The public appetite for public engagement
During the Australian federal election, the Labor Party promised to convene a year-long Citizens’ Assembly (CA) to find a “deep consensus” about a national climate policy. The announcement was poorly timed and articulated. In righteous ignorance, the commentariat howled it down.
A CA should have been called for two years ago after the release of the Garnaut Report. Since then, stakeholder positions have become deeply entrenched. A perfect example is the Greens, a party that more than any other (since the Australian Democrats) preach for collaborative governance, now ridiculing the very idea of a CA.
Rather than consensus, the aim should have been broad acceptance of a policy that most people and institutions can live with and support, for longer than a single electoral cycle. The process only needs a few months to complete, not a whole year.
Also, the Government’s aim to “lead” and “educate” the people about their preferred ETS can only be perceived as propagandist. Instead, a well-designed CA puts the agenda in the hands of the participants and resists the privilege of any particular interest. The CA should have been introduced as part of a government-wide initiative for public engagement, as part of their Declaration of Open Government (which was never publicised).
If we did a general survey of public attitudes towards a possible CA, we would surely find that the vast majority of people neither understand how it works nor what it could achieve. But after they participate in an engagement event, whether at a local or national level, they become converts to the positive value of public deliberation in policy formation.
In our Citizens’ Parliament (CP) we had almost 35% of randomly-selected invitees apply to take part. Many of those who attended were still sceptical about their ultimate influence and often perversely cynical about anything to do with government. But they still came, made the effort to learn about the various options at hand, and made constructive contributions. Three of the top six recommendations of the CP involved raising the prospects for public engagement. Surely, this demonstrates the public appetite for public engagement!
They should be proud that their reward was a Government that used their process as the basis for the proposal for a Citizens’ Assembly! To have the uninformed commentariat strike that down is surely a slap in the face of trust in public engagement.
So how do we turn this around? How can we publicise that beneath the public and media cynicism that the Government has clumsily reinforced, there exists an appetite for public engagement at the national level?
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