Deliberations

With a minority Labor Government finally installed in Australia, we immediately see conservative partisans and media begin to lob destabilising mortars at it, before they’ve even gotten started. ENOUGH ALREADY!!

To their credit, some of the more broad-minded journalists are openly critical of some of their peers, suggesting that exaggerating conflict and polarising issues should not be acceptable reportage.

I couldn’t agree more, especially after seeing the media pour flaming oil on Labor’s proposed Citizens’ Assembly for climate policy. Read any newspaper story and you will find adjectives that carry judgement rather than fact. Most readers would not distinguish between Michelle Grattan the journalist and Michelle Grattan the influential political editor for the Age Newspaper, for example, so accept all her pronouncements as fact, when the only fact is that they are her opinion. While her commentary can be astute (although not regarding the CA), others are quite malevolently irresponsible.

In a democratic system that protects us well from the worst excesses of power in government, we don’t need media that messes it up like spoilt children.

My PhD supervisor Lyn Carson has just written a piece for Australian Policy Online entitled Growing up politically: conducting a national conversation on climate change. She spells out how the announcement of the Citizens’ Assembly during the election campaign was done so very poorly, feeding directly into the opinionated ignorance and divisiveness of the so-called reporters.

Most of the caustic commentary was about “failure of leadership”. De-constructing the commentary, one finds an almost universal [media] expectation that politicians should exercise power in a liberal democratic tradition that provides them with that mandate…. However, leadership is easy if everyone agrees or if the leader does [only] what the stakeholders want. Involving voters in difficult decisions is one way to diffuse that anger by sharing ownership of those decisions. Furthermore, experts alone will not resolve this issue…. Parliaments certainly cannot.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 10:45 AM | Link | Comments

When I promote Australian snow sports to my North American and European friends, I can feel the disbelief. This video produced for Mt Hotham shows how big it really is. (They could have used a more inspiring tune, tho.) We were on the mountain last week when they filmed this.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 10:13 AM | Link | Comments

Julia Gillard: “I will pursue the idea of a citizens assembly” (AAP: Alan Porritt)

Now that the Labor Party has been granted the authority to form a minority Government in Australia, we can return to regular programming. In getting here, Labor signed a deal to gain the Greens’ legislative support, which included formation of a multi-party parliamentary committee to finalise an emissions trading scheme. The media interpreted this as a replacement for the proposed Citizens’ Assembly. Remember that it is the media who are calling that a dud, not the 40% of the public who indicated in a survey that such public engagement would be useful. As I’ve written recently, if more people understood how a CA can support a policy-setting process, more would probably encourage it.

Last week Julia Gillard made it clear that she has not abandoned the idea of a Citzens’ Assembly, even if the Greens express ambivalence about it. In that ABC News article, my Phd supervisor Lyn Carson makes the following points:

“Climate change is a diabolical policy problem and a citizens assembly would be an effective and ideal way of finding out what the Australian population would perceive to be the best way forward,” she said. Professor Carson, from the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy, says it would be a contradiction of policies if the Greens forced Labor to drop the assembly idea. “The Greens include amongst their national policies a commitment to community participation in decision making,” she said.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 02:09 PM | Link | Comments

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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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 11:12 AM | Link | Comments

Alannah Mactiernan has been a long-time promoter of public engagement processes in Western Australia. When she was state minister for planning and infrastructure, there were more deliberative processes convened in Western Australia than anywhere else in the world. I met her in Perth and found her to be easily approachable and passionate about making government accountable to voters. She was a vital expert contributor to our Citizens’ Parliament.

In this federal election, she ran as an Labor party candidate in her home electorate of Canning, southeast of Perth. The seat was held by Liberals, so it was always going to be an uphill battle. Unfortunately, she just came up just short. So even if Gillard does gain government, Alannah won’t be there to push public engagement from the inside.

Immediately after her loss, she tore shreds off the Labor party election campaign. Perhaps rightly so.

I hope her life after politics includes work in the practice of public participation.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 05:01 PM | Link | Comments

In Australia, the long-running program Compass is one of the quiet jewels of the ABC TV. Late on Sunday night, we get fabulous insight into a vast range of topics that relate to ethics, morality and religion in Australia. The programs vary in format, but are always well produced and demanding of a thoughtful audience. In the range of material it presents, it is clear that the editorial stance is progressive and relativistic in appreciation of the diversity and tolerance that living in Australia warrants.

For last week’s program, in advance of the federal election, host Geraldine Doogue interviewed some leading Australian federal politicians (left, right and green) and questioned how they are guided by faith. The result is a surprisingly human and sympathetic picture of politicians. Correctly, the program summary states “this program charts ground rarely explored.”

If more people actually watched this program, especially those who tend to moral and righteous indignation in their public comments, perhaps they’d be more measured in their criticism.

The video for this program can’t be embedded, so follow this link to view it online.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 03:05 PM | Link | Comments

Zotero is the best bibliographic cataloguing and citation referencing system for researchers. Requires Firefox. One reason I love it is that it is just so darned easy to add entries from all manner of online sources, from public services like Amazon to obscure academic journals.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 10:52 AM | Link | Comments

Participedia has been launched by Archon Fong, who is Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Citizenship at Harvard Kennedy School of Governement. The wiki was developed with political theorist Professor Mark Warren from University of British Columbia.

Participedia is a tool for strengthening democracy. Based on a wiki platform, its main content consists of user-generated articles which describe and assess participatory governance throughout the world. For instance, there will be articles on the British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly of 2004, consensus conferences in Denmark, participatory budgeting in Porto Alegre and other cities, local school council governance in Chicago, municipal evaluation meetings in China, and the People’s Campaign for Democratic Decentralization (under the Panchayati Raj reforms) in Kerala, India. In addition, there will be articles on participatory methods, such as deliberative polling, citizens’ assemblies, and participatory budgeting, as well as articles about the organizations that sponsor, implement, and study participatory governance. Over time, we hope Participedia will garner hundreds and perhaps thousands of such articles.

There are three main kinds of articles in Participedia:

• Articles about cases, or experiences, of participatory or deliberative governance (e.g. British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly of 2004).
• Articles about specific methods of public deliberation, participation, or collaborative governance (e.g. Participatory Budgeting).
• Articles about organizations that design, execute, or support public participation, deliberation, or collaborative public action (e.g. Everyday Democracy).

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 10:37 AM | Link | Comments

From the video archive of the Personal Democracy Forum held in June. Public engagement scholars Jim Fishkin, Jane Mansbridge and Howard Rheingold talk with David Weinberger about how and why deliberative forums work.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 09:59 AM | Link | Comments

Bookmarking this annual event for later review. Watching streamed video

This year’s topic is News Cities: The Next Generation of Healthy Informed Communities, focussing on communications (online, F2F) that promote democracy.

One of many interesting tweets:

#FOCAS10 Most do not care about “civic literacy” or engagement. They see politics as hopelessly corrupt, just want govt to leave them alone.

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Posted by Ron Lubensky at 08:48 AM | Link | Comments