The Australian Citizens’ Parliament and the Future of Deliberative Democracy

Chapter 2: Putting Citizens in Charge: Comparing the Australian Citizens’ Parliament and the Australia 2020 Summit

2 putting citizens in charge: comparing the australian citizens’ parliament and the australia 2020 summit Janette Hartz-Karp and Lyn Carson Australia is one of the world’s stable liberal democracies. It has a history of democratic innovation.1 But the “Democratic Audit of Australia” and other studies tell a story of falling confidence in our political system.2 Symptoms include low levels of citizen engagement, apathy and cynicism toward politics , declining membership in and public support for political parties, and growing numbers of young Australians seeking to avoid mandatory voter registration.3 Some observers trace the malaise to a “democratic deficit”— institutional arrangements and conduct that appear at odds with the normative ideals of democracy, including factionalism within parties, the intentional polarization of issues by political partisans, the oversimplification of issues in the news media, and the short time horizon of the policymaking process.4 Some civic reformers hope to address this deficit by creating new opportunities for meaningful citizen engagement with government officials and each other on issues of public concern.5 In this chapter, we show how the Australian Citizens’ Parliament (ACP) can play this role effectively, and we contrast the ACP’s approach with the Australia 2020 Summit, which was initiated and led by the prime minister in April 2008. The comparison is useful because both initiatives addressed the same issue—public participation in the policy-making process. Both aimed to provide government officials with information to which officials otherwise would not have access, including firsthand knowledge of the public’s needs, 22 deliberative design and innovation beliefs, priorities, and readiness to accept trade-offs, and both promised an opportunity to exert genuine influence on substantive policy decisions. But the contrast between them is what merits the comparison. The Summit is an instance of processes in which government officials consult with persons they identify as experts and stakeholders. Questions are formulated in advance by officials for the purpose of eliciting information relevant to the task of formulating sound policy. By contrast, the ACP emphasized the primacy of the general public in the policy-making process , and hence the importance of enabling citizens themselves to set the agenda for discussion. Participants are selected at random in order to achieve a demographically representative cross-section of the population as a whole, sometimes known as a mini-public,6 and instead of privileging the views of experts, the ACP sought to validate the knowledge participants have acquired through lived experience. In the discussion that follows, we compare the 2020 Summit and the ACP with a view to assessing their potential to revitalize democracy and to enhance the policy-making process through citizen participation. The comparison centers on differences in design and on the approaches taken to ensure that participation is inclusive and potentially useful to policy makers . The ACP and the Summit did succeed in providing officials with valuable ideas, but in our judgment the ACP delivered ideas that were more deeply and collectively considered as a consequence of differences in process design. The Australia 2020 Summit Soon after gaining election in November 2007, the Australian prime minister , Kevin Rudd, decided to convene an Australia 2020 Summit at Parliament House in Canberra on April 19–20, 2008. The rationale for this undertaking was “to tackle the long-term challenges confronting Australia’s future—challenges which require long-term responses from the nation beyond the usual three-year electoral cycle.”7 Accordingly, the broad purpose of the Summit was to harvest “big ideas” for the federal government to implement by the year 2020. The Summit plan called for inviting one thousand of the “best and brightest” minds from across the country to address the challenges facing it and to produce a set of recommendations for action.8 Challenges were sorted into ten policy discussion “streams.”9 Each stream was co-chaired by putting citizens in charge 23 a federal cabinet minister and a prominent person selected by the government . The co-chairs in turn constituted the steering committee, headed by the vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne.10 For each stream, organizers sought a hundred participants. The cochairs extended personal invitations to prominent Australians within each stream. In addition, self-nomination forms were available on the Summit website. Participants were required to cover the costs of their travel and accommodation.11 More than eight thousand people...