Radio transcript

Radio 6PR, Perth, Western Australia

10.30am, 1 June 2005

Interviewer: Paul Murray; Interviewees: Lyn Carson, John Gastil, Mary-Pat MacKinnon

PAUL:	We’re talking about community consultation this morning I had Alannah MacTiernan on again as my first guest on the program today talking about the muddle at Terry(check) lakes. There’s been no shortage of community consultation there but maybe the Cambridge Council just doesn’t listen to it very well.
	The Gallop government since it came to office has prided itself on trying to consult the community on a range of issues, and I went through some of them this morning: we had the Drug Summit, trying to come up with some sort of workable strategy to handle drugs in the community, then we saw it move on to the Water Consultation that went on around the metropolitan area - a series of meetings there, trying to come up with some sort of consensus in the community about what we should be doing about our problems with water.
	In recent times we saw the Dialogue with the City of course [insert link], which was a pretty big one, held down at the Fremantle Passenger Terminal over a whole weekend, where there was an attempt there to come up with some great planning rationale for the direction that Perth should handle. And a similar one to that is going on now down in the Coburn [check]area about the planning for the Coburn coast. And that happened just I think in the last weekend or so.
	Alannah MacTiernan the Minister for Planning and Infrastructure has invited to town a series of experts to discuss the processes that you might go through if you wanted to involve the community in this sort of planning. I have three of them in the studio with me. Alannah rang me last night and we all know how persuasive she is, and says you need to talk to some of these experts to get a bit of debate happening around the place on what they want.
	We’ve got a Sydney-sider, a Canadian and an American in the studio. And without wanting to upset out visitors from overseas, I thought we might start with the Sydney-sider. And that’s Dr Lyn Carson. Lyn comes from the School of Economics and Political Science at the University of Sydney.
	Good morning to you Lyn.
CARSON:	Good morning, Paul.
	Good morning to all of you first of all, yes. Particularly to you starting off Lyn. Lyn, I think that you’re involved in this idea of what is called Citizens’ Juries? Just explain to us what they are, and how they work.
CARSON:	Sure. I think I’d want to start by distinguishing between community consultation and what it is that each of us is interested in. We’re actually interested in very meaningful community engagement where citizens become partners in the process rather than people who are just sharing their opinions. For us there is a big difference between, public opinion and public judgement. So we’re very interested in drawing citizens in to help with decision-making, and Citizens’ Juries are an example of this. So… you randomly select people from the community, and that’s really important because it means you’re getting a slice of the community that often doesn’t get heard.
	When you have a normal, a traditional consultation — public meetings, that kind of thing, you attract, in my opinion, the incensed and the articulate, you get the same voices being heard: interest groups and so on, I think they have a very different role to play; I think they’re local experts and very important, but if you want to find out what the whole citizenry thinks then you need another way of doing that. And for me, that’s through true random selection.
PAUL:	Are you talking here about somewhat localised decisions?
CARSON:	It depends. You can have big ones and you can have small ones. A Citizens’ Jury is an example of a small process that usually involves about 12 to 25 people. But you can have massive deliberations, and you had an example which you mentioned: Dialogue with The City. The biggest that I know of involved 4,500 people in one room talking about how to redevelop the site that was destroyed through the September 11 attack. So: some small and some large.
PAUL:	So how do you cut through community apathy to get a representative sample to sit on a jury?
CARSON:	It’s amazing how easy it is. We assume that people don’t want to do this. In my opinion it’s like we’ve all got a muscle, a participatory muscle if you like, that has just atrophied through lack of use. No one has asked us to participate and we think therefore it’s inappropriate to do so. But if you extend an invitation to the community — and I have now on many many occasions — I’m always amazed at the take-up rate; people are actually very keen to participate in process like this. A jury was convened over the past days while we’ve been in Perth. . Ned Crosby from the United States, the original designer of citizens’ juries, conducted a five day jury here, and it was remarkably easy, the recruiters discovered, to find people who were willing to give up five days of their work and other activities, to serve on a jury which they thought was worthwhile because it was going to discuss topics dear to their hearts – it was about water among other things. And these people genuinely wanted to find out more. I do think we underestimate the capacity of people to be involved in decision-making, but also, as you mentioned, their willingness to do so.
PAUL:	MARY-PAT KacKinnon is a Canadian. She works for a not for profit organisation called the Canadian Policy Research Network. They’re all about leading public dialogue. Is this something that now is a regular part of public life in Canada?
MARY-PAT:	I wouldn’t go that far. But I would say it is certainly… there is growing interest and growing excitement about it. And I want to share a little bit about the most recent experience — which happened in British Columbia. We had a government. The government of British Columbia gave a mandate to a Citizen’s Assembly which was 150 randomly selected citizens of British Columbia, given the mandate to study and assess the electoral system in British Columbia, and to bring a recommendation to the people of the province, the electorate, through an election. So, not only did the province, the government… take an… and this was a deliberative process that lasted for a whole year… the citizens, 150 of them for 11 months going through intensive learning, public hearings and then deliberation to actually come to a recommendation that was put to the people of British Columbia around what kind of electoral system they want. And actually, through that process, amazingly, 151 people…. Only one had to withdraw and they had almost perfect attendance through the course of 11 months.
PAUL:	So the recommendation went to a referendum?
MARY-PAT:	It went to actually as part of the election campaign; they included the referendum in the election. The election just happened; it was on May 17, and despite a lot of political pundits and the establishment who poo-pooed… the by-the-way who came up with the single transferable vote you’re somewhat familiar with here in Australia. Despite the view that they were going to fall very short, and in other words it would never reach maturity/majority, 67.4% of the population of the electorate supported it. So now the Premier is taking it back to the legislature and assessing the next steps to change it. It was a random recruitment, so through Election British Columbia, they drew pool, and then eventually got for each of the 79 electoral ridings, one man and one woman for each of those ridings (electorate). So it was completely random, they had balanced gender, and in addition they had two aboriginal representatives to ensure that that voice was there.
PAUL:	Were they paid for their time?
MARY-PAT:	They actually were paid for any expenses. But they typically met on weekends, so weren’t paid per se but all their childcare travel expenses, accommodation, because British Columbia is a huge province. So they came from across British Columbia and they were meeting in Vancouver. So all their costs were accommodated.
PAUL:	Ok let’s move on to John Gaskell(??). John is Associate Professor in the Department of Communications at the University of Washington. John, how do you get over the cynicism in the community about these things. I know a lot of the discussion here, particularly in terms of the Drug Summit in WA is that the government somehow managed to put together a group of people who came up with the recommendations that they want to live with. So it was the old thing about ‘Don’t call an enquiry unless you know what the answer is going to be’, ‘Don’t ask the question’. How do you get over that cynicism?
JOHN:	Well, the public is of course sceptical of processes that are supposed to be neutral and unbiased; people immediately suspect they’re just going to confirm whatever the government wants them to arrive at. What’s remarkable about a process like the Citizens’ Juries Lyn described, or the Citizen’s Assemblies that MARY-PAT just described, is that they are so carefully constructed and the random samples are paid off – and in the case of the Citizens’ Juries, or at least having their expenses covered at the Citizens’ Assemblies… That the process is so carefully constructed that the average person looks at it and says: ‘You know, I might trust that’. Even in the United States. Now, you think you’re cynical. But ho! Man. You should ride 15 hours in the other direction watching B-grade movies. Trust me, when you get off the plane…. You know… We’re cynical.
	A survey was done in the US just a few years ago that asked this question. ‘Who would you trust more to make decisions on your behalf: the US congress or just a random sample of American citizens?’ And they went with the second of those: two to one.
	With the Citizens’ Assemblies, when people voted for it, some people voted for it because they loved the idea of a single transferable vote. But some people voted for it because they trusted the process. And frankly a lot of people who voted for it didn’t know exactly what the proposal was in its details. Single transferable vote is a little complicated to understand if you’ve never heard of it before. But they trusted the process. So that’s how you can cut through cynicism, is to give people a process that they can believe in.
PAUL:	So can you trust laymen with all issues, I spose that’s the question. The Drug Summit wasn’t a random selection of people. In fact it was, in the main, experts and people with axes to grind, and that seems to be the one about which people in most cases had misgivings about in WA, what to do you say Lyn?
CARSON:	I’d immediately call to mind, Australia’s first Consensus Conference on Genetically Modified Organisms in the Food Chain. We brought together a small group of people, the same number you’d recruit for a Citizens’ Jury. We had an unemployed person, a secretary, a barman, a real mix, a cross-section of the community. I had a bit of a trouble understanding the language around GMO, and I must say I had my doubts about their capacity to be able to understand this. But you have to appreciate that they had two preparatory weekends, and then had three days of deliberation. In this time, I can guarantee that those people knew more than the politicians who were making decisions about GMO. And the language that they used, both in terms of their recommendations but also the questions they used when they were asking experts, well it blew my mind, and I think the minds of those who were there, who hadn’t been part of the deliberations and hadn’t been able to come up to speed as they had. Some of those people went on to be part of advisory bodies and so on that were discussing GMO. They very quickly learnt a great deal. Remember, they don’t need to understand all the detail. Often the issue is about value judgements in science or technology, and often the scientists are not the best people to make those decisions. Ultimately it’s up to the citizens to do that. You don’t need to understand the science of it sometimes. You need to understand the values that surround it.
PAUL:	So, MARY-PAT, Will you let the Great Unwashed loose on any issue?
MARY-PAT:	Maybe I could just share a similar in Canada we had a citizen’s dialogue around the problem of what to do about nuclear waste. So we brought together 500 people in groups of about 40, and this was to help the decision-makers around what framework, what values, and management framework to take to the decision-making about what to do, do we have deep disposal? And so it was very similar because in that it is a technical scientific issue which a lot of people think ‘Well, they’ll never be able to get their heads around it’. We weren’t asking them to come up with a technical option that was correct, we were asking them to deliberate together, to learn about it first, and then to deliberate about what is the value framework, and what is the direction within which we want to have these decisions made? And actually we’re been extremely successful. We’re now at the stage where the Nuclear Waste Management Organisation has just released its report. The front page of the report says that they were guided by the value framework through the citizen’s dialogue process that helped them understand the policy space within which they needed to go ahead. Very successful.
PAUL:	Do you feel comfortable with that?
MARY-PAT:	With issues where people have a chance to learn to deliberate, and its around value-based choices, not a technical option. It can be very powerful.
PAUL:	John this seems to head towards an issue that the politicians hate in Australia and that’s citizen-initiated referenda. Which they seem to think take the power away from them; and if there’s one thing politicians like more than a good salary it’s their political power. Do you see that there’s a connection here?
JOHN:	Absolutely. If you talk to elected officials, they’ll tell you there are some issues that take power away from us. That is, there might be five things you want to do when you’re elected to office, and you only have a few years to do them before your career is over, but the one thing you have to deal with is something completely different to the controversial issue, its intractable, you know you’re going to be punished if you do the right thing. That’s not the issue you want to have power on. In fact, that issue is draining your time, your energy, your political credibility. If you can create a process like a Citizens’ Assembly, and say: ‘You know what, folks, we’re not passing the buck on this one, but we are going to bring together these citizens to help craft either a policy framework or a policy proposal’. Maybe then you put that to a full vote of the public. Now you’ve taken an issue, You’ve allowed a deliberative process to arrive at a good policy decision. And you have the general public put its stamp of approval on it. Now that issue is off your agenda and you can get working on the things you really care about. And that you want to spend your political capital on.
PAUL:	Lyn?
CARSON:	I wanted to add that I think politicians are right to be fearful of citizen- initiated referenda. I personally am quite cynical about referenda. I think Australia has some classic examples of how things just don’t get up.
PAUL:	They certainly lead to a scare campaign.
CARSON:	I think it’s because with referenda we’re talking about direct democracy and often it’s very superficial, its reduced to a yes/no vote and a whole lot of confusing information and people function out of fear in that situation and often reject it. What we’ve been talking about with these various examples of Citizens’ Juries, Citizens’ Assemblies, Community Dialogue and so on is deliberative democracy rather than direct democracy. They can often be linked: you can have deliberative democracy that then led to a direct vote, as it did in British Columbia, but we’re actually not so interested in encouraging that kind of superficial reaction from the community. We’re about public judgement, not public opinion.
PAUL:	Are there examples in Canada and America that you know about where there’s been too much democracy and the governments haven’t swallowed what’s come out of the process?
MARY-PAT:	Well, I think there’s too much of the wrong kind of democracy. There has certainly not been too much of deliberative democracy where people have had an opportunity to actually learn, deliberate, and then come to some kind of public judgement around things.
JOHN:	Yeah. You’re absolutely right. There’s more than one kind of democracy and I think what we’re talking about when we talk about direct democracy is were talking about pushing power to the people. I will tell you from Washington State, Oregon, California, the whole west coast of the US, we do initiative and referenda like crazy. And we did a survey once for instance in Washington, just a couple of years ago. A week before the election we asked people who were likely voters, with a long history of voting – remember it’s not compulsory in America – so these are the people who do vote - What initiatives or referenda are going to be on your ballot next week? 45% couldn’t name one. There were eight. Those who could name them, about 10% could give you an argument pro or con on any of those issues. They didn’t know what was coming and they were going to vote on it. I guarantee you, 90% of those people voted. How they voted I couldn’t tell you. Now that’s not deliberation; that’s incredibly superficial. And on these initiative elections, sometimes we’ll have one initiative that cuts taxes and one that fixes the budget, you have to raise somebody’s pay. It’s not deliberative. The Citizens’ Assembly in BC couldn’t be more different, because the citizens who drafted the initiative had to take responsibility for really working through the issue and come up with something that was well thought out.
PAUL	You have a long history of this in America haven’t you? Almost at every election, you have resolutions in the state elections that people are required to vote on as well as putting people into the parliament.
JOHN	Right, but again let me underscore that point. That just gives power to the people without any thought to how it’s done. What we’re talking about with these processes is actually sharing power, you see how with the Citizen’s Assembly or the Citizen’s Jury the legislature and the general public work together to have a deliberative process, but the initiative process some: guy making watches in the middle of Washington State can come up with something that sounds great but is actually going to destroy the state’s budget; there was no deliberation.
PAUL:	I really appreciate the time that you’ve given us to talk about it.