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Shhhh. Democracy sleeping

By Peter Chen - posted Friday, 20 August 2010


National elections can be like festivals. Festivals that allow us all to celebrate the co-operative construction of social order that is democracy. As measured in the commentary of the opinion pages, however, the overriding theme of the current election is often a sense of profound ennui. This is disappointing, but it should not be misread to indicate that the democratic spirit of Australia has failed and that we’re heading for a post-democratic era of PR politics and demagoguery.

That is the road to a mindset that divides Australia into the political and apolitical strata. It is a shift back to a class-oriented view of our society that led to the Howard-era electoral reforms. These reforms, ostensibly aimed to protect the integrity of the electoral roll, now feed into the problem of under-enrolment by the young and transient. Rather than be appalled at this state of affairs, we only see punish-the-victim narratives such as Hugh Mckay’s patronising dismissal of younger people as divorced from political interest.

Successive survey work undertaken by researchers from the ANU’s Australian Electoral Study has demonstrated a number of interesting and somewhat contradictory things. First, if democracy is measured in terms of elections, then there has been a steady decline in the number of Australians who actively follow federal election campaigns over the past four decades. This reflects what we have seen in the 2010 race: politics without passion, and largely also without real conflict over policy.

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This often leads to the argument that politics is dumbed-down to the lowest common denominator because of the compulsory voting system. That we’re hog-tied to the least engaged and informed members of the community.

But before you start to ask if compulsory voting should be done away with consider these three other trends:

First, elections aside, the ANU’s research has shown that Australians are as interested in politics as they have ever been, and they’re more interested in politics than in the 1960s. Here politics is a different construct than elections: we can be interested in politics as the contest and distribution of power without being interested in the formality of the electoral process.

Second, Australians have higher levels of regard for the value of democracy than in the more ‘‘lively’’ political jurisdiction of the US (with a system that, without compulsion, encourages and rewards elite and middle-class participation only).

Third, is that we see political parties as a necessary evil: parts of the democratic system, disinterested in our concerns and opinions.

In short hand, what Australians like about our country is its democratic tradition and their personal sense of empowerment to take action with regards to issues of concern. What we like least is the major institutions that exist to aggregate and facilitate political participation. The back-room political manoeuvres that we’ve seen in recent months, the issue management of the campaign, and the he-said she-said nature of the leadership contests leaves people cold.

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This makes me interested in an undercurrent that has been running throughout the campaign to date: democratic reform. While democratic reform was a key policy issue in the recent UK election, it has lurked around the margins of debate in our contest. Like any painful family discussion that we know we should have, but avoid because it will lead to door slamming and hurt feelings, we’ve been putting it off for far too long.

But there are some willing to talk about it. One of the more recent examples of this was from Cheryl Kernot who has stated her come back was motivated by the shallowness of contemporary politics. In defending her return she talked to Sky News about potential for technology to improve democratic participation in Australia.

This should be music to the ears of the Senator Online Party. SOL are running candidates for the upper house who promise to vote on each bill and amendment based on the result of online polling through their website. Where Kernot and SOL differ lies only in their core models of democratic practice: Kernot presents as the democratic trustee, you can rely on her because of her legislative experience and known progressive credentials; SOL reflect the more jaundiced view of democracy, their senators are bound to vote based on the majority view. Like monkeys hitting the feeder bar, division seating arrangements for SOL’s senators will be dictated by their Blackberries and iPhones.

But even the major parties have been in the reform game, albeit far less radically than SOL. The Greens have a strong empowerment agenda, and support the citizen assembly model (except for the issue of carbon pollution). The ALP, as we now well know, oppose citizen’s assemblies, except for issues that the Prime Minister has strong policy preferences on. The Liberals, too, have been talking up improvements to question time that they hope will increase democratic oversight. More importantly, under Kevin Rudd’s leadership the government initiated an inquiry into ‘‘government 2.0’’: the increased use of modern IT tools in government such as blogs, open access data, citizen applications, and increased online consultation.

Democratic practice is a moving feast, and if you don’t like how its evolved, then it is possible to add a little intelligent design into the mix like New Zealand’s complex but interesting mix of single-member, party-list and indigenous members of their national house.

What often isn’t well ventilated is the way that political parties in Australia work: both in terms of the basic processes by which they are funded (and who funds them) and the processes of collective (or top-down) decision making that goes on within them. While the call for more transparency of funding and relations with lobbyists are common, we need to unpack the very nature of party politics in this country: making party registration (and the considerable liberties and financial benefits the status of being a party brings in Australia) dependent on parties meeting a broader benchmark of transparent internal politics than they currently display. All parties are subject to the problem of elite inside rule, as recent email leaks from the Greens have shown. As organisations dependent on the public purse, their welfare dependence needs to be matched with the responsibilities to innovate democratically and demonstrate this to the wider community.

Some of the barriers to the participation in an electronically-facilitated democracy will be overcome by the development of the National Broadband Network (or the Coalition’s wireless alternative). But the introduction of electronic citizen juries, e-referenda, or online consultation systems needs more than the cursory attention it’s been given to date. NBN or no, we run the risk of exacerbating the distance between the insiders and those who sit on the margins.

The great advantage of our representative model of government lies exactly in the fact that we elect others to govern on our behalf: we don’t always have the time, intelligence or moral fibre to be on top of every issue. Any reform, therefore, needs to be compared to our current benchmark of democratic practice: the universality and simplicity of the upper and lower house vote. If we are to change politics, we’ll have to turn the gaze of electronic democracy directly on to those hearts of darkness: parties.

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About the Author

Dr Peter John Chen is a lecturer in politics and public policy at the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney.

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