Adelaide city's future to rest on citizens' jury
A "CITIZENS' jury" will deliberate on Adelaide's future and deliver their verdict to the State Government.
A "CITIZENS' jury" will deliberate on Adelaide's future and deliver their verdict to the State Government.
Forty randomly selected South Australians will consider how to make the city both vibrant and safe and their recommendations will go to Parliament.
Premier Jay Weatherill will outsource this latest incarnation of "debate and decide" to a not-for-profit organisation, the newDemocracy Foundation. It boasts the support of a range of luminaries and former politicians and is dedicated to finding a "better system" of government.
It will invite about 20,000 randomly selected people to apply, then use an algorithm to find 40 people who are broadly representative of the community.
The final group will spend about 50 hours being briefed on the issues - such as crime statistics, drug and alcohol abuse and cultural and behavioural factors - and discussing how to make Adelaide a top entertainment destination that is also safe.
They will report within six months. Mr Weatherill said this method will replace a debate where vested interests and powerful lobby groups have the loudest voices.
"A lot of public debate gets captured by the slogans and this replaces it with the considered judgment of citizens who hear the evidence," he said. "We've been trying to find new ways of arriving at decisions ... and one of the things I said when I first got the job was I wanted to engage the community in policy development."
Mr Weatherill said the Government would still have the ultimate responsibility over what to do with the jury's recommendations.
NewDemocracy has completed similar projects interstate, and is funded by donations. Their overheads are paid for by their founder, philanthropist and businessman Luca Belgiorno-Nettis. Executive Director Iain Walker said the foundation was trying "something new".
"You can't ask government to change wholesale in one day. We want to show that a random selection of citizens gets beyond adversarial debate ... we hope to prove that we have a transparent ... method," Mr Walker said.
Opposition Leader Steven Marshall said his advice for Mr Weatherill was: "(Scrap) Labor's toxic car park tax which will drive up already high cost-of-living pressures for South Australians".