The Spinoff: The one Australian democratic innovation New Zealand should adopt

Read the original article in the Spinoff

There is an anecdote that, for Iain Walker, perfectly illustrates the potential for getting ordinary Australians more deeply involved in politics. In 2016, in his capacity as the executive director of the New Democracy Foundation, he was helping run a “citizens’ jury” in which 50 regular people were brought together to consider whether South Australia should host a nuclear waste disposal facility.

On the opening day, a member of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission – an elite panel that had already backed the nuclear waste plan – was standing next to one of the jury members, a tradesman in concrete-splattered work gear. In the latter’s hands was the 320-page Royal Commission report, curled into a tube.

When the Royal Commissioner asked what he’d made of the report, the tradesman responded: “Well, I’ve had it in my ute and I’ve been reading kind of a chapter every couple of days. I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t understand Appendix H at all. Chapters three through seven make total sense. [But] I think you missed a few things around costings, etc., and I’ve got a lot of questions around that.”

For Walker, the anecdote underscores just how much political and media elites underestimate members of the public and their ability to take part in decision-making. Following a report from the above jury, a subsequent larger one – this time featuring 350 people – was convened. It came out strongly against the nuclear waste plan and, partly as a result, the idea was shelved.

Such stories are repeated across the 40-plus citizens’ juries that Australian government agencies have run. The idea behind these forums – the larger version of which is sometimes called a citizens’ assembly – is that in the right conditions, ordinary people may be better problem-solvers than politicians are.

A citizens’ jury brings together a group of people designed to be representative of a region or country, their mix of age, income, gender and ethnicity making them a “mini-public” or “the nation in one room”. They are given time to engage with the evidence, listen to experts and make consensus-based recommendations which the relevant government agency will respond to or – ideally – implement. The jury’s discussions are invariably better than those taking place in parliament, because its members aren’t bound by party lines or pushed into knee-jerk positions by a poorly informed public.

In New Zealand, only a handful of citizens’ juries have been held, and only one has had real impact: an assembly run by Watercare in 2022 that decided Auckland’s next major water source should be recycled “greywater”. However, a recent Porirua citizens’ assembly, in which tangata whenua and tangata tiriti sub-assemblies merged their ideas for how to tackle the climate crisis, shows there is life in the form yet.

Speaking on the phone from Australia, Walker acknowledges that this democratic innovation still faces major obstacles. Prime minister Anthony Albanese, for one, has been publicly unenthusiastic about citizens’ juries.

But the Liberals’ outgoing leader in the senate, Simon Birmingham, said after the last election that his party should embrace them, and the climate-focused “teal” independents are big fans. Even some Labour heavyweights, among them treasurer Jim Chalmers, have acknowledged voters will start to “drift away” from the party unless it can break long-standing deadlocks on issues like tax.

“That’s where you start to see the entry [for citizens’ juries],” Walker says. “The hardest step in politics, the hardest step in a reform conversation, is the first one. The first person to say, ‘I think we need to reform our tax system or industrial relations’ – all the arrows come their way. And that’s the problem a citizens’ assembly can solve.”

New Zealanders probably associate Australia less with democratic innovation and more with vicious attack ads and the debacle that was the Voice referendum. But Walker says the drive to reinvent Australian democracy has come a long way. “When we were standing up in 2011, saying, ‘Our democracy is about to get a lot worse’, people laughed at us. People thought we were out of our minds. You can probably guess we don’t hear that any more.”

The case for reform was only strengthened by the chaos of “what you could say was our Marie Kondo period of prime ministers – we had five in five years where they no longer sparked joy [and] we threw them away.” Citizens’ juries still seemed “too weird” to the average punter. But then Ireland stunned the world by using citizens’ assemblies to forge a public consensus that both abortion and gay marriage – long the subjects of bitter and entrenched division in the profoundly Catholic country – should be legalised.

Even in Walker’s backyard, citizens’ juries have achieved major feats, including, in 2014, setting out a multi-billion-dollar, 10-year budget for the City of Melbourne. How did Walker and colleagues equip those ordinary people for such a Herculean task?

First, he says, they got the city council to put the budget in concrete terms – “how many pavements, how much road, how many childcare centres, how many parks, how many after-hours services”. Second, the jury members were willing to get engaged because the problem was a pressing and relevant one: Melbourne’s politicians were caught between the unenviable options of a 43% rates rise or cancelling a swathe of projects. “To a reasonable person, it’s like, ‘Yeah, that [dilemma] is worth my time. I’ll get involved.’”

Finally, the jury members had tonnes of time: six all-day Saturdays, spaced three weeks apart. The end result: a set of recommendations, containing a mix of tax rises and asset sales, that “heavily influenced” the council’s final budget.

Democracy, Walker argues, must continually evolve. Despite his reservations about conventional politics, he describes election day as “one of the most innovative electoral processes out there”. Its key elements – including voting on a weekend, the secret ballot, Australia being the first country to allow women to stand for parliament, and compulsory voting – were all revolutionary in their time. But, he adds, “What have all these innovations got in common? They’re all over 100 years old … What’s missing, what no one thought was needed 100 years ago, was a format for regular people to mix. We need to build that institution.”

First, though, politicians must believe that ordinary people will make a constructive contribution. They must also accept they can’t predict what a citizens’ jury will decide – and, above all, acknowledge that the current system is badly flawed. That realisation, Walker thinks, is slowly dawning. This year’s Australian election was “the first time I’ve woken up … and heard a major party’s very senior representative say we need to look at [reforming democracy]. It’s the first time I’ve woken up after a federal election where a large number of independent candidates have asked us for advice on how to implement it.”

In New Zealand, democratic activists argue there are plenty of issues where politics is deadlocked, the trade-offs are complex, or the issues are otherwise ripe for a citizens’ jury. Reform of GMO laws, proposals for a four-year parliamentary term, cannabis law reform … the list goes on. In Australia, Walker says, awareness of the need for democratic innovation “has never been higher”. Whether that’s true on our side of the ditch is another matter.