Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today I want to give a shout out for the Parliamentary Friends of Democratic Renewal and the fabulous event that we have lined up for next Monday. We have coming to speak to a cross-section of parliamentarians, Councillor Stephen Mayne, from the City of Melbourne, and Nicholas Reece, from the University of Melbourne. They will be joining Craig Laundy and me, the co-hosts and co-chairs of the Parliamentary Friends of Democratic Renewal, and hopefully dozens of other parliamentarians, to talk about their experience in the new ways of deliberative democracy.

Deliberative democracy, for those who perhaps are not aware, is a process of bringing together forums of citizens chosen randomly from across the demographic spectrum to come and deliberate on a problem and to give guidance to government on how we might take our community forward. Sometimes they are very large issues, very conceptual issues, that are dealt with and sometimes they can be small, localised issues that need to be resolved.

The fundamental idea of this is to try to revitalise our representative democracy. We all know the virtues and the challenges of representative democracy, but it is true that its very adversarial nature, where we spend a lot of time getting stuck into each other, has, and always has had, the propensity to create a degree of cynicism within the community. So we need to look at ways in which we can get the citizens and get the community actively involved in decision making, and there has been amazing work that has been going on around the world in this regard, and real science and strategy have developed.

What we are trying to do through the Parliamentary Friends of Democratic Renewal is showcase some of the really good things that have been happening. So we are very pleased that Luca Belgiorno-Nettis and Iain Walker of the newDemocracy Foundation are sponsoring this event and we are able to bring Stephen and Nick up to talk about the practical experience of the City of Melbourne, where they got 43 randomly selected residents and business proprietors to come in and be involved in developing their budget strategy.

They found that some members started off somewhat cynically, but they were amazed at the enthusiasm of the people that were selected and the common sense that, overwhelmingly, was demonstrated. The set of formulas that they developed perhaps would have been very difficult for a local government, or indeed any government, to implement had they not been able to refer to the process that got ordinary people involved and gave the community some assurance that this was not a political solution but one that was grounded in common sense and common sensibility.

So we are really looking forward to seeing Councillor Mayne and Nicholas Reece. The Lord Mayor, Robert Doyle, was very enthusiastic to be involved as well, but unfortunately he is overseas. This is going to be a great night, and it is very important for us to keep that enthusiasm for democracy going.

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