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Whatsapp Members of Melbourne's People's Panel stand outside City Hall.

The City of Melbourne’s recent experiment asking citizens to develop a 10-year financial plan is being hailed as a success by those working in the deliberative democracy space. Now one councillor is looking to see what other issues could be addressed with the method. Sunday Extra reports.

Bold, fearless and creative suggestions for the city’s future: that was the brief given to Melbourne’s People’s Panel when they first embarked on their task in August last year. The panel of 43 randomly selected Melburnians had come together to advise the council on a 10-year financial plan for the growing city.

This week the council’s final plan was unanimously endorsed, with Lord Mayor Robert Doyle saying it was heavily influenced by the panel’s deliberations. Among the recommendations that made their way into the council vision were planning for more public open space, maintaining a high standard of events and redeveloping the Queen Victoria Market.

The level of active citizenry that results when people get involved in something where they feel like they can actually make a difference—it gives me chills when I see it happen.

The only recommendation not adopted involved increasing council rates by 2.5 per cent more than CPI; the city says the Victorian government plans to introduce a rates capping policy for all state councils.

Councillor Stephen Mayne, chair of the City of Melbourne’s finance and governance committee, says his experience with the citizens’ jury process gave him real hope for democratic renewal.

‘We decided we wanted to do our first ever 10-year financial plan. And then we thought, well, we want to do something a bit different with community engagement, and citizens’ juries seemed to be getting some momentum,’ he says.

‘Let’s throw them a really big challenge, where we don’t already have a policy position, on a 10-year plan, and let’s see what they come back with ... Let’s get the community in to give us some advice and let’s give them a whole lot of information. A 10-year financial plan is a lot of data, and you’ve got to understand the council’s full scope of operations.

‘So we did it and we were delighted with what came back. We’ve pretty much adopted most of it.’

Nicole Hunter, co-founder of an organisation called MosaicLAB that works with deliberative decision-making projects, was involved as a facilitator in the Melbourne process.

Citizens involved were selected randomly, but through a stratified selection process, with recruiters seeking balance in terms of socio-economic background and gender.

Hunter says two other criteria were getting a good mix of both residents and business—in this case, a 50-50 mix—and capturing the 18-25-year-old age bracket. However, it was important to rule certain people out of the process as well.

‘Anyone who’s actively involved in a party is generally excluded from the random selection process, and anyone who might be involved in any party political activities,’ she says.

‘We clearly state anybody involved in party political roles is excluded. And then the process itself depoliticises it. It takes it away from any preconceived positions people have on things.’

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Whatsapp Melburnians gather for the city council's People's Panel.

She says it was amazing to watch as the participants were transformed through the process.

‘We had people texting their thoughts into the process from the labour room as their wife had a baby. We had people continue coming throughout their chemotherapy.

‘We had people return from overseas after a close relative had died to come back to the process, we had people put off holidays or come back from holidays to attend, people who said "I’ll only come to one", but they kept coming back and in fact have become a key spokesperson for the whole process.

‘The level of active citizenry that results when people get involved in something where they feel like they can actually make a difference—it gives me chills when I see it happen.’

A ‘confronting’ moment for political elites

Deliberative democracy models like the citizens’ juries present something of a paradigm shift to those involved in traditional political processes. But Carolyn Hendriks, a senior lecturer at the Australian National University and a member of the newDemocracy Foundation, which recruited participants in Melbourne, says elected representatives are not the most resistant to change.

‘On the whole I’ve found that the elected representatives get this stuff; they want to connect with their electorates,’ she says.

‘It’s the groups that hold other kinds of power in our political system that resist it: the commentators, the interest groups, the lobby groups, all those opinion leaders who have direct access to decision makers.

‘They momentarily have to stand aside while these ordinary citizens have the opportunity to deliberate seriously, and in depth, on an issue. And that’s quite confronting for a lot of what I call these political elites, because they’re not used to handing over that power to ordinary citizens.’

Read more: Citizens' juries giving power to the people

Mayne agrees. ‘I think it actually says there’s a bit of a problem with our normal political processes of vested interest, squeaky wheels, short-term media cycles, campaign finance, all those things that actually get in the way of sensible evidence based decision-making,’ he says.

‘We wanted to not hear from the squeaky wheels. We’re sick of them, we hear from them all the time. We want to hear from real ordinary normal people, randomly selected, and truly get the view of the community, not just those who play the political game loudly.’

Hendriks says some issues are considered so divisive that consulting with the community is not worthwhile—but she thinks that’s often a misplaced opportunity.

‘You may recall in the lead-up to the 2010 election Julia Gillard, prime minister at the time, recommended a citizen’s assembly on climate change. It was knocked down very quickly by a range of commentators. There are certainly times when you may question, what would this process serve politically?’ she says.

‘I think it’s about choosing the right kind of issue, and also ... making sure that the citizens actually have some power. There’s no point involving people over a very complicated process and then saying thanks for your advice, we’re going to ignore it.’

Mayne sets sights on enterprise bargaining

Mayne is now proposing an idea—which he admits is controversial—to apply the citizens’ jury process to negotiations over the council’s agreement on employees’ pay and conditions.

‘No one’s ever done one before on an enterprise agreement, so whether I get the numbers to do that we’ll know in a month,’ he says.

‘You would get maybe some staff, who are the affected community, you might get some of our original panel, and then you get a few new ones, and then you get the unions in to present, you get everyone in to present, and you simply say, give us some advice as to whether we should make any changes based on our last one.

‘We’re all sick of the adversarial [process of] attacking each other, ambit claims, pretend to strike, down to Fair Work. Last time we had a very messy process, it was the usual pantomime and fighting and arguing. I thought, is there a different way? Because the community has absolutely no involvement in that last process, and they might actually have an opinion.’

Read more: 'People's panels' could build public's trust in politics

Mayne thinks even the Australian parliament could do with a shake-up. In the United Kingdom and Canada, where the Upper House is made up of appointed representatives, there have been suggestions that a randomly selected group of citizens could provide an alternative. Why not in Australia?

‘I think you could have a citizens’ assembly sitting as a third house, on top of the senate. As long as you don’t professionalise the participants, so you’re on for a year or two and then you’re out,’ Mayne says.

‘[The problem with politics at the moment is] you get captured and you get familiar and you develop positions and you get factionalised. But if you had mass rotation, I think ultimately they could sit there as a third house.’

Shaping democracy for the people Listen to Stephen Mayne, Carolyn Hendriks and Nicole Hunter speak about deliberative democracy on Sunday Extra.

Sunday Extra is RN’s live Sunday morning broadcast, looking to the week ahead and also incorporating Ockham’s Razor, Background Briefing, and First Dog on the Moon.