Detoxing democracy 3: bringing citizen deliberation into government administration

Citizens’ juries and agendas that are ‘stuck’

Infrastructure Victoria faces similar kinds of issues. Congestion pricing is an old chestnut which, for all the talk about economic reform, is progressing at glacial pace. As King et al argue:

It is almost universally acknowledged among transportation planners that congestion pricing is the best way, and perhaps the only way, to significantly reduce urban traffic congestion. Politically, however, congestion pricing has always been a tough sell.

Congestion pricing is also a commonsensical way forward. But if people don’t get the time and the deliberative ‘space’ to look and talk the idea over and search for ways of dealing with the objections of those who’ll be disadvantaged by it, reform will be easy political meat for those who want to stop it — including of course the hard-heads of the party in Opposition who will see great opportunities to advance their own and their party’s cause. As John Stanley observes ‘International experience is that public support is typically evenly divided, or mildly negative, prior to implementation but increasingly supportive afterwards.’

Deliberative democracy institutions give us the best chance we have — short of a time-machine — to get to that land of the future of acceptance and look back. Ordinary people can discuss the pros and cons and learn of others’ experience with it. And so it is that the metropolitan citizens’ jury that Infrastructure Victoria established to explore forward planing recommended an ‘Overall pricing review to manage demand for travel at peak/non-peak times across the entire rail and road network’ with its strong endorsement as a high priority. If the jury was representative of the community before it convened one may surmise that the process of deliberation changed many minds. And the legitimacy of juries — their conspicuous engagement with ‘everyman’ suggests such findings could be influential in helping reform occur.

Similar things could be said of good policy in numerous areas which are stuck or where the pace of reform is glacial because powerful interests assume (rightly and sometimes not) that their interests may be compromised, or politicians can launch ‘zinger’ lines of opposition against opposing politicians trying to make headway. Here’s a list of such things in all areas of which deliberative forums appear to move citizen’s views further towards the consensus of thoughtful professionals in the field.

• Focusing education more on quality of teaching and less on proxies for it that pander to parents (lowering class sizes) or teachers unions (defending the interests of mediocre teachers);
• Tackling climate change; and in that context
• Considering nuclear power on its merits ³
• Moving policy on illicit drugs more towards a ‘harm minimisation’ stance with the use of mechanisms like drug courts that are otherwise often demonised — generally without real knowledge of the program — as being ‘soft on crime’;
• Tackling obesity; or
• Having professional demarcations redrawn — for instance between doctors, nurses, and para-medics or between lawyers and para-legals.

It is easy to say that these things are properly the province of politicians, which indeed they are, but good bureaucrats help shape the way issues arise for politicians and help them consider strategic alternatives including leading community deliberation on the issues.

Representing stakeholder groups

Deliberative democracy institutions offer a way of complementing and/or replacing institutions that hold themselves out as representative, but which are imperfectly representative and/or whose business models require behaviour that is poorly aligned with sensible representation. Mancur Olsen made the logic of collective action and the way it shapes our politics a focus of thinking many decades ago, but this lens through which to think about the issues is as relevant as ever. Consider an organisation that says it represents small business. In fact most organisations ‘representing’ small business are funded by members who are a very small subset of the group that’s claimed to be represented. It is it almost certain that members of the organisation will be different to those they claim to represent in some way or other (though it may or may not be material to some public policy issue at stake).

Moreover the incentives on the organisation to fund itself will have all manner of influences — some good; some not so good. To attract members a small business association may provide private consulting services to its members. It may provide its members with a collective voice on public policy and services to help members navigate public policy. But another important objective for many such organisations is to get media coverage and that won’t always be compatible with taking the most thoughtful or helpful line in the public debate.

These observations apply mutatis mutandis to most representation of interest groups in Canberra. Associations representing consumers, workers, doctors, environmentalists only represent the group they claim to represent very imperfectly and always refracted through the institutional interests and imperatives within associations themselves. These are likely to favour activism and the broader career interests of the operatives within associations. I suspect these agencies often dumb down their policy positions to maximise their appeal in the stakeholder group and emphasise their standing for that group’s interests. Here agencies can take things into their own hands and engage ‘mini-publics’ of stakeholder groups and use the now well developed methodologies of deliberative democracy to really partner with communities to solve problems including the problems of making trade-offs between different interests. They can continue dealing with traditional interest group representatives but also know when their positions diverge from the considered opinions of those they represent and be able to bring that perspective into the policy discussion with the public legitimacy that well considered deliberative arrangements should allow.

Where existing institutions are failing

In some areas existing putatively meritocratic structures are simply failing generating hidden crises of dysfunction and illegitimacy. The clearest example of this I know of is the extraordinary growth that’s taken place in ethics approvals. An example is best to make the point. Family by Family is a program developed in 2009 and run since then by The Australian Centre for Social Innovation which I chaired until late last year. We have conducted numerous independent evaluations of the program. Each one was fraught for reasons I need not detain the reader with here. However we’ve never had the impact of the program on children independently assessed. Why? Because the university based unit performing the evaluation advised that it was too difficult to obtain ethics approval to do so. (How ethical is that: to fly blind, or less sighted than one could be, on a central impact of the program?)

Ethics approval would be difficult because such an evaluation would involve asking children questions deemed ‘sensitive’ by the powers that administer ethics approvals. As it was it took a good part of a year to obtain the multiple approvals needed to ask the adults in the program those questions (which are very similar to questions they are asked in the program every few weeks!). It took even longer to obtain data from the government departments funding the program but that’s just another part of the jigsaw puzzle that, by the end had me joking with TACSI staff that I wanted a trigger warning whenever evaluation was discussed.