I am about to break my indication that I am unlikely to post again until after Jen's death. I am bored to death in this Regis joint filled with old codgers with assorted disabilities. How many I will write is another question.
I have been thinking about Nicholas Gruen's sortition proposal: a third house of Parliament chosen by lot. Nicholas has written several articles on this subject, most recently earlier this year. Nicholas thought a strong cross-bench might force such a proposal on a minority government. As we now know, Labor ended up with one of the strongest Lower House majorities ever achieved. Although Labor may still need cross-bench support in the Senate, at least where the Coalition doesn't agree with them, that is unlikely to occur with Nicholas's proposal. You can guarantee that Labor and the Coalition WOULD agree to oppose such a proposal
I certainly agree with Nicholas about citizen assemblies. These are gatherings of people chosen by the organisers (presumably in a random manner - in that sense not unlike Nicholas's idea) and making recommendations to the general community , frequently in the run-up to referenda . I participated in the citizens' assembly in the lead-up to the 1999 Republic Referendum. Participants were addressed by a large number of experts on both the Yes and No sides of the argument. A strong majority ended up convinced by the Yes argument, but that didn't stop the Referendum from crashing and burning spectacularly. All States and Territories (except the ACT) voted No, exactly like the 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum. Most citizens probably didn't even know that this Assembly had met, and it seems that few of those who did were convinced by the opinions of a bunch of random citizens meeting in Canberra. Citizens' assemblies in other countries have met with similar results. See this article by Ron Levy and this one by George Williams and Geraldine Chin.
As for Nicholas's sortition proposal, I have two main reservations. The first is that, unless selected citizens are conscripted and forced to serve (which would be outrageous), only selected peope without significant career prospects would agree to serve. Anyone climbing the ladder of a significant profession or trade would be highly unlikely to agree to spend sevral years poncing around in Parliament while their career prospects suffered.
Secondly, selected participants would undoubtedly form themlseves into parties or factions. That is the only effective way of achieving results. Thus, Third House selected by sortition would end up acting pretty much like existing politicians. Nicholas may well have strong answers to these reservations. If so I would love to read them.
Finally, I am not sure that a Third House is even needed. In the long run the cross-benches WILL end up stronger than they are now. A strong cross-bench would introduce the sort of genuine competition of ideas that Nicholas values, as do I. An example of this is the Gillard minority government of 2010-2013. Although some may disagree, I think it achieved quite a few valuabe and lasting reforms that Labor probably would not have introduced voluntarily. Sadly, one exception is that of a carbon price, which was promptly repealed by the Abbott Coalition government.
You might be interested in two books I have read recently that (amongst other things) challenge sole reliance on participatory democracy: "The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy" by Samuel Ely Bagg, and "Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligarchic Republic" by Camila Vergara. Best you read the blurbs, but in brief, they argue that a healthy democracy needs many contesting centres of power, of all kinds, to neutralise oligarchic elites.
Thanks Ken,
Some responses and clarifications.
But I think the most fundamental thing to highlight is that I don't support citizens’ juries as some kind of 'hack' to the existing system. I see that system as in a profound state of decay. That's because, in the last 800 odd years, there have been two different 'logics' of democratisation of European monarchy. The first was Magna Carta and the idea of judgement by one's peers, and the second was the 'checks and balances' applied to monarchy from the 17th century on.
In the former case, an institution was (eventually) developed that husbanded the life world of the people and brought it into government. In the second case, checks and balances were set up but administered by the same elite class that was being held to account. And that's turning into an unaccountability machine (see Robodebt, the NACC and the rising tide of careerism in public life). It's also comically easy to subvert - you just win government and appoint your cronies. We're seeing this in the US and they have more checks and balances than us - like Senate confirmation hearings. Once the partisanship reaches a certain level, things can move very fast.
We might have democratised monarchies by doing something similar to Magna Carta in the legislative and executive branches. But it's a simple fact of history that we didn't. But we can get glipses of what that might look like by looking around. Belgium now has parliamentary committees with 15 elected legislators and 45 randomly selected citizens. There are standing citizen councils in East Belgium, Paris and a few other places.
Michigan has the Independent Citizens' Redistricting Commission, which draws electoral boundaries. And it does it in a way that is much less corruptible than almost all the systems used elsewhere, including here. These are the kinds of institutions we should be developing. Elsewhere in the Western world, these kinds of things are easily subverted by doing what Scott Morrison did with the AAT. Appointing your cronies to 'independent' positions.
That's the 'bulwark against tyranny' argument. There's also the 'can we please have a sensible conversation' argument. Even where there's a strong cross-bench, its MPs have to participate in more than their fair share of double talk. I was discussing budget repair with an independent member of the Tasmanian parliament the other day and they're almost as hamstrung as a party politician. Because if you want to get elected, your 'messaging' though our marvellously dystopian mass and social media has to be pretty reductive. You have to spin your question begging nonsense for media management reasons. Taxes are bad and spending is good! Not easy to balance the budget given that!
Finally, before getting to your specific concerns, it's important to stress that all human institutions, like humans themselves have profound flaws. And in all this the growing dysfunction of the existing system looms large for me. What I'm proposing is extremely low risk and I think it could be highly beneficial. But it's like shooting fish in a barrel to point to shortcomings. The question is how those shortcomings stack up against the shortcomings of the system we have now.
On your specific points
How can citizens’ juries be representative if people will opt out of them?
On the representativeness of the group, I think that, at least as they are getting established, we shouldn't require people to leave their job to serve (this also has attractions for me because it reduces the cost of philanthropic funding). For illustrative purposes, a term in the chamber could begin with the person committing, say, two full weekends in the first month for face-to-face meetings and one two-hour teleconference a week during the week. Then they might be asked to spend around one weekend day a month plus the same weekly teleconference load throughout their term. Jurors would be paid ideally at the same rate as parliamentarians for their time.
While I think this would substantially increase the takeup rate itself, I think it would increase substantially over time because, when they're competently run, the participants report an immense buzz from them. About 95% of participants describe them as good, more than half of those describe it as very good, with about half of those experiencing a kind of epiphany and then some share of those actually changing their lives as a result - standing for local council or doing some other kind of public service at the next opportunity.
Given the public unfamiliarity with these processes - and elite suspicion of them - you need to expose people to them. You need to show them for people to understand what they are. I participated in Rory Stewart's campaign to be London Mayor. He was promising a citizen council, but it 'focus-grouped' badly because voters thought it was 'another committee', another politician's gimmick to appear to do something without doing anything. Instead of another committee, they wanted "a strong leader"!
Won't citizens’ juries harbour the same kind of factionalism as parliaments?
On your second point, Jay Weatherall will tell you that the assembly shouldn't be too large because about 5 percent of the population are natural factionalists, and they provide the seed for larger factions - as they did in his 340 person citizens' jury on nuclear waste (though it was also badly run). But obviously your point is to some extent valid. But, like so many people who are sceptical, you judge people's behaviour by what is familiar to us now. Individual citizen jurors attend their first meeting thinking similarly to you. They expect aggression, spin and point scoring. But then they experience a shock of recognition, an 'aha' moment. They look around and find people like them and their next-door neighbour. Many of them exit these processes without having come to agree with those with different views, but coming to respect them - with immense relief as it rekindles their faith that democracy can be made to work.
What you're witnessing in contemporary politics is a system which has been optimised for a couple of centuries now, a system of cheap talk and 'messaging' in which, as I argued here, a cultural version of Gresham's Law has been eating its way through our public life so that today the principle purpose of virtually every public utterance whether in politics, business, or media is manipulation and self-promotion. One of the main reasons I believe in citizens’ juries is that they are institutions for husbanding the life world back into public life, a life world that has been more or less extinguished in public life, but ultimately the world in which we gain our bearings - our grounding with reality.
It's why I so love this story from Utopia. It captures the relentless progress of the bullshit world in displacing the lifeworld which is the ultimate anchor of our lives, our sanity and our decency. As Alasdair MacIntyre put it in After Virtue:
Won't a growing parliamentary cross bench sort things out?
On your third point, first, I too thought the Gillard Government showed the virtues of a hung parliament. But that was Julia Gillard's metier. How would our other political leaders have gone in such a circumstance? (Hawke is the only one I'm confident about.) Hung parliaments can lead to better or worse government and I don't think we should be too confident of which direction that will go. They can also easily lead to weak governments that forever teeter on the brink of dissolution, as they have, say, in Italy. It depends on the maturity of the political culture. (Right now, the question of whether it leads to better or worse government is in play in the only state with proportional representation in the lower house - Tassie. So far it's been a counterexample to Gillard. We'll have to see what happens with the new government, whoever forms it.)
I'm also not sure how robust the cross-bench is in single-member electorates. Certain important features of Australian elections help - compulsory and preferential voting. But there remains huge inertia towards the major parties and their way of doing politics. You need a hell of a lot of money and professional support to campaign, and the the Lib/Lab duopoly is trying to get an unfair advantage over independents (something that seems both shameful and foolhardy for the ALP to participate in, but what would I know?)
Remember what happened to Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott. They lost their seats once they stopped campaigning in poetry and started governing in prose. Likewise the Australian Democrats and the Lib Dems in the UK. Yes a cross bench can survive as a protest. I'm hoping the community independents will do better. But it's a great deal of work and the major parties have a lot of options to run you out of town.
Sounds like a topic for Monday's lunch!
I don't think we actually discussed it, but it was great to meet you at last.