally endorsed candidates runs second and another runs third. Endorsed candidates who lose aren't considered notable, surely the same applies to unendorsed or "informally endorsed" candidates. There is not a single member of the self-declared "party" anywhere close to being considered notable. Even if they were, the notability of their "party" (of which they are not members) would still be questionable.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 22:08, 29 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Helen Dalton (Mrs 18% in Murray) lists her website as the Country Party's website on her Facebook campaign page, features "Endorsed by the Country Party of Australia" on her campaign posters, and has been described as running a "Country Party branded campaign" in rural media. I'm quite curious as to why you've chosen to use scare quotes around the word "party" and claim that their candidates "are not members" of the party for which they are running (???). Anyway, my point is that any standard of notability that says yes to these sorts of parties simply because they're registered, but no to a party that can outpoll major parties in two electorates (on its first go), is ridiculous.  IgnorantArmies  (talk)  16:20, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
 * They aren't "scare quotes" in that context (at all), it was an acknowledgement that while they have called themselves a "party", in actual fact, no such entity has been registered and so there are no membership lists to join.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 22:48, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Interesting then that her hashtag is #Dalton4Change, not #DaltonYourCountryParty or #DaltonCountryPartyofAustralia. Most of the local news clippings she's posted to her Facebook page call her independent candidate and don't mention this group. She does not meet the Wikipedia politician criteria to have an article about her, so there are still no real inbound links to this article from other articles. I can be sympathetic to the cause without believing the entity is worthy of an article. --Scott Davis Talk 22:16, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
 * This group has actually been fairly unusual in the way they've endorsed candidates - they've been more of a "we like this person and think you should vote for them" rather than "this person is running on our ticket" with a few, Dalton included. See here, and here (where it's called "Country Party branded"). The Cyclists Party actually also endorsed both Dalton and Mailler (clearly after negotiations - and called them "independents" while the upper house ticket was "Country Party"). Funnell here calls himself very clearly an "independent"; Dalton has also described herself as a "Country Party-aligned independent". This is in contrast to other unregistered parties like the Socialist Equality Party or even the tiny non-notable Communist League. In this case I think it's far from certain whether Dalton and Funnell are even members of the Country Party. Frickeg (talk) 22:30, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

 Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.

Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, JodyBtalk 23:07, 30 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete Content is certainty newsworthy so I would recommend the editors who made the article look at making an article on WikiNews about the party and it would be a lot more appropriate, as for an Enyclapedic entry? I think it misses the mark (today at least) for that notability. Bryce Carmony (talk) 12:02, 31 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Delete Until such time as a member is elected, it is a non entity. Drs002 (talk) 07:21, 2 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Keep - I favor the lowest of all possible barriers to inclusion for political parties, their leaders, and their youth sections regardless of size or ideology. This is, plain and simple, the sort of material that any encyclopedia pretending to be the "sum of human knowledge" should include. File this argument under the banner of our policy of Ignore All Rules (Use Common Sense to Improve the Encyclopedia) if you will. Think about it though — I'm right. Carrite (talk) 00:38, 5 April 2015 (UTC)
 * Carrite, I've always appreciated your point of view here and I think you do great work on a lot of minor political parties (and pretty much everything you write I would keep). And I think your goal with this philosophy is laudable, but I just don't think it's practical. I mean, how do you define a "party"? Is it the joke group formed by twenty-five uni students - which has membership lists and a whole (satirical) constitution, and runs candidates for the student union? Is it the loose groupings that register to run for local council? Is it the guy sitting in his basement who swears he has at least a hundred members - or at least, he has emails from people who want to join, and that counts (and then, under this approach, he gets an article too)? Consider this a question from someone who is genuinely curious about how this proposed approach would work. Frickeg (talk) 00:48, 5 April 2015 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.