Are our leaders asking too much of Australia’s democracy?

In the field of environmentally sustainable energy policy, these trends and outcomes are present in the near-invisibility of nuclear energy within the field of policy choice in planning Australia's economic future. It is not an informed, majoritarian rejection or acceptance of the nuclear generation of electricity as a plausible element of the mix of energy sources available to power Australia's economic growth. Australians are effectively being required to eliminate this low carbon, base load source - not from its Australian application, but from the policy discussion itself. If Australian democracy is in fact sufficiently robust to withstand pressures of this stamp, it may still be dangerous to test its limits in this way.

Where to from here? Surely the only coherent response is to offer to those whose needs are not being met the kind of information, interpretation and understanding they are looking for.

In other words, for a policy position based on the qualities discussed earlier, and one whose value lies in its capacity to form a sounding board for their own, carefully thought through, opinions. This involves the need to convince those people who feel unable to take a position on the information available that alternatives clearly can, and do, exist. They no longer need to rely on unreliable evidence, which has been created by agents of all kinds in their own causes. No longer do they need to accept, in the absence of other possibilities, the worldviews and advocacy of those who know, brooking no argument or dissent, that their position is inarguably the correct and only one.

On the contrary, the alternative to the domination of extreme positions based on interests and ideologies is one based on evidence, which is itself founded on scientific method and rational argument. Only with the clarity of reason and the cogency of evidence, which clears away preference and partiality can independently peer-ratified scholarship, replicable physical outcomes and the balanced application of findings to cases provide a true touchstone for national policy leadership in Australia.

To quote John Stuart Mill: "We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and even if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still."