DEMOCRATIC PROCESS AND ENGAGEMENT

So what is the common good? How might it be discovered?

One possible answer is that the public good and common good can be discovered through the democratic process. This might enable the people at large to decide, as in other Victoria and the ACT, and in similar countries, that a Charter of Rights was desirable. The Federal Government ran a consultative process on the desirability of have a Federal Charter of Rights, which attracted just over 35,000 individual submissions, but the process seems to be a device to placate rather than implement, even though the accompanying public opinion poll recorded that 85% of the telephone respondents supported human rights legislation.

On reflection, it is clear that we are operating through a representative government model of the process, characterized by institutions such as parliaments, parties and mass elections, increasingly dominated by television, often controlled by private interests. The dominance of over the legislative and decision process not only by the executive but increasing top-down political parties subject to insider interest groups who carry expertise and the cachet of political funding. Whatever else is true, the agenda setting process, not to mention dialogue and consideration has except for the mostly superficial and increasingly it seems trivial process of electoral politics orchestrated through the theatrics of television, is not managed and directed by the people at large.

Is there an alternative to representative democracy as a process and institutional forms and practice? One suggestion is to create a forms of community democracy, which might be closer to the experience of democracy and dialogue in Ancient Athens, indigenous societies and the Quakers. There seems, to me at least, a discordance at the underlying cultural level between individualism, which is accommodated by the familiar representative model, and the notion of community, which is the condition for dialogue.

Martin Bell and Terry Waite are leading members of the Independent Network of the UK. This small group has both a blog a Facebook listing, and a Twitter page. There immediate purpose, it seems, is the promotion of more independent members of The House of Commons in the belief that will improve the processes of parliament that have on there analysis been corrupted by the party control of elected members. To that end, Martin Bell has outlined what are known as the Bell Principles for Independent candidates.

There will be times when a successful “insurgency” can occur and independents will be elected to the House of Commons. Then the hope would be that independents, rather than say the Liberal Democrats would hold the balance of power, so that the government in power would bend their ear to the concerns of the Independents. These concerns typically turn on issues of corruption, as the expenses rorts of recent memory. Currently, the House of Commons has two independents out of 430 members. Whereas, the NSW Legislative Council with 93 members has six independents, who have been largely irrelevant given the NSW Government has the numbers – a majority of nine. So the integrity of the Independents, with their freedom from the party whip, is largely wasted.

Local Government might seem to the answer. We are told that the NSW Constitution 1902 reduces local government to an agency of the State Government, and it seems that local government has been subject to corrupt influence, not least because councillors are not remunerated on a full time basis. The State Government, aided and abetted by the Independent Commission Against Corruption, exhibits the same authoritarian top-down approach to local government as it has to local environmental planning, oblivious to the corruption of the democratic process. And yet the argument is advanced, among others by former Premier Carr, that the executive mysteriously can balance the competing interests in decision making, although there is never an example of case study cited to demonstrate the proposition versus the many examples where special interest, often party political donors appear to have been favoured.

Do we then conclude that the model of representative democracy is broken, and that it cannot be restored by changes in voting behavior and in voting systems? The election of independents to representative parliaments will not per se, although it is possible where the balance of power is held and exercised effectively, and it has been done in NSW to change the political outcomes. Most often for a disparate group of independents effective cooperation would be much to expect.

So what might save the show? One answer is to develop community democracy based on small face to face groups, perhaps linked to public meetings, which focus on process in their decision making and so slowly rebuild an authentic culture of democracy. There are several problems including the slowness of group development, the tendency to group breakdown and the lack of a development group culture of openness, inclusion and responsibility. Still democracy is experiential or is derivative and imitative.