He mihi nui ki te rōpu Internet Party

We, the active membership of the Pirate Party of NZ (www.pirateparty.org.nz), the local affiliate of Pirate Parties International, send our warm regards to our fellow geek activists in the active membership of the Internet Party of NZ.

Firstly, we seek political cooperation with your party. We feel that the memberships of both parties can make more progress in campaigns on policies we agree on, if we communicate, collaborate, and see if we can move in the same direction, at the same time.

Secondly, further to this proposal to actively work together, we would like to open formal discussions about the possibility of merging our two parties. We believe that in a small country like ours, working together to build one socially progressive, digital-liberty party would be more effective than having two competing with each other. From your experience with the Mana Movement, it seems clear that any political alliance is much more likely to work if developed slowly, and thoughtfully, with full consensus and engagement of both memberships, and well before election year.

Both parties seem to us to have a lot in common. Both support the socially progressive use of technology. In line with this, both have engaged in exciting experiments in deep democracy, using our Loomio groups to engage any interested member in party decision-making.

Both prioritize the protection of human rights, civil liberties, and personal privacy, both online and offline. In line with this, we have both shown a willingness to stand up for rational but controversial policies, similar discussions and outcomes regarding drug law reform and UBI can be seen as examples. This opens up potential to work with the active membership of the Aotearoa Legalise Cannabis Party and the New Economics Party.

One of the traditional divisions between libertarians is whether we ally ourselves with economically with the "left" or the "right". Just as the Greens transcend this false dichotomy with their own economic approaches, we can formulate economic approaches based on open source collaboration ("co-production", "peer-to-peer production", "social production", "collaborative consumption", "crowdsourcing"). This opens up even more potential to work with the active membership of the New Economics Party.

If there is interest from the Internet Party membership in entering into negotiations on the possibility of merging, our bottom lines can be summed up by the following criteria:

The resulting organisation will:
- be committed to a bottom-up organisational architecture,
- be committed to the core values that have been emphasised by the PPNZ community (human rights, civil liberties, free culture, personal privacy, transparent governance, net neutrality),
- be committed to a Code of Conduct that ensures a friendly environment for a diverse community, both in online channels, and in-person gatherings,
- not have any constitutional guarantees for named persons to have control over particular offices without being elected into their role.

We strongly advocate that the resulting organisation would use the name "Pirate Party", in solidarity with Pirate Parties around the world who share our values, and in order to benefit from the international recognition of this name, and what it stands for. However, we are open to other suggestions. Due to a recent rule change in PPI, any resulting organisation could continue as the official NZ affiliate of PPI, even without the word Pirate in the name.

EDIT: Just to clarify, as there has been some confusion on these points:
* we are open to working under any party name, so we would be willing to merge with the Internet Party under your name, or a new name, if the criteria listed above are met
* we are not insisting on the resulting party being a member of PPI, just noting that its a possibility, with or without the merged party using the Pirate name