Submissions or a fun 2025 festive season?
What has happened to the idea of a restful, fun festive season? We’re not 2 weeks into 2025 and already Trust Democracy has made 2 Government submissions: one on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill and another on proposals for a Regulatory Standards Bill. How many submissions would the Government have received if these consultation hadn’t ended in the holidays?
Even though the Committee decided that Trust Democracy would not make the writing of submissions a major thrust of our work during the development of our Strategic Plan in early 2024, we nevertheless made the following 4 submissions during 2024.
| Submission to: | Topic: |
| Health Coalition Aotearoa | The regulation of lobbying |
| Ministry of Justice | Official Information Act exemptions |
| Statistics New Zealand | The future of censuses |
| The House’s Parliament Bill Committee | Parliament Bill |
Some 2024 highlights
Porirua Assembly on Climate Change
At our 2022 AGM, Helmut Modlik, CEO of Te Rūnanga o Toa Rangatira, outlined a vision for a form of community governance that combined Māori, Pacific and deliberative democracy concepts and ideas. Since then, the Porirua Community Leaders Forum has been operating for a number of years and organising for a citizens assembly is now well advanced – the assembly will be held in February and March 2025!
The assembly process has been co-designed by Ngāti Toa, Te Reo o Ngā Tāngata: The People Speak and Porirua community members, including our Chair, Simon Wright. The novel assembly process takes inspiration from the Matike Mai report and will address the question: how do we connect and respond as our climate changes?
OECD Global Forum on Building Trust and Reinforcing Democracy
OECD member states are now willing to acknowledge that democracy is in trouble and to act to turn things around. In a post entitled ‘Mixing Democracy and Pleasure’, Simon Wright, our Chair, reflects on attending the Milan forum and on NZ’s non-attendance.
Collaborating with the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Aotearoa
Committee member Finn Shewell has been working with WEAll to deepen their understanding of participatory and deliberative approaches to economic transformation. As part of this, he ran a workshop at their ‘Economy for the Public Good’ conference in November alongside Koi Tū’s Tatjana Buklijas.
Trust Democracy is currently working on a bigger piece of work with WEAll to deliver a policy and campaigning document to local government candidates ahead of the 2025 local body elections, with the aim of embedding deliberative approaches into the policy platforms of many new and incumbent candidates.
Leveraging Local Government’s Superpower
In this blog post, Trust Democracy Committee member Anna Curnow describes how local government is starting to embrace more deliberative and participatory approaches for its “superpower” of being close to its communities.