Democracy faces real threats internationally and in New Zealand, and yet, there are reasons to be hopeful. Based on our work over 2025, we’d like to highlight some of the issues and potential solutions.
🚨Issues of concern
Well-structured consultation is a cornerstone of democracy. It ensures that people who are interested or affected can have their say before decisions are made. This process strengthens policy development, improves programmes, and leads to better lawmaking.
Consultation also helps everyone understand who stands to gain or lose from proposed changes—and it limits the undue influence of powerful groups.
Unfortunately, the current government is pushing through constitutionally significant laws with little or no public input. By relying heavily on Parliamentary urgency, they have been bypassing public scrutiny.
In our ten submissions this year, we highlighted this and noted another concerning pattern: many of the rushed laws concentrate power and/or resources in central government ministers and already privileged groups. And this comes at the expense of the Legislature, Judiciary, local government, Māori, civil society and the wider public.
In our view, parliamentary rules, conventions, processes and practices are not protecting and upholding democratic principles as well as they should. Two of our suggestions for improving things included:
- Establishing a new select committee focused on the continuous improvement of Parliament’s procedures, standards and working practices similar to the House of Commons Moderisation Committee
- The use of citizens assemblies and juries to support select committee inquiries, for policy development and the review legislation, and to inform voters of the pros and cons of referendum proposals.
✨Twinkles of hope
While the government and Parliament haven’t yet caught the ‘deliberative wave’, 2025 has been a stellar year in New Zealand’s deliberative history. Five citizens assemblies were organised to address important local issues.
Council-led assemblies:
- Auckland – the future of recreation at A F Thomas Park
- Napier and Whanganui to consider issues to do with swimming pools.
Community-led assemblies:
Trust Democracy had strong connections with the Porirua and Auckland assemblies.
Auckland assembly on the future of A F Thomas Park – the home of the Takapuna golf course
This assembly was commissioned by Auckland Council and Kaipātiki Local Board as part of their wider public engagement around the future recreational use of the A F Thomas Park and facilitated by our committee member, Anna Curnow. In an article (paywalled), the NZ Herald’s Senior Writer, Simon Wilson, wrote about it in glowing terms.
“I’ve seen the future of democracy and it works … Over three Saturdays last month, I’ve been observing 40 people in a room, chosen at random, making a series of decisions about a complex, highly contentious issue affecting their part of the city … They went into it with a wide variety of views, but they came out with recommendations that all had “supermajority” support … it was remarkable. You want some good news about political decision-making? This was it.”
To find out more, you can:
- Read Anna Curnow’s detailed account of the Assembly
- Listen (7:03 onwards) to Simon Wilson talking about the Assembly with RNZ’s Kathryn Ryan
- Visit the Auckland Council webpage about the project
Porirua Assembly on Climate
Having supported the Porirua Assembly on Climate project since 2019, we recently hosted a learning event called ‘A Place of Firsts’ that attracted 150 registrations. We will publish the event video and transcript in the New Year. In the meantime, you can read a Wellington.Scoop report about the event. You can also watch this 20-minute video to get a sense of what the Assembly was about.
Setting the Record Straight on Citizens Assemblies
A recent Hapai Social newsletter highlighted a Policy Exchange report titled Citizens’ Assemblies: Less Accurate than Tossing a Coin. In response, committee member Finn Shewell has written this response. Hapai Social agreed to include a link to Finn’s response in its next newsletter.
Democratic innovation beyond the deliberative paradigm
While it’s great to see so much local democratic innovation, citizens assemblies are not a democratic panacea. That’s why we would like to draw your attention to a recent paper by Frick, Westphal and Escobar that calls for a more critical approach to deliberative democracy and draws on alternative theoretical traditions to rethink the scope, design, and practice of democratic innovations.
🌟Growing the twinkles
Want to help grow twinkles of democratic hope? Joining our growing membership – it’s free (koha welcome!) – and invite others to do the same.
As a member, you will have access to monthly chats with a range of democratic thinkers, entrepreneurs and innovators. Plus, there are plenty of ways to get involved: writing submissions, research, democratic experiments, projects, communications, administration, etc!
Acknowledgements
All photos used in this post of the Auckland assembly were provided courtesy of Auckland Council.