By Geoff Gallop
One of the most badly received proposals from the recent election campaign was Labor's "People's Assembly" to consider climate change.
Aimed at building a community-wide consensus it was widely criticised. Some saw it as inappropriate in a system of parliamentary government. Why do you need a People's Assembly when you already have an elected Parliament? Others saw it as a cop-out from decision-making. Surely the time has come, so they argued, for action not debate. Why do we need a People's Assembly when we know the facts about climate change, including the options available to tackle it?
But contrary to popular opinion, there were others who weren't hostile to the idea but who saw its application at this time to be flawed. Such an assembly would have been appropriate when climate change was first recognised as an issue and a government was looking to plot a course for tackling it. Indeed it is often the case with difficult policy questions that extra-parliamentary investigations and deliberations can pave the way for systematic change.
Australia, of course, came late to the climate change scene and even then went for conventional forms of inquiry (Shergold first and then Garnaut). Other options would have been royal commissions or judicial inquiries.
There are, however, many other options that can be used, including small scale citizens' juries or large scale deliberative assemblies. Such institutions add a potentially creative – and democratic – element to our representative system of government by taking us beyond the normally adversarial and confrontational environment that is parliament today or beyond the narrowly legalistic approach that all-too-often comes with a royal commission.
During my time in government this was an idea that we took very seriously, particularly in the transport and planning portfolios then under the leadership of Alannah MacTiernan. The idea was also put to work through the Drug Summit and the Water Summit.
What is being done here is a broadening and a deepening of the policy process. Take for example our Dialogue with the City, designed to tackle the planning issues associated with population growth in metropolitan Perth. Preceded by a process of community consultation, a large deliberative forum was instituted with participants from state and local government, industry, business, academia, interest groups, community associations and a large random sample of residents. One-third came from the random selection process.
Right through the process the Government made it clear that it would follow up on the recommended actions from the forum. Indeed representatives from the dialogue process joined with others from community, industry and government to form an Implementation Team. What emerged was endorsed by Cabinet as "Network City: Community Planning Strategy".
One of the consultants engaged by the government to develop Dialogue with the City was Dr Janet Hartz-Karp from Curtin University. She has made the point that for such forums to work, three principles need to be followed – influence, inclusion and deliberation. Those participating need to know they will have influence, they will need to be representative of the population and they will need to engage in open and informed dialogue.
For too long the debate about democracy has been an either/or one. Either representative democracy or a Swiss-style direct democracy. What Dialogue with the City – and similar initiatives here and abroad – have shown is that there is a third way that supports and improves our system of representative democracy. Depending on the circumstances it may be relevant in breaking long-standing and seemingly intractable planning issues, seeking public attitudes to newly emergent issues generated by developments in science or technology, better managing major infrastructure projects and testing public opinion on controversial issues around which well-organised interest groups dominate the public debate.
What we are talking about here is moving beyond the politics of the opinion poll to the politics of engagement. So too are we talking about moving beyond the politics of parliamentary government. Parliament should – and often does – engage in a genuinely democratic deliberation. However, it is constrained by party discipline and party conflict. They have their role to play but not to the exclusion of other and more open and inclusive deliberations.