This event was the second public event of Iain Walker’s New Zealand speaking tour and was held in a packed Law School lecture theatre. It brought together leading thinkers and practitioners to explore how our democracy might respond to growing public dissatisfaction and declining trust in institutions. Hosted by Trust Democracy in partnership with the Institute for Democratic and Economic Analysis (IDEA), the panel featured Iain Walker of Australia’s newDemocracy Foundation alongside Chris Finlayson, Dr Claire Timperley, and IDEA’s Max Rashbrooke.
At the heart of Iain Walker’s contribution was a clear diagnosis: contemporary democratic systems have become overly responsive to ‘public opinion’, often shaped by polling cycles and media dynamics, rather than considered ‘public judgment’. This, he argued, creates powerful barriers to tackling complex or contentious issues. The alternative proposed by the newDemocracy Foundation is to supplement representative democracy with structured processes of public deliberation, such as citizens’ assemblies and juries. These bring together a representative cross‑section of the public, provide access to diverse evidence, and allow time for reflection, enabling participants to move from raw opinion to informed public judgment with the promise that decision makers will respond to their recommendations.
The panel explored both the promise and the challenges of this approach. While deliberative processes can unlock political deadlock, build trust, and generate nuanced solutions, they also raise important questions about power, inclusion, and how they interact with existing democratic institutions. Drawing on experiences from New Zealand and overseas, the discussion offers a rich and grounded exploration of how public deliberation might complement representative democracy to address some of its most persistent problems.
Reflecting on discussions near the end of the event, Chris Finlayson, a long time member of the National Party and a former Attorney-General and Minister for Treaty of Waitangi Negotiations, said:
I think the most important thing that’s been said tonight is what Iain said about 92 percent of people first preferencing One Nation [in Australian elections] wanting to blow the system up. Well, I think the answer is there’s no point calling them deplorables or people from flyover country, or whatever. The critical thing is, one, make the existing system work, and two, bring them into the system so that they are part of it. And if some of these ideas look a bit airy-fairy at first glance, I think that’s wrong. I think they’re worth looking at very closely, because we do not want to go that way in this country.
Finlayson also emphasised that many of the tools needed to strengthen democracy already exist, pointing to the importance of properly resourced select committees and meaningful consultation.
Timperley, while broadly supportive of deliberative approaches, cautioned that such processes are shaped by wider social dynamics and power imbalances, and cannot on their own overcome these systemic issues: “a deliberative process which has, as an ideal, kind of, the contest of ideas, but those ideas don’t necessarily happen in a vacuum. The social context and all the norms come into the room alongside.” Timperley also pointed to the recent Helen Clark Foundation report on social cohesion, which noted that, “Contact from people with different backgrounds consistently predicts stronger belonging and more accepting attitudes.” Timperley suggested that citizens’ juries are not just a mechanism for unlocking political deadlock, but are also an important tool because “they both confer legitimacy on the process, but also maybe are doing something for the people in the room.”
Video
Transcript
| Use the links below to jump to different parts of the transcript. |
| Introduction |
| Iain Walker’s address |
| Panel session |
| Questions and Answers |
Introduction
Max Rashbrooke: Well, kia ora koutou, nā mihi nui. Thank you very much, everyone, for coming out tonight. It’s great to see so many people here. It speaks to, I think, people’s, concern about the state of our democracy and determination to defend it. My name’s Max Rashbrooke, I’m the research director for the Institute for Democratic and Economic Analysis, or IDEA.
We’re a little bit less than 2 years old, and our mission is to tackle the problems of poverty and political exclusion, to contribute towards building economic systems where everyone’s got the means to participate in society, in democratic systems where everyone’s got the opportunity to participate in decision making.
We see those as two of the big and most intertwined challenges that we face, and that’s why we’ve been very pleased to work with our friends at Trust Democracy to bring over here to New Zealand Iain Walker from Australia’s newDemocracy Foundation and to have him in conversation with our distinguished panellists, Claire Timperley and Chris Finlayson.
Now, before I, get into the introductions and the running order, just a couple of thanks are in order. A particular thanks to Simon Wright and Finn Shewell from Trust Democracy, who’ve done huge amounts of work to make this event happen. And thanks also to Michael and Amy Tiemann, for their generous financial support of Iain’s trip. And thanks also in Queenstown to Julian Knights, who’s also sponsored Iain here. And I mention Queenstown because we’re working Iain pretty hard on this visit. As well as Wellington and Queenstown, he’s getting up to Auckland, he’s meeting with councillors, regional councillors — for as long as they exist in New Zealand — MPs, members of the media, officials, all sorts of other people. And we think those are really important discussions.
The reason that we wanted to bring Iain over is that the newDemocracy Foundation in Australia is doing fantastic work, has been doing fantastic work for nearly two decades on trying to reinvigorate democracy, trying to do democracy differently, trying to do it better. And in particular, building forums where ordinary citizens can come together, discuss issues deeply, think about them deeply, and try to find common ground on otherwise polarising political issues. We think that’s a really, really promising thing to be doing, it’s really important in this moment that we’re at. These ideas around deliberative democracy, democracy that’s based on high-quality public discussion, are incredibly important.
So the format for tonight, as opposed to the traditional New Zealand game of two halves, is going to be an evening of three-thirds. Iain will speak for 20 to 30 minutes outlining some of the work the newDemocracy does, and deliberative democracy, and the promise that it holds. We will then have a panel session, which I’ll be chairing with our two panellists, first of whom, Claire Timperley, is a Senior Lecturer in Politics, up the hill on the Kelburn campus. Claire specialises in political theory and the politics of Aotearoa New Zealand, and has been the recipient of multiple early career research and teaching awards. Our other panellist is Chris Finlayson, known to many of you as an MP for 14 years from 2005 to 2019. Under John Key and Bill English, he was the Attorney General, the Minister for Treaty Settlements, and he’s now one half of the Cross Party Lines podcast.
I’m really looking forward to the conversation that we’re all going to have together, but without further ado, can you please welcome Iain Walker to the lectern?
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| Jump down to the questions and answers |
Iain Walker’s address
Iain Walker: Thanks, mate. Good evening. I’ve got a really simple idea for you tonight. I want to ask you, can we do democracy better? I want to introduce … that was a very quick yes.
I’ve got one really simple idea, and I want to outline how we view the problem to be solved. Because how you define the problem affects how you look at the solution.
So we’re going to spend a little bit of time on what the problem we think there is to be solved. There might be different views.
After that, I want to give you the nuts and bolts. The idea we have, how does it work? Just so you can form a view and say, well, I understand what it is. Whether you’re going to agree or disagree, understanding the concept.
And I’ll close, I’ll weave in just one or two examples of where we’ve used this in practice. And all I’m hoping you’ll get from the evening is a chance to say, oh, I know what this deliberative reform actually looks like, and I know enough to form a view. If I’ve done that, hopefully in 20 minutes, I’ll have done my job.
We’re going to hear different views on how we do democracy better. And hopefully, please ask provocative questions. If you’re looking at something thinking, there’s no way that works and I don’t trust it, there’s probably 20 other people thinking the same thing.
So to start, who is newDemocracy?
We’re a small, privately funded research foundation underwritten by a former political donor. So, Luca Belgiorno Nettis, his father started Transfield, which is a large infrastructure company in Australia. As a result, he got hit up for political donations since he was about this high.
He went to every political fundraiser, and one day said: “this isn’t done for civic contribution. We’re paying for access.” And he decided to say that loudly to the MP concerned, who said: “the system isn’t going to change, I think you want to keep turning up and playing by the rules.”
Luca approached the University of Sydney, and very fortunately went through the School of Government, not the Vice Chancellor’s office hitting him up for a library. And he said: “I want to take money out of politics” and they said: “you’re an idiot. That’s not going to make any difference at all. Money will always influence elections. You want to ban donations? Special interests will buy advertising. You want to ban advertising? Special interests will buy media outlets. You can’t stop money influencing elections.”
So they said: “read these five books, come back when you know something.” They were on Athenian democracy, citizens juries, citizens’ assemblies. And bless him, this is a great way to work with my boss, because he bought the 5 books, called them back 6 weeks later, he said, “This is a much better idea than what I’d had. Who’s doing this?” And the university, hopefully I’m going to get some nodding from the front here, said, well, we lecture, we publish … but if you want to do something, like try to innovate within our political system, it’s going to cost you $4 million before you even start. And he said: “Okay.”
That academic, Lyn Carson, is now on our board, and has been since inception. newDemocracy is a bridge between … there’s ideas in academia; there’s a world of mayors, ministers, premiers, prime ministers who need to get something done, but there isn’t communication, really, between the two.
What do we do?
Well, as you can feel tonight, we advocate for a new idea, and then we design and operate pilot projects so you can get a practical experience. So someone in elected office can come to us with a hard problem, and we will do that on a… just a complete end-to-end rollout basis. That’s our job. That’s why we have the project experience I’m going to lean into tonight.
So what’s the problem we need to solve?
We think our democracy has become excessively responsive to public opinion. What people think in the next 5 seconds.
It’s a provocation I give you: opinion polling. Why do we ask people what they think when they haven’t had time to think?
It’s… it’s… you may laugh, but we make a lot of decisions – influenced, subtly or otherwise, on this basis.
Now… journalists, especially, will say, show leadership. Show leadership, and push through public opinion. And that is how to become a former MP.
You can’t ignore public opinion. You have to respond to it. That is the system, that is the structure that we’ve built.
So what are we trying to do?
Instead of public opinion, we want to move to public judgement. Now, that sounds like a slogan, so let me make it a little more real for you.
I tend to pick on Max for this. If Max and I have a wild night out tonight, and end up in the cells … can’t rule it out … what will we not do? We will not say, we insist on a phone poll of a thousand people in Wellington to decide if we go to jail. Neither of us are going to come out of that well.
What do we do instead? We use the jury. A jury is a trusted mechanism. We have a mechanism for making incredibly important decisions in our society based on whether people will go to jail for the term of their natural life. If you turn on the news tonight, and hear a jury has reached a verdict, I’m wagering that for 95% of this room, you’ll say, “That’s fair enough. Either I guess they did it, I guess they acquitted it.”
The next news story could be your council changing bin night, and there’ll be 10 conspiracy theories on social media within an hour. “The mayor has a connection to the waste company.” “They’re trying to do this to block out my suburb and turn it into apartments.”
We are not trusting elected officials. We are trusting jury verdicts.
Now … this is not a radical revolution of throw out of all politics. We still have judges to determine sentence. Judges and juries are complementary. Can MPs and juries be complementary as well?
I’m going to put a little caveat here. It’s a broad analogy, there’s some significant changes, but hopefully you’re getting that sense of it’s a public judgment mechanism.
What makes a jury work?
Random selection of the population.
Diverse and contested evidence. Not a single source. You don’t just get the police turning up, going, oh, well, I guess he did it then. There’s actually difference and points of view.
There is extended time: extended time to hear the evidence, extended time to deliberate as a group.
Critically, we ask a jury to find an 11 out of 12 common ground recommendation.
So if you’re sick of the battleground of politics of, “I’ve got 51%, you’ve got 49, get lost,” we see that jury as a different kind of mechanism.
So that’s the problem we’re trying to solve.
So what does this look like in practice?
There are five principles that make a deliberative process work. They’re designed on their own, they take many different formats. The Brussels Parliament has integrated this into their committee system. The Irish government now has a capacity within the Prime Minister’s office to request a deliberative process. President Macron re-tasked an engagement agency with doing it.
So hopefully you feel there’s many different flavours, but everything has 5 principles in common. I’m going to step through these, just so you get a feel for what this looks like.
These are going to be the 5 most obvious things you hear this year. And I’m sorry about that. I only want you to consider one thing, your government probably currently does zero of them. So they may be obvious, we’re not waving wands here, it’s just that no one’s doing the obvious thing.
Are you speaking to a representative cross-section of the population, or are you speaking to the most angry, the most interested?
Generally, public … people in public roles will hear from two ends of the bell curve. “Government absolutely has to do this.” “The world will end if you do what they want.” Here! What a terrible job. We approach this with empathy. That is a very difficult job that we continually put elected representatives in.
Imagine if those special interests made their case to a jury of citizens. Who synthesized that, and then presented it back to say this is the informed, common ground view we’ve had after considering those different sources. But fundamental to this is that representative sample.
Now, this is where I said it differs from a jury. Picture a group of 40 to 50 people. And it’s not a pure random selection, it’s a stratified random selection. No one wants Monday night maths class, so a stratified random selection is simply … it’s a random draw roughly matched to the census profile. 50-50 by gender. 10-year age bracket match to the census. Geographic distribution, so if 20% of the population is regional, 20% of the draw is regional.
In Australia, we will also ask people, do they own or rent where they live? It’s a really effective indicator, surrogate indicator, for income and education. Candidly, Australians won’t answer the income question honestly, so we can’t use that point. We found this a really effective way to work and say: “have we got people from all walks of life?”
Success in that lottery selection is you see people blue collar, white collar, no collar, all different backgrounds, all different ages, it’s a snapshot of the population.
That’s core to a deliberative process.
Principle number two: diversity of information. Most people offering comment to government, if they’re not special interests, then at local government, there will probably be residents shooting from the hip. That is… that is the engagement that comes through.
So, what’s our principle here? It is diversity of sources of information. Citizens actually considering that range of views, and critically, being given source control. In any jury, we will say to a group, to make an informed decision, what do you need to know, and who do you trust to inform you? What that prevents is an organiser, a government, just corralling one side of an argument straight through.
For those with an interest, it’s such… it’s… well, everyone thinks they have God on their side, so it’s a fabulous, fabulous offer. “Would you like to make your case to a jury of people from around here?” I’ll tell you, everyone says yes to that.
We have been contacted by both sides of an issue, repeatedly. We’ve heard from… one nice example is, because it happened in the same week … was Lock the Gate is an anti-coal seam gas community group. And I won’t name the mining company, but a significant coal seam gas producer. Both came to us and said, “We’re sick of having a two-minute discussion and slogans in the paper. How do we have a more substantial discourse?” Interestingly, neither would go ahead with the project when they heard that the other was interested. So it can be… because all we said was, “Why not go to the energy minister, who is tied in knots? And say both those anti and in-favour, want to do this.” So, not a magic wand, not everyone’s going to love you. But hopefully what you’re getting from that is, what we are really looking at is information-rich processes with multiple sources. First government, then a range of interests who want to put forward a view, and citizens having source control.
Next principles are a lot easier.
If you have a random selection of the population, and you want to consider diverse and contested evidence, you need a lot of time. Most government engagement is fast and… well, it’s too fast for the complexity of the issue. Our projects commonly, to give you a feel for it, they’ll meet on a Saturday all day, [have a] 3-week break, [have] a further meeting… So we’re generally looking at 6 Saturdays for an issue to resolve.
40 to 50 hours in-person. For those interested, urban planning issues are the hardest, because they touch every other portfolio. They’ll be up to 80 hours. Some of the projects commissioned by Premier Macron… Premier… President Macron, around about 100 hours.
Deliberative processes that are 12 hours, you shouldn’t trust. It’s like a quick jury trial: “Hang on, did that just get forced through?”
So now I’ve got a representative sample of people. Diverse information, extended time … this is the fourth obvious thing. We ask people an open question, we don’t try to sell them an answer.
For those of you who’ve ever participated in government engagement, there is often a: “Here’s our draft plan for solving this problem. Comment.”
Now, from the laughter, I’m guessing some of you have tried to do this. Because if you then look at the final plan, this is the greatest ‘Where’s Wally?’ exercise you’ve ever seen, as you try to pick the difference between the two. There will be a single page up front that said, “We did 11 workshops, we had 32 online comments. We engaged. Result’s the same, but we engaged.”
We’re saying, why do this? This doesn’t make any sense. Why not ask people the question?
I want to give you just a little practical vignette on this. Like many countries, Australia has a problem with funding its health system. There’s been repeated government reviews … attempts. One of them was known as the Commission of Audit, it was under the Abbott government. Several million dollars to do those expert reviews. 18 months, came out. This… I’ll see if this plays across a non-Australian audience … it came out with a recommendation that our Medicare system, that people needed to pay $7 to go to the doctor.
Do you want to guess how this went?
It went “pow”. In the press: “GP tax”, “thin end of the wedge”, “beginning of Americanisation”. It was dead in 48 hours.
Just think about that. Problem hasn’t gone away. We’ve still got this huge problem. We’ve spent millions on a review, and it’s unactionable.
Audience comment: Is the $7 a new cost?
Iain Walker: Yeah, yeah, because it’s just free to turn up for a doctor right now.
So … it’s still free, it’s still free today, but we also have a trillion dollars of debt, so a little problem to juggle there. So … train of thought …
Our contention’s really simple. Imagine I’d taken 100 Australians from all walks of life. You’ve got the random selection, different jobs, different backgrounds. They got to hear, understand the depth of the problem, the amount of costs, procedures. They would hear from the AMA, the nurses union, you can see a diversity of sources coming together, and prospective patients’ representatives groups. And, for sake of discussion, they would emerge out the other side and say, “Look, we’ve looked at this. I think we’re going to have to pay $10 to go to the doctor.”
Our contention is, because it comes from people like us, doesn’t come from a professional advocate where you think, “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” Because this is a new voice we add into our politics, we think this can unlock the political system. That right now, if you think of the example I gave, that government, that minister, that report, was constrained by public opinion response. No one read that report before reacting. No one came up with an alternative solution to the problem.
So, that’s four principles. The fifth one is the one that knits it all together. This only works where governments pre-commit a level of authority. This does not mean they are bound by it. Same way a judge can throw out a jury verdict if they find flaws in the logic and reasoning.
What’s the level of commitment that we seek? When we’ve done projects, the easiest example is state premiers. I want you to think of getting an invitation with this offer: “We want you to solve this problem.” Maybe, “How can we pay for the health system we want?”
“Your report is public immediately” – and I’m talking 2 minutes immediately, because there is a mistrust that the public sector will just get rid of the bits they don’t like.
The Premier … “You will get a substantive written response in 45 days.”
“The Premier will meet with you within 21 days of that report becoming public.”
My contention is that is a better democratic offer than you are getting through voting alone. Now, I’m not saying get rid of voting, and in no way are we saying this is anti-politician.
If you think about what we’re trying to do, we are trying to help leaders lead by unlocking that reactive public opinion stop that occurs.
My first week in this job, we are… we’re backed by a high net worth individual. And I said, Luca, “It’s fabulous you want to do this, but you donate quirky bits of art to the city, you do some weird stuff, why would anyone listen to you?” The first thing they’re going to say is, “Get elected. If you want to change something, get elected.”
So the people we reached out to, and, it was a former Liberal Premier and a former Labor Premier. Just to demonstrate we have no ideological alignment. For those who know a bit of Australian politics, it was Nick Greiner, who was a New South Wales Premier in the 80s, and Geoff Gallop on the Labor side.
And it’s what Nick said to me that I’d like to share with you now. He’s said this publicly, so it’s going to seem rude, but he has said it publicly, so I’m okay.
He said: “I’m the second most dictatorial premier this country has seen. Jeff Kennett still has me, but when I came into office…” – oh, people know some of the names – “when we… when I came into office, candidly, we commissioned freeways, cut the public service, cut schools. You know, we blazed through things. My logic was there’s only one front page. If you do many things at one time, they can only attack one piece.”
And he said, “Yet with all that hubris, there were things I didn’t touch.” And the example he gave was this. He said, “There’s no one in politics in Australia who thinks that what we do in prisons actually works”. Ok, just … it was a personal view, but I’ve never found someone who really massively disagrees with that.
And he said, “Here’s my problem. Think of the decisions that I took when I started to say, I want to reform the justice system and prisons. It wasn’t that every member of my party said, ‘this is a terrible idea,’ it was everyone I knew.” This is how to lose office really quickly. What’s the public opinion barrier? The next terrible crime occurs and now it’s your problem: “You changed the system, you’ve done this.”
Excuse me a second.
He said, “It’s unreformable, when you look at it. It’s a huge barrier, because it’s just how to lose office. You can’t touch it.” And he said, “The reason I’ll help you out is because with my time again, I would love to call an organization and say, ‘Show me a jury of citizens. I want them to answer one question: What should we do with people convicted of a crime?’ Because in politics right now, my options fit in a matchbox. But if people from all walks of life immerse themselves, and looked at the costs of the system, the effectiveness, recidivism, do these people go into jobs? What happens to their lives afterwards, their families?” He said, “My bet is that they will come back with a box of options much bigger than I have today. I won’t like all of them, but as long as I’m willing to substantively respond and show where their logic doesn’t hold up and where different evidence should be presented, then my range of options is larger.”
And that’s what we need to do. There are certain conversations we are not having, for a very rational reason: people in elected office would like to stay in elected office, and there are some very shortcuts to getting … to losing office too quickly.
What I hope I’ve done there, is give you a snapshot of what a deliberative process might look like, a citizen’s assembly, or a citizen’s jury.
I hope I’ve shared with you the problem it seeks to solve, and you’re getting a feel that public opinion, or that excessive responsiveness, is the key issue that we need to look at.
I understand there’s going to be some views of, ‘I just don’t like politician X’, or ‘they’re all liars.’ That’s not what we do. We look at it technically. That there is a structural problem that we need to address, that the system is simply too responsive to that opinion view.
Some of you be thinking, ‘This is all nice, you can write that paper. How on earth does this work in practice?’
I’m going to give you a couple of examples.
We did a project for the City of Melbourne. So, City of Melbourne’s a $400 million a year council, about $250 [million] comes from rates, the rest from parking, leases, etc.
Group of councillors had run for office. Obviously everyone’s made promises, and we got a call from the CFO, who said: “Yeah, I’ve got a problem. We’re overspent by $1.22 billion across the next 10 years.” Now, I’m not going to do compounding and interest, etc, but in round number terms, you’ve got $250 million of rates revenue, and you need to find $120 million more.
So they’d turned up, and the CFO had said, “Well, it’s a 45% rates rise.” And the councillors, do you want to guess what they said? “No.”
He said, “Okay, well, you can’t do that. Then, these are the promises we can’t go ahead with.” Do you want to guess what they said to that? “No, we’re not doing that.” Which is why the CFO called us.
We assembled a jury of 43 citizens: half commercial rate payers, half residential ratepayers. It’s a capital city, huge amount of revenue came from commercial rates.
We asked them a very simple question: “How can we live within our means?”
And what I want you to pick up on that question is it’s non-directive. We don’t care if citizens increase rates, we don’t care if they sell assets, we don’t care if they reduce services. It simply says, solve the problem in front of you.
6 days, 4 months — for those interested, about $350,000 to operate.
Jury’s ultimate recommendations: about $970 million of recommendations they made. Yeah, that’s nice. It’s pretty easy to be a sideline player. What’s more important is what happened next. Council acted on $775 million of the recommendations.
That is a problem that had been ticking along for over 12 years. As one of the councillors said — Stephen Mayne, if you want to have a Google. He said, “It’s not that we couldn’t resolve this as a council, it’s that we couldn’t discuss it.” Because the first person to say, ‘I’ve got a budget issue,’ someone will point at them, ‘You’re trying to raise taxes.’ ‘You’re trying to cut services.’ The public opinion response and manipulating that had become too dominant.
I’m going to close with one final example. I’m going to use a controversial issue. I don’t want you to have a view on the issue, there’ll be a range of different views on the room. All I ask you to grasp, excuse me … someone’s talking too much … all I ask you to grasp is that it’s difficult.
Picture this: a centre-right government in Ireland started to see news stories pop up related to an abortion law issue. So I’m not sure if some people are familiar with this, but… Some people will have different views, but just think of the political difficulty of this, particularly for those of you who have held office.
Essentially, abortion is prohibited in Ireland. There is a right to life in the Constitution. The Church plays a very large public role.
Women would travel to London for a procedure, and the thing that was the trigger was a young woman died on a flight returning to Dublin. Front page news. You’re that government. What do you do?
Think about how awful this is politically, to try to address this issue. This is going to be nothing but a firestorm. That is a Parliament that had used Citizens’ assemblies before. So on a cross-party basis, there was confidence to say, “We don’t want to lead this politically, but we do want to allow the discussion to occur.”
They picked 100 people from Ireland at random, and asked them a simple question: ‘Does this provision in our constitution need to change? And if so, how?’
How does a referendum debate normally go? There’s a ‘Yes’ camp, there’s a ‘No’ camp. And they crash into one another. They pick the worst arguments of the other side, and you just amplify it, and hit it, and hit it, and hit it.
I’m going to skip a lot of steps. What did that assembly recommend?
They came back with nuance. They actually said ‘There’s 6 scenarios where we’d like it to be legal. And 3 scenarios where we’d like it to remain illegal.’ That would never happen in a normal political discourse. They had no incentives to campaign. They simply said, ‘This is what we think fairly reflects our views.’
Now, I want to stop at this point and say we view success as that the government could discuss that issue at all.
It’s not success because of the referendum result. Normally, that political debate would have just been, can we make this issue go away? Can we announce a train somewhere? Can we just make this stop and go away? Issues get kicked down the road. Instead, they were able to address it.
The operative part, and we helped fund a documentary behind it. And we know one of the operative parts in the media that really stuck. It was a truck driver from County Cork. I’m not going to do the accent, I’ve tried, apparently it’s terrible. But he went on the news and said very simply, “I’ve always hated this issue. I don’t even want to think about it. I really struggle with it, it’s just awful, and I just… I just push it away. But when I learned that over 200 women die getting a procedure each year, I realised I had to get over it. I realise it is something we need to discuss and take a look at, and that’s really why I’m here and what I’m thinking about.”
What’s the point I want you to take from that? That is something that you wouldn’t trust if it came from someone in elected office, someone who is an activist, either pro or con on the issue. They simply added a new voice.
Those pro-yes and pro-no still had a say. Those in elected office who wanted to have a go… have a point of view, still had a say. But they had a structure to inject a citizen voice as well.
For those of you interested, I won’t leave you hanging, the referendum passed 67:33, which is not how referenda tend to go.
I want to emphasise, it’s not a good project because it passed. We would still be telling this story if the referendum was defeated. But being able to make a decision, an informed decision, is better than simply making an opinion decision.
So, I can read the clock. This has been quite a long monologue. What I hope you felt today is that there is a way to do democracy better. That there is a problem with public opinion, and we’ve got to get over telling people to ignore public opinion, and we should replace public opinion with public judgment.
For anyone who is in touch or has held elected office, I have a simple message. This doesn’t detract from your power, it adds to it. It lets you take on the issues which were the reason you came into politics, and if judges can find juries complementary, why can’t our MPs? Thank you.
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Panel discussion
Max Rashbrooke: All right, thank you very much for that, Iain. We’re going to move into our panel session, so Claire and Chris, if you want to come and join me up the front. And we’ll arm you each with a microphone.
All right, so, Claire and Chris, we’re both very grateful that you’ve joined us on this panel, and I should have said at the outset, actually, we’re… we’re open to a range of, views here. Anyone who listens to ‘The Rest is Politics’ will know the phrase, agreeable disagreement.
And so I thought maybe I would start with you, Claire, if that’s okay? So obviously, as a political theorist, you, you know, these, these issues around deliberative democracy and these things are very familiar to you. Just interested in… in… your thoughts broadly about this issue, and your reaction to what Iain had to say.
Claire Timperley: Kia ora, thank you. I think I was brought on to be the disagreeable voice on the panel, though I will kind of … underpin that with, generally, as an academic, I think that deliberation is wonderful. I think that giving reasons for actions and outcomes is a really good thing. But one of the concerns that I have is the ways in which social structures operate within those deliberative bodies. So, the example that Iain gave of the majority of people agreeing with a jury decision and feeling that that is a fair way to make a judgment is not necessarily a view that would be held by everybody, especially those with mistrust in the judicial system, or those just generally with a mistrust in institutions. And thinking about the particular positions that people are coming from, and some of the reasons that they might distrust jury deliberations, is that we know that there are social norms that affect the quality of deliberation in jury decisions.
So, for instance, we know that, by and large, the person who’s chosen to be the foreman is usually a man. It is usually someone who says that they have some form of experience, whether or not that’s actually the case. And just thinking about the way that, the kind of different demographics of people in the room might play out in discussions. We know that it isn’t just that a good argument always wins out. It might be that the person making the argument, the accent with which they speak, or the body in which they inhabit, might change how people respond to the arguments that they’re making.
So that was one of the, kind of, thoughts that I had about, kind of, concerns about a deliberative process which has, as an ideal, kind of, the contest of ideas, but those ideas don’t necessarily happen in a vacuum. The social context and all the norms come into the room alongside. So I guess that’s my opening gambit to Iain.
Max Rashbrooke: I mean, Iain — we’ll come to you Chris, in a second. Iain, do you want just a reflection on that? How those social structures can come into the jury, the citizens’ jury process?
Iain Walker: Certainly, and there’s a… there’s absolutely a core point that…
So we’re a research foundation. We’ve run about 32 projects. And, to your point, after about 4 projects, we started to work out that citizens would trust someone they’d seen on television more than other speakers. We could just see it happening in front of us. It goes towards almost a charisma dividend.
And so we’ve iteratively changed this over the years. And the key thing that we had to add was two little 10-minute experiential things – we could actually do them tonight – around critical thinking and biases. So, you’re right, there’s no perfect solution. The key is to be open to the criticism and see what you need to change along the way. I’m always reminded of that fabulous little anecdote of, you know: the two of us need to run away from a tiger. And someone will say to you, ‘Well, you can’t outrun a tiger.’ I don’t need to outrun the tiger, I need to outrun you.
Look at how we make public decisions today. There may be challenges and imperfections in what we do. We’re simply looking at the status quo and going, can we make it incrementally better?
We look at… there aren’t really biases in recruitment, but in terms of, yeah, literacy can be a barrier. Nothing’s perfect, but we think simply the positives outweigh the imperfections.
Max Rashbrooke: Alright, thanks for that. There’s probably more to say on that, I think. We might come back to it, but maybe, Chris, if I can turn to you. I mean, so you’re coming to this with the experience, obviously, having served in Parliament in very senior roles, probably dealt with some of the frustrations that politicians feel that Iain outlined. When you were listening to Iain talk, what were your thoughts? You know, when you’re … can you see this … could you see these sorts of things working here in New Zealand?
Chris Finlayson: I put my microphone down, because if I can’t make myself heard in this lecture theatre, I don’t deserve to be a part-time lecturer in the law school. I have been reflecting very much on this issue in recent times because of the fact I’m repelled by what I’m seeing in our kind of democracy. And [this] was brought home on Saturday night, Iain, in New South Wales, when One Nation won the Farrer by-election, and also on Friday, when the British political system fragmented, and the rise of a party I regard as… utterly repellent. And so one of the key issues which we have to look at, is how do we strengthen our democracy? How do we bring people into making decisions, empowering ordinary people to make a democracy we can trust?
And it seems to me there are two answers to this, and I’ll come to Iain’s point in a minute, but the first point is, we have a lot of mechanisms already, but they are not being properly used.
And I just made a little note. The first is, and this — I’m sure the General Secretary of the Labour Party will be very pleased with me when I say this — if you don’t like what you see, join a political party. And obviously, to join the Labour Party. I was once a branch chair of the Karori branch of the National Party, and we had a thousand members between the cemetery and the mall. It used to be about 1,800, and people became disengaged in politics, and I know why. It was in the early 80s, mainly because of Muldoon.
And political parties, and I think you went through the same experience in the 80s, and political parties have shrunk, but getting people involved and saying, “If you’re dissatisfied, and you want to make change, get involved in political parties.” And I think that the death of membership of the Labour Party and the National Party and so on is a cause of very real concern.
Another example is… and I annoyed Chris Bishop’s mother on Saturday at Featherston Booktown when I was talking about this. She said, “It’s not ‘Cross Party Lines’ anymore with you and Goff, you’re all singing from the same song sheet.” And the answer is that we are, on issues like urgency in Parliament. There’s a difference between ramming something through and winding people up — and I had first-hand experience of that with the GCSB amendment legislation in 2013 — and boring people to death with a slow, deliberative process, as we did with the intelligence reforms, starting with the Cullen-Reddy report in 2015, and a quiet jaunt through Parliament, no urgency, a full select committee process so people could have their say. So, we have these mechanisms, let’s use them. Proper consultation, and Iain touched on that. What we have too often in this country are papers that are published, and I know my iwi buddies feel this really intensely, and they’re given 10 days to comment on something. It’s not fair. So, proper consult… consultation. So, many of the mechanisms that we have but don’t utilise could address some of these issues of empowering the individual.
The other point I want to make is that I think that the sorts of things he’s talking about are very well suited to, what I think was developed in Norway recently, a committee for the future, standing back from the day-to-day scraps, and having a long-term view of society, and I think the kind of assembly he’s talking about could be very valuable indeed. We used to have a Commission for the Future. It was Hugh Templeton’s idea 50 years ago. It was set up and then it was abolished in the early 1980s when Muldoon didn’t like it. And we’ve tried to replicate it with particular… I know you want me to stop … A committee for the future, a committee for tomorrow, could be a very good way of involving people in a deliberative process, and I also strongly endorse what is proposed at the local community level, because I think a city council like the Wellington City Council — which has a couple of grown-ups leading it now, which is great, Andrew’s doing a fabulous job — but having people who could take a long-term view at what are the challenges facing Wellington. Mind you, it’d be a very short meeting: billions of dollars worth of pipes. But, you know, just some of these issues that could help city councillors as they navigate some of the problems, for example, that our city is facing. So that’s the key point I wanted to make. Lots of mechanisms that we have for addressing this issue, they’re not being utilised properly, and in some areas, I could see it working very well indeed.
Max Rashbrooke: Thank you for that, Chris. I’m tempted to observe that the metaphor of, well, the fact of 1,800 members between the cemetery and the mall has a certain symbolism. Yeah, given that a number of those members, dare I say it, would have made the journey to the cemetery. Just as politics has arguably become more like a shopping contest, where you sort of tick a red box or a blue box, depending on your choice.
Claire, I want to come back to you in a moment, but Iain, maybe just sort of a quick thought. So, partial endorsement there from Chris, but also a view that we could do a lot better with the mechanisms we already have.
Iain Walker: Yeah, I mean, to the consultation point, you’re right, one resolution or one way to act on what we do. A charter of public engagement that captures those five principles is… would actually… you can do this at the consultation layer. And part of the… because we work with foreign governments, it’s interesting that almost every parliament’s done it differently.
Interestingly, in Belgium, the committee system is deliberative in nature: it considers; it’s extended time; diversity of sources. It’s perfectly fit. What did they do? They created a special purpose Deliberative Committee, where a — it’s more a 4-5 party system there — and they simply have occasionally a special purpose committee, where they then draft in 35 citizens. It’s just done on highly blocked issues, so they integrated at the committee level.
You can do it at a consultation level. You can do it at a prime minister’s level. You see what I mean, there’s a range of options, so I agree with you on consultation.
I thought I’d add a point on One Nation, because it is absolutely focusing the minds of the major parties. When One Nation voters are polled … the most recent, major party reporting is, the primary voting intention for 92% of One Nation voters is, “I want to blow up the system.” Think about that as a motivation. It’s actually not about immigration or others, or things like that. It is a protest vote in a major way.
So, to address that dynamic, our advocacy to the major parties is, if you’re not going to give people a say, they are not feeling heard. I could have equally said, apart from public opinion, people generally don’t feel heard, they just sit there and things happen to them.
If you don’t innovate within the system, voters are going to do it for you in a, maybe a less pretty way. That’s not to take a negative — we wouldn’t take a party view anyway — but there is a clear voter dynamic for, ‘Please try something.’ And all we’re really injecting is, well, we’ve got our one ‘Please try something.’ We need to talk less about what we don’t like, and much more about what we’re going to try. And there’s absolutely different examples of that, but what’s the harm in small trials and innovations?
If we’re wrong, we’re wrong. Okay, if it doesn’t work, hey, we spent a little bit of money, and we’re wrong.
If we’re right and we start to address hard issues in a trusted way, based on evidence, that’s transformative. Let’s take the small experiments.
Max Rashbrooke: Thanks for that. Claire, if I could come back to you, I was really interested by what you were saying about your worries about the dynamics within these forums, and, you know, which is part of a worry about the dynamics within politics more generally, right? And I’m sort of interested, I think there’s an American legal scholar, some people know him, Cass Sunstein, is a big opponent of group deliberation, because he worries that the first person who speaks up in a group is very dominant, and then sort of the cascade effect, I think he calls it, that people follow after him. And it generally is him.
On the other hand, people push back on that and say that’s only true in sort of badly organised, badly moderated discussion, and that well-moderated discussion sort of tends to make people, well, more moderate. I mean, do you… do you…do you… do you feel that there would be ways of doing these things better that might accommodate some of the concerns that you’ve got? Or do you think… I mean, are you raising a bigger point, really, that we need to fix other things before these sorts of… and that we load too much into these sort of forums as possible panaceas. Do you have a sort of general view about that?
Claire Timperley: Yeah, maybe a bit of both. I think, again, thinking about this wider social context, I saw the release of a UN report last month, which was looking at the, I mean, huge rise in online misogyny. And the report says in no uncertain terms, this isn’t individual perpetrators, this is an orchestrated, systematic… — and supported by the technologies and the platforms through which these messages are shared. And so I think I do want to kind of hold to that concern around wider social dynamics, and there’s misogyny as one. The report also said that either women of colour or women who had, an affiliation with a religion that wasn’t Christianity, so Jewish women or Muslim women, were also more likely to have, you know, terrible campaigns orchestrated against them. So I think there is, sort of, the undermining of particular people and kind of groups within society that need to be considered and addressed. I don’t have a very good, I don’t have the solution to that, but I think that if we’re also — again, to kind of reiterate — that I think deliberation is good, but I don’t think that deliberation can ignore that there’s these wider systematic effects that find their way into… both into the room itself, and I… I really like this idea of, citizens juries or assemblies as helping to overcome deadlock, and to kind of not necessarily… well, sort of diffuse issues.
And I was also looking at the Helen Clark Foundation report on social cohesion recently. I thought it raised a number of concerns about trust in our democratic institutions, and we’re seeing… and again, that trust isn’t just across the board, it really does depend. You can break it down by age, by gender, by ethnicity, those different levels of trust. So I think people are having really particular experiences. But one of the things that I kind of underlined when I was reading it earlier that — or re-reading it earlier this morning in preparation — was that it said that, “Contact from people with different backgrounds consistently predicts stronger belonging and more accepting attitudes.” So I was thinking about citizens’ juries, not just as this mechanism for unlocking political deadlock, but also actually as a really important source of, like, in and of themselves, they both confer legitimacy on the process, but also maybe are doing something for the people in the room. So… it’s sort of a nuanced, like, complex situation, yeah.
Iain Walker: Just picking up on this theme. You know, if you zoom out, we get a lot of discussion at home about social cohesion. What’s the world increasingly being? It’s people on devices — one there. On devices, and you sit there, and it’s like, ‘I’m going to go and find a community of people who all agree with me.’ And we’re getting siloed, and siloed, and siloed. And there is a dividend simply to putting very different people in one room. Old and young, rich and poor – rich and poor don’t mix that much – people from very different… from different places, we’re getting solid – village makes it sound nice but people are very much in their own cohorts. There is a dividend simply to getting that exposure, on its own.
In terms of that… social dynamic. Really bluntly, it’s really easy to be awful when you’re on a device. It really changes when you’re sitting in front of someone. We don’t like our methodology running online. Some do it. Even the most active proponents say it works 70% as well. There’s something to just sitting across from people and having to hear and understand it. So hopefully those two points are… they’re not the reason why we do it, but we can see a clear dividend.
Just as a little fine, tiny point: We’ve done longitudinal research and looked back at what jurors have done. Do they trust… would you trust another jury, having experienced one? You get all nice answers. And we accidentally discovered something. Across our first six projects, a third of people who had been on a jury, volunteered in the community after because they had discovered that they liked something beyond work, friends, family. It was nice to have — once every three weeks — to do something different. We weren’t looking for it, but it was just a … ‘What’s the takeaway from your jury experience?’ This just popped up clear, out of the blue. So, look, we’re about it for a very narrow political reason, but you’re right, there’s flow-off benefits.
Max Rashbrooke: And just adding to that, I mean, some of the research I’ve seen from people who’ve taken part in citizens’ assemblies and juries is that they often come out of that process more trusting of politics in general, right? More trusting of politicians, more trusting of institutions, partly because they see how difficult it is, the trade-offs that you have to make. I mean, I sometimes say, if you’re not making trade-offs, you’re probably not doing politics. And I think people, when they go into those processes understand the complexity that people like you, Chris, faced when you’re actually having to make those trade-offs.
Just coming on … both Claire and Iain, you’ve both talked about deadlock and the potential for these sorts of deliberative mechanisms to break deadlocks. So, Chris, one thing I was interested in, sort of putting you on the spot a little bit, is can you think of something from your time in government that you really would have liked to move on, that you would have liked to see legislation on, or you’d like to start a discussion on, that you couldn’t? And where you could see a role for the kinds of citizens’ jury, or something like that, that Iain’s talking about?
Chris Finlayson: Yes, well, I have one particular example that haunts me. After the 2011 election, John Key phoned me and said, “Same portfolios.” I said, “Great.” “Would you like to be Associate Minister of Māori Affairs?” And I said, “Fantastic, can I reform Māori Land law?” “Go for it.”
And I always remember Ngātata Love warning me. He said, if you look as though you’re Moses coming down from whatever mountain Moses came down from — it wasn’t Hebron, what was it? Sinai! Oh, sorry, I’m a New Testament guy — he said, if you go … if you’re like that, you’ll fail.
And so I embarked on this great reform, and got Patsy Reddy involved in all sorts of things, and Api Mahuika’s son, and it was a very good piece of work. But … and we had exposure drafts that I put forward as Attorney General. I approved these exposure drafts going out, lots of consultation. But, it failed for politics. In fact, Tony Ryall was like a parrot on my shoulder when we were debating it in Cabinet, and he was saying, “You’ll fail, you always fail on this one.” And as it turned out, we failed, and I think… I think something along the lines of what was being talked about, rather than looking though I was, you know, Moses, the lawgiver, something like what you have been talking about; where you’ve got communities together, and you talked about the issues and the problems, and then developed the legislation, that would have been a more effective way of achieving reform of Māori land law. Which is, incidentally, desperately in need of reform. And PwC said over a decade ago, get the settings right and it’s worth about $8 billion to the Māori economy. So that’s where, I think, a practical example of where it would have worked.
Max Rashbrooke: Thanks for that. Just sort of maybe one last question, which I might put to each of the panellists, before we move into Q&A. And it’s a question about consensus and the importance, or not, of engaging with people of different views. Because, I mean, I think your whole sort of pitch, if you like, Iain, was about bringing people together and finding common ground.
There certainly are… there are issues, perhaps ones which particularly involve rights, where some people feel very strongly that they don’t need to necessarily listen to people on the other side, who might have what they see as bigoted views, or where they just think that there’s a real urgency to change. And that they think, you know, and that consensus is created by, ‘You have a mandate to do things as politicians. You make the change, you bring it in. That becomes the consensus.’
You could draw a contrast between, the previous, the fifth Labour government, where they brought in things like, Working for Families. John Key in opposition called it ‘Communism by stealth.’ But then it became the new consensus. Then, of course, you know, your government, Chris, preserved Working for Families largely.
There’s also a view that, that politics and… and debate and democracy shouldn’t be about just sort of straight away a search for consensus, but a more — Claire, you’ll tell me if I’ve got this wrong — but I think the term is agonistic, more of a conflict. More like, sharply opposing views. And that the sort of the deliberative stuff is a bit nicey-nicey and a bit sort of kumbaya-ish. That’s a critique you get from people like Chantal Mouffe and others. So, just sort of a question for all three of you, maybe starting with you, Iain, since you’re sort of the proponent of this. Do we focus in these cases too much on a sort of finding a nice consensus? What about the role for the really heated, sharp, pointy conflict that arguably is an important part of democracy?
Iain Walker: Is it an important part of democracy to so angrily disagree? I’ve often thought, you know, if airlines advertised like political parties, no one would go anywhere.
‘Get on a Qantas flight. They’ll probably fly into a mountain like they did before.’ ‘Shit, I’m not doing that!’ You know? ‘Do you know how much Air New Zealand pilots drink?’ You know…
And then we wonder why people don’t trust them. You’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars telling us not to trust half of them, and then the next guy spent the same amount of money doing the same thing. The point is, it’s unproductive.
It’s not a kumbaya issue. It’s that the people in a jury have no active incentive to disagree.
Now, in politics, you must create difference. You must have a difference at the polling place to say, choose me, not choose my rival. What’s the Charlie Munger saying? Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome.
You create a system where you must create difference, they’ll create differences. It’s not necessarily the best way to find a solution.
Just as I got on the plane to come over here, our government at home in Australia was lamenting — our Labour government was lamenting — the past terrible government because they have a big tunnel they’re building called Snowy Hydro 2. A giant tunnel battery, announced for $2 billion. Last reported at $22 billion, heading for $45 billion. Who knows? Big tunnel, apparently it’s filled with mud, we keep putting tunnel and boring machines down in there. Better get another one. Like, it’s not going well. And the Minister stood up and said, ‘What kind of idiots would announce something for $2 billion that costs over $40?’ And it turns out, that it was actually her who had announced previously our national broadband network, which was announced at a cost of $3.2 billion, last seen crossing $93 billion. Announced at $3.2. No consequences.
So is that a productive system? We have an incentive to make announcements. And then we go, okay, we’ve got to figure out what it’s going to cost, sometime later. Can you start digging, though? Digging would be good, I want signs.
This is a terrible way to make decisions, because it’s being done for a public opinion reaction. Why have that hot contest? Because it’s fun to hate the other side.
It does motivate people. Absolutely, that motivates votes. I’m not kumbaya. I would argue that the alternative is excessively hostile. Which is great if it’s working. But if it’s not working for you, if you’re not resolving issues that are relevant to people’s lives, why not try something new as well?
Max Rashbrooke: Thanks for that. And that, the example of Australia’s adventures with ultra-fast broadband, is always a nice reminder that although we struggle to do things well — infrastructure well — in New Zealand, one thing we did get right was ultra-fast broadband, by comparison. Which was your government, I think, actually, Chris. But anyway, so your take, Chris, on the same question that I posed to Iain. What’s the role of conflict in politics versus the search for consensus? How do you see all of that?
Chris Finlayson: I strongly believe that Harry Truman is right. You get a lot done when other people get the credit. And also speaking highly of your opponents is extremely important. And I think I annoyed certain people on Saturday at Featherston Booktown when I mentioned the work of the previous Labour government on COVID. And, I said it was a case of sometimes it’s not good decisions versus bad decisions. It’s bad decisions versus worse decisions. And Robertson had asked me to act for him in the Royal Commission. I did say to him ‘Why?’ And he said, ‘Because we want someone… Jacinda and I want someone who can be a prick if necessary.’
But it was very interesting when they were giving evidence to the Royal Commission on the closure that was shutting down Auckland that… that theme came through. It wasn’t good versus bad, it was a really tough decision that was going to be bad anyway. And so, I… and I, I think that, so speaking highly of your opponents and getting away from this utterly corrosive rhetoric, and I… and as Madam, former Madam Assistant Speaker will tell you, I could be a pretty sardonic and aggressive person in the House. Braunias called me wasp-ish today. But at the end of the day, those sorts of things: toning it down — which is a matter for individual politicians — getting away from the rhetoric, is extremely important. And seeing the good in your opponents, and in many of the decisions they make. Judith Tizard once said to me after I was elected to Parliament, ‘Look, you’ve got to… you’ve got to agree, National and Labour have to agree on about 75-80% of the stuff, have a scrap on 20 per cent.’
And we don’t want to get to a position where, you know, Willie Whitelaw, the former Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, would fly into Belfast, sit down with the Catholics and the Protestants, and say, ‘Good morning, can we agree what day it is?’ I think that much of what Iain says in that regard is extremely important.
Max Rashbrooke: Well, thanks, thanks, Chris, and it’s a good point about speaking well of one’s opponents, although if I recall correctly, the thing that’s mostly got you into trouble is speaking ill of people in your own party.
Look, coming coming to you last, Claire. Your sort of views about conflict, dialogue, consensus, agonistic, deliberation. Where do you sit on all of that?
Claire Timperley: Yeah, I mean, it gives me the opportunity to promote my former grad school colleague’s book, which she wrote with one of our professors, which was called ‘The Two Faces of Democracy’. And in it — they co-wrote it — and one of them was a deliberative democrat, and one of them was an agonistic democrat. And part of what they were trying to do in writing that book was think about the fact that there are these two different, kind of, approaches to democracy. One which is more consensus-seeking, and one which is… recognizes that there is inherent conflict. And I would, sort of, maybe draw a distinction between an agonistic approach to democracy, which recognizes there are tensions — and some of those might be irreconcilable tensions — and you’ve got to figure out how to deal with those. And, sort of, outright antagonism. So, agonism is different than antagonistic or adversarial, which is what we often see across the road in Parliament.
So this isn’t exactly answering the question, but just, I think it’s sort of maybe a helpful heuristic to think about democracy as having at least these two different faces, to use their word, that there is a deliberative side, and that it’s a really important piece of the puzzle. That we do want to find ways to make that flourish, and I think we especially do want citizens to feel invested in their institutions and in civil society.
But I think if we ignore the agonistic dimension, which does recognize that there may be some tensions that are very challenging to get people to agree on, that we’re maybe doing a disservice to kind of… I don’t know what you would call it, sort of the general democratic project.
| Jump up to Iain Walker’s address |
| Jump up to the start of the panel session |
Questions and Answers
Max Rashbrooke: Thanks. Well, that’s a great note on which to open up the floor for questions. We’ve got Simon and Finn, who will be going around with these foam microphones, although I think you have to speak pretty closely into them. Hold them nice and close. Now, just before we… before we get going, I will just say, and people… some people have heard me say this before: I have been trained in the Kim Hill School of Meeting Facilitation. So if any sort of, questions — comments masquerading as questions — go on for too long, I may use the Chair’s privilege, and bring them to a brief halt. A quick halt. But anyway, with that caution in mind, Marian, do you want to lead off on the questions?
Audience: Thank you, thank you very much. I’ve really enjoyed this. It’s lived up to my expectations. But has a citizen’s assembly – and it’s really for you, young man – ever – that’s because I’ve, as usual, forgotten the names – Has a citizens’ assembly ever failed to find an agreed solution?
Iain Walker: Yes.
Audience: Tell us about it
Iain Walker: So, candidly, no one should ever represent that their solution works all the time. I’ve blown up 3 projects. My call, my… what I got wrong. They have a very common through-line: what did you get wrong? It’s when the time is insufficient. So, I’ll give you… I can give you the… the shortest example so we get more questions out.
There was a problem in an agricultural region. Effectively, South Australia is farmed because of drainage ditches, swamp, drain fresh water out, you get farmland. So no one has maintained them for 150 years, and so the state came out and said there’s going to be a levy on every household of about $550. Bang! Premier steps in, this is something for the region to resolve, we’ll commission an assembly.
Design problem for us: geographically huge so we are flying participants in. So now I’ve got a problem where we, as I said, remember, we like 6 individual days? Farmland. I’ve got, what do you call it: harvest times, shearing times? You’ve got all sorts of problems here with timing. So we ran 3 double-day weekends. 3 lots of 2 days does not equal 6 lots of 1 day. And all of a sudden, we could tell, ‘Oh my god, I’ve under-scheduled.’ Now, to give you an idea of what they were on: generally, people spend half the time learning, half the time then refining and writing a report. And all of a sudden, they were still having ideas on the fifth day. If we’d had two more days, we would have been able to cost and explore the idea.
I’m happy to share what the two ideas were. They’d said, “We have 3,000 kilometres, and we have a right-of-way of 5 meters each side of the ditch. We have several gigalitres of fresh water. Can we grow trees for carbon credits?” Which, normally, you’d then refer a question to an economist, or an agronomist, who can cost that, so they come back with an informed decision. But the final day was the next day.
And then, related, there was another solution that was… the federal government had funded – what is it called? – Restore the Flows of the Kooyong. And they said, “Well, they’re rehabilitating a river for $120 million. We need $8 million. How much will it cost for a 90 km pipeline, because we’re dumping 3 gigalitres of water into the sea? They need 3 gigalitres of water, is that a solution?” We didn’t have time to go to the expertise, we generated a non-result. The shortest way to answer this, most problems are generated from a poor question that doesn’t reveal the problem, insufficient time to resolve the issue. People feel rushed, corralled, the fix is in. So, that’s the most concise answer I can give in this.
Audience: I’ll just follow on and ask the question that comes before that. Does the assembly… do you have assemblies where they… half of all the people involved don’t believe it’s a problem? And we use something like pay equity. And, so people are sitting in the group saying, “What are you talking about? There’s no problem.”
Iain Walker: No, but I’ve had a jury reject the question. We were referred by a New South Wales Parliamentary Committee to look at — it’s 10 years ago, help me with my memory — orders of… preferences for renewable energy generation in New South Wales. And the jury’s opening paragraph is, “We reject the premise of this question because technology changes so constantly, no one should have a preference on renewable energy generation. This is what we want you to do instead.” What was interesting is when it went to the Public Accounts Committee — you always hold your breath waiting for the committee response — 146 references to, ‘We heard this expert, we heard this expert, but we are guided by the jury view.’
Postscript to that: nine years later — 9 years later — a different government adopted their central recommendation. So that’s as close as I can come to that.
Max Rashbrooke: Brilliant, alright. We’ve got one up the back.
Audience: Kia ora, I’d like to ask about costs. I think you mentioned that it was, like, $350K to run one of these things. And I’d just like to kind of throw three things at you and get your response. So, firstly, the… the… honestly, eye-popping numbers that we’re spending, or think about spending, or trying to spend on infrastructure. In contrast to that, the amount that we spend on human processes like this. And in New Zealand, we had the Constitution Conversation, which I think was part of the coalition agreement between the Māori Party and National? Yep. With respect, massively underfunded, but a good, you know, I think pretty, pretty deliberative process. And then we had the flag referendum. Which was kind of off. And then locally, we’ve had the Porirua Assembly, and I know in Auckland there have been, Watercare, did a really great Citizens Assembly as well. Those ones invest heavily in facilitation and process design. It’s not about just getting the people in the room. Yeah. It is about creating a space where conflict can happen constructively. So could you just speak to the amounts of money involved and the proportion that you guys see fit to spend on facilitation and process design versus anything else?
Iain Walker: Sure. The concise answer is… so, if I pick that notional, say, $300,000 project cost, about 60% of it will be facilitation. Now, this is going to vary locally. Facilitation is really expensive in Australia. Yeah, we’re all going to change jobs after this: we pay a lead facilitator, it’s a contractor, $4,500 day rate, and the general rule of thumb is that I have a 6-day process, that I have 18 billable days for that person. 35-person room needs 2 facilitators, 43-50 person room needs three. That’s the general order of magnitude.
After that, what are your costs? I’ve got to post out invitations, like royal wedding invitations. Spent about $15,000 doing that. We feed people respectfully. You can’t keep people for 8 hours and feed them government-burnt quiches that are sad. So we overspend on… we overspend on catering.
So your top-line costs do start to end up there. AV, venues, that’s where the cost comes in. What I come back to is, it is expensive. Australia just dropped $550 million on a referendum.
My argument at home is that if we did two of these per term — just two — at a federal level, we’ve got massive travel costs, because it’s a big place. We’re looking at, depending on the issue, $2.2 to $4 million.
We’re spending $600… oh, sorry, it’s actually costing $600 million per federal election. As a complementary option, it’s affordable, particularly if you select for very high-value issues. So, hopefully I’ve given you a feel for the cost and a feel for the relativity. Yeah, you don’t do it on the colour of the swing set. Doesn’t matter. Go for the, ‘Where is your deadlocked 10-year decision?’ is a good place to start.
Max Rashbrooke: Brilliant. All right.
Audience: I think you’ll hear me without this. I just… for the benefit of our Australian colleague, I would like to say that New Zealand is a very small uni-cameral country, which is a great friend of executive dictatorship. Now, the second thing I want to say, though, is that do any of the panel think that our select committee system — which is in a state of some crisis because there are many people wanting to be heard, and they’re not — does the citizens assembly idea have any merit in solving the crisis that the select committee system in New Zealand is undergoing currently?
Chris Finlayson: Oh, I’ve said the select committee system is a brilliant way of engaging people, but not as it’s currently done. Ramming things through under urgency is simply not the way to do it. And a slow, deliberative process getting… hearing people and reflecting on what they say works very well.
At risk of giving examples, in 2006, Lynne Pillay was chairing the Justice Committee. We were dealing with the Evidence Bill, which had come from you, from the Law Commission, which itself had had some very good consideration. The gestation period was, what, 5 or 6 years? And then we had, Russell Fairbrother chairing a very small committee; Nándor Tánczos and I were on it, and we spent our time, and we listened to people. And the net result is an Evidence Act, which, I think, it’s one of the best pieces of work to come out of the Law Commission. Not that I’m greasing up you. So, you know, I don’t know that it necessarily replaces it. I think it could be used in other areas, but we have a system that should be working better than it is. It’s not a partisan political comment, because both parties have done it over the years – tell us about the SOE Bill, for example. We’ve got to be able to spend time on stuff, because the net result will be so much better. And so, the point I’m making in direct answer to your question, we’ve got it, we don’t need to fiddle with it, we just need to use it.
Claire Timperley: Could I just add to that? I don’t think it’s just the use of urgency, though. I think our select committee is straining because it isn’t being resourced appropriately. And I know that I’m preaching to the choir, because I’ve read your work, but I think we need more MPs because they don’t have the time to actually deliberate. I think they need more support in the form of advisors. We’re seeing a huge amount of submissions coming through, which — there’s conversations about whether they, and I think they already have been, put through AI — and then AI summarizes that and goes back to the MPs. And the MPs may not actually be reading the full submissions, which I think has legitimate… kind of challenges people’s sense of trust in institutions. I think there’s sort of a legitimacy concern there, but we also don’t want to dissuade all of these people submitting. So I think there’s some… I think there is a resourcing issue within our formal institutions, but I would also see some sort of citizens’ assembly or jury as complementary, or potentially kind of slotting into that system. But I’m… yeah, I really think our select committee system is such a wonderful process, and something that we should cherish and we should support, but it requires proper resourcing.
Chris Finlayson: We don’t need more… if I could just barge in a little bit one further comment… we don’t need more MPs. They need to work harder. They’re are not social workers. And, you know, they used to come to town on a Tuesday, and it would be emblazoned over their cut, “I’m working for you,” which was all rubbish. And they would attend a few select committee hearings, ask some desultory questions in the House. Normally, those sort of… what do you call those sorts of questions… Patsies! And they’re not legislators. Now, you will agree with me that first and foremost, Members of Parliament are legislators. They have to get… no point moaning about judges interpreting particular clauses of the deal with treaty principles, when they’re responsible for putting in place formulaic stuff.
And so they’re legislators. They need to work harder. They need to concentrate on what matters. We don’t need more of them – I’m sorry, we don’t.
Audience: We might need fewer ministers.
Chris Finlayson: Oh, well, you’re going to have… [inaudible audience interjections] well, all the… [inaudible audience interjections] There’s ridiculous portfolios that exist so that Casey Costello can have a job. I’m sorry.
Iain Walker: We don’t need more politicians, we need perhaps more randomly selected people attached to the Parliament.
To give you a very direct answer, the problem we solve, and we’re dealing with a parliament, Upper Legislative Council president, who says, “My problem is that we have 150 committee reports not responded to by government.” That’s a problem. Why is… why is the government not responding? They don’t want the public opinion response.
So, if you can land a committee report, and also have a community view that says what’s acceptable, we think we can add an efficiency. If your question doesn’t relate to public opinion feed, like, that is the core problem we’re looking at solving. It sounds like your issue might be slightly different here.
Max Rashbrooke: Great. All right, got a bit of disagreement, finally. Excellent. All right, up the front there, and then back.
Audience: Different policy questions are difficult for different reasons. Sometimes it’s hard to predict the future, knowing how much an infrastructure project’s going to cost. Sometimes there are big trade-offs. Sometimes it’s a very, sort of, moral and emotive issue. Sometimes the considered expert view is very different to the kind of commonsense approach. Like, there’s a whole variety of policy problems out there. What types do you think are best suited for deliberative processes?
Iain Walker: Great. Everyone heard that? I don’t think the microphone clicked, but ‘What’s the good fit?’
Starting point is when a politician tells me that all courses of action will earn them criticism. That is a great start. Premier Weatherill in South Australia, I asked him, I asked all politicians, tell me what’s hard. And he said, “Two kids will die on the streets of Adelaide this year. They go out, it’s summer, they have 10 beers, two groups run into each other, someone throws a punch, they hit the pavement, they die.”
“Do you want me to tell you what the political problem here is? If I change laws, I am the nanny state, I am the fun police. I get smashed in the papers for 2 weeks, so my backbench gets nervous, so we back off.”
“Conversely, I think the laws are fine, we just send a directive to the police to be active and visible, but we don’t make a legislative action. What’s in the papers? ‘You’re asleep at the wheel.’ ‘You’re not protecting our kids, you’ve got your priorities wrong.’ So we… after about 3 weeks, we reactively just push something through and hope that it works.”
“And I have a third problem. I could take the 20 greatest minds on this topic, put them on a desert island. They could come back with perfect technical response and 95% of punters out there will think the liquor industry wrote it, because we take donations from them.”
There is no trusted action. That is the starting point.
More technically, high data topics are good. To give you a shorthand, budget projects, or infrastructure prioritisation, how do you want to pay for it, will work a very high percentage of the time. At the other extreme, something I’ve done once and will never do again. It’s – I’ll be honest, it’s our worst piece of work ever – was visioning. There’s no trade-off. If someone says, I want Wellington 2050 to be a renewable energy superpower, and someone else says, I want it to be a walkable arts precinct. There’s no tension for us to resolve. You need a clear, hard problem that is relevant to people’s lives, and the project will work, high probability. To the earlier questioner, nothing works all the time.
But we’re increasingly understanding why it won’t work. If you get certain variables right: if you have a facilitator who is task-based and can give people clear instructions, if we can get the question right and the time right, your odds of success are extremely high.
Audience: Kia ora Iain, I’m not sure if this is working. Hi, I’m Alicia McKay, I work in local government across Australia and New Zealand, and I would argue that we have everything that you’ve specified today, but there is no mandate or funding to make it possible in local government.
Local government is probably the closest thing we have to a citizen’s assembly in terms of representation of the population, the time, and the diversity of information needed to participate.
But certainly not the mandate or authority, which was your fifth point that they need. And so in New Zealand in particular, with the, the over-MP or not issue, it seems like there’s a really clear mechanism there for decentralising that decision-making closer to the people, and that we already have it.
We could certainly work on making those systems — to the point of both Chris and Claire — more effective by bringing more representation into the selection and voting process for local government, and for providing more time and funding and mandate. And I say that because, obviously, everybody hates the council. But I also say that to make the point that I think, you know, nothing is outside the system, and so once we make a citizens’ jury or a citizens’ assembly the decision-making authority, the same mistrust and uncertainty that we have directed at government will surely be then directed at citizens’ assemblies, but without the accountability mechanism that politics currently offers us.
And so I will wrap up this statement into a question, shortly. Thank you for your patience. My questions would be: do you think the effort in establishing additional consultative mechanisms would be better spent strengthening local government, which is arguably the citizens’ assembly we already have?
And do you think there is a risk, potentially, to democracy in decoupling critical decision-making from the accountability of the political system that we already have?
Iain Walker: I kind of admire optimism. You find politicians accountable. I don’t mean to be negative but think of the example I just gave. People have very short memories for politics. You announce something. Is anyone seeing if it gets done? Is anyone seeing if it gets done on budget? That does not motivate a voter. The number one motivation for a voter. Been done in studies all around the world. What’s the number one motivation? ‘I really don’t like the other guy.’ It’s not about efficacy. So, no, I strongly disagree.
You said, council is a citizens’ assembly. People who run for council, I would suggest, are not a representative cross-section of the population. They are nowhere close to it. In Australia, odds are they are property developers and real estate agents. Oh, look! We’ve just had another two politicians wiped out because the metro stations… I mean, who would have thought that you’d build the metro station right under my mother’s function centre? Look up John Sidotti, that’s the latest one, wiped out. That’s how we’re making decisions. He was a councillor, he became a state minister. He’s got a couple of colleagues in that. So, no, I reject the proposition that people look at their councils and see people they really connect with. I just don’t think that’s accurate, and I think that’s an impediment.
I think the more nuanced answer is, I think people often look at politicians, [and] have a grisly view. I look at councils especially, and council staff have learned how to run their councillors. I have enormous empathy for seeing these reading bricks that come through for people who have day jobs, have insufficient time. One of the benefits we’ve got, will juries be… I’ll sort of close on this point so it doesn’t turn into a grumpy old man rant.
In Ireland, we’ve assisted them with their recruitment methods and their information methods with technical advisors. But the government did a really interesting little bit of opinion research. You know what they asked people? ‘What is a citizens’ assembly?’ Most common response to a… you could say it’s an open, qualitative question. What’s the response? ‘That’s how Ireland makes hard decisions.’
Now, I’m going to wager, I know, I know if I asked an Australian, how does Australia make hard decisions, I would get laughter. Now, I can’t… I don’t know what your response would be. The general rule is, we kick it down the road, and eventually someone makes a last-minute call, and kind of blames the other guys.
We’ve had a federal government in for two terms now, that still, every problem is, ‘Well, this was given to us by the last lot.’ Like, really? You’re still doing this? At a certain point, you own this.
So, no, I don’t agree councils especially are representative. I think they get Type A personalities, and they are in… they don’t have sufficient time for the decision. And the… candidly, there was a change to the Victorian Local Government Act.
You know why it was changed by the state government? It actually requires councils to settle their budget once every four years using this method. Why’d they do it? Because every council, people running for office, they promise free stuff. And councils were starting to get under mountains of debt. That’s a natural incentive. ‘Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.’ You got to run for office, fastest way to win office, with respect, give away some stuff. Works super well. Motivations of the jury are very different. They just live there, so… No, I don’t think you just make councillors better. I don’t see a path forward, but, you know. We want to see experiments. Why not work on a council and try to make the election method and the information work better? I often think that deregulating local government elections would be one of the most interesting experiments.
Are there voting elements, other representation models? Why not allow experimentation? In… certainly where I live, you are struggling to get enough candidates to even run for council now. It is such an unappealing job. That doesn’t point to me to a system that is… just needs a bit of a tweak.
Max Rashbrooke: All right, we’ve got time for another couple of questions.
Audience: Very, very quickly, and it’s going back to the select committee. I’ve often felt that the difference between select committee working well — at a time it’s working well — and a citizens sssembly is that it feels to me like the select committee involvement of citizens is a linear approach. You’re speaking to the decision makers and back. To me, a citizens assembly is… the value of it is when the individuals at that citizens assembly are actually in the same room with each other, speaking to each other. It’s like a… it’s like it’s been channelled in a select committee, whereas in a citizens assembly, anything can come up and be addressed.
Chris Finlayson: No, I agree.
Audience: So your comments on that?
Chris Finlayson: Yeah, I agree with you, but I don’t see it as an either-or, and I use my example of Māori land law reform. I think I’ve… if I’d been smarter, or if I’ve met Iain, maybe we could have started with a citizens assembly, or an iwi assembly, looking at the issue and the challenge. But that doesn’t militate against the fact that when the bill goes off to the select committee, you’ll get another layer of consultation, but it will be the sort that you mentioned. So I don’t think it’s either-or, and I think it does depend very much on the subject matter of the issue.
Audience: Thank you.
Claire Timperley: I can just add a very brief mention that a brilliant PhD student of ours focused specifically on select committees in his PhD, and one of the things that he was looking at, kind of confirms your… your view that they aren’t kind of these pure deliberative processes. In part because some of the interviews that he did with MPs were around the coordination that happened around the table via political party, where especially new MPs came in and thought that they were having a genuine vote on what they felt about something, and then were very quickly given a raised eyebrow, or a nudge, or a text message saying, ‘Stop! Don’t… you don’t vote that way, that’s not how our party is voting.’ So, yeah, select committees are not… I think there is some deliberation that happens there, but yeah, just confirming they’re not akin to an assembly.
Max Rashbrooke: Alright, yes, question up there. I’ll go here, and then we’ll finish… finish up there. Thank you very much.
Audience: A few months ago, I was in this room listening to the readout of the citizens assembly from Porirua, and I’ve just — quick raise your hand if you were there also? So, a few… a few people. The dimension that I think we didn’t hear tonight is not just the question of the quality of the decision-making but the personal growth that people gain through this participation… Iain mentioned that 30% maybe become more pro-social after this process. Claire questioned, you know, do people have the wherewithal to speak? But I’m wondering if you could talk about how the Porirua experience speaks to this untapped dimension of growth. That can transform apathy into engagement, in addition to all the benefits of decision-making we talked about.
Max Rashbrooke: Great question. I don’t know if we can talk specifically to the Porirua experience, but Iain, that sort of question, the growth that people experience through juries, citizens’ assemblies generally?
Iain Walker: Yeah, and I think the positive is that it scales. We simply need an institution which encourages people to think and to mix. That’s really all this is boiling down to.
The thing I’m very happily convinced of, and I’ll be honest, I started in a Masters of Public Policy, which is where I got exposed to this. I probably come from a more tyrannical viewpoint: I’ll have one great leader who makes the decisions. And I got into this because I had to do a subject, and I found through 15 weeks I couldn’t break it. You know, you look at, ‘Okay, so how do you manipulate this system? How do you get it to generate a result?’ And that was my… where my interest was… was piqued.
I continually… there’s great elements in every project, and if you’ve done this for 15 years, I don’t mean to get all Yoda on you for the evening, but in public policy, I know you probably have some strong views about things, there are no right answers.
Okay? There’s an answer a given community feels is right. Doesn’t matter if your tax rate is 1% or 99%. If 80% of the punters out there go, yeah, that’s fair enough. If it’s an informed decision based on evidence, that’s a good one. People take the opportunity. I think I’ve, I’ve… I’ve shared… we’ve obviously faced scepticism that when I say I’m going to have a randomly selected jury of citizens, I understand that a lot of people picture the pub at 11am on a Monday. Okay, that’s… I get that a bit. And all I ever say to people, particularly in elected office, is, I get it. Come on the first day. Come and meet them. I’m doing a blind experiment here. I’m putting my hands, every time, in a group of people I haven’t met and it works out. Because if you trust people with a decision, they take it seriously.
There’s often a question, it sort of touches in some of your themes, of who does it exclude? In my first project, I was really worried that we’d get a skewed population. And I asked Lyn Carson, the academic behind us, I said, “Do we need to do self-identified ethnic background as a stratification criteria?” And she said, “No. People are equivalently interested in the world around them and that doesn’t vary a lot by background, by income, by job type, etc… trust the lottery.” You reach your hand into the jelly beans, you don’t get all the red ones, you’re going to get a mix. And consistently — it was early on that we started to figure out that, candidly, publicised literacy rates are not true. When you actually sample the population and give people documents, you get a bit of a feel for where literacy rates really are at. They’re probably 10-15% lower than you think.
And yet, they can contribute in that discussion. They can hear evidence, and it is great to see people from massively different backgrounds. We have… we pay participants. Periodically, people will approach us, and they will explain they’re in, basically, a homeless situation. We just make the payment in advance, discreetly, etc. And what it reinforces is, that person has a lot of other pressures and concerns in their life. But offered an invitation, they want to have a say.
Our democracy is built around the most insistent voices. Fine. Balance it with some invited voices, and we’re not doing that just to be nice and cuddly. We’re doing it because there are blockages we can overcome as a result.
Sorry, that was kind of a long answer to a short question.
Max Rashbrooke: All right, we’ve got time for one. Chair’s privilege, one final question up the back. No pressure, but make it quick and make it good, please.
Audience: Okay, can you hear me?
So my question is basically about what kind of properties the decisions that come from citizens’ juries will have. And I’m thinking of a couple in my head. You mentioned Cass Sunstein earlier. He also talked about how juries can have what he calls severity shifts, where through deliberation, they’re basically skewed to extreme views. So it doesn’t come to, like, some wise median voter middle ground, it just, skews more extreme voices.
And the other property I’m thinking of, that I don’t know if citizens juries have is whether or not it, quote, gets to the right answer, or it has the right epistemic correctness, because some democratic theorists who promote these things, like Hélène Landemore. She uses these theories like the Condorcet Jury Theorem or the Hong-Page Theorem to try to argue that the… when you collect the wisdom of the crowds, the collection of all these diverse viewpoints, it’ll actually get you to the right answer more than a collection of experts. But that’s the big contention, that I don’t know if that’s actually true.
Iain Walker: That’s an enormous question. So… It’s better to think first and… what is it? ‘Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.’
The thing that impresses me in most jury deliberations is that they’ll come up with some idea that is outside politics.
We did a project for Infrastructure Victoria related to massive infrastructure prioritization, 900 potential projects across the state. What stood out in the report for the agency is two simple things they said. Firstly, ‘How have you got 900 projects listed and none address mental health?’
And the second one was, ‘You’re trying to be so equal in your access to public housing. Candidly, women over 50 struggle to get mortgages. We are happy with them being prioritised, and we are happy with a co-payment model.’ Which is very politically contentious, but they found common ground. That was… that was off a very open question about ‘What infrastructure do you want to prioritise?’
To give you a very direct answer, we use a three-word template. We’re very worried about biases, so we do an absolutely minimal template: recommendation, reasoning, evidence. That’s it.
No, the juries don’t skew extreme. I often get asked by politicians, ‘So how do you ensure that it’s 50% Coalition and 50% Labor?’ [I’m] like, ‘You’ve got no idea what the population is like. Most people are just not that political.’
If we hit one person who’s that politically militant that they want to drive to the edges, it doesn’t really work out for them. We are representing a common ground view through a self-written report. We do this through iterative writing. We tend not to see extreme results.
The hardest part, to come to the core of your question. The key, you know, what is a good project for us? What are we looking at? People confront a trade-off. Let me give you a very short example of a good versus bad. There’s a Scottish Parliament climate assembly that recommended that we care about climate change, so, we want every bus in Scotland to be electric, and we want public transport to be free.
That is a terrible recommendation.
Why? It’s a wish list. It just shovelled a cost onto politicians of… ‘Where am I finding this money?’ We spoke to the organisers and said, do two Google searches.
What’s an electric bus cost? 600,000 euro, about a million and change. Actually, I don’t think your currency’s going super well, so a million two.
So, how many buses in the Scottish bus fleet? It’s 4,200.
Okay? 4,200 times a million, you’d have spent $4.2 billion, and you took away fares.
This is…
What is a good recommendation? I don’t… I don’t have a policy view. You can have electric buses, they can be free electric buses, but it’s only actionable when people confront the trade-off. ‘We want free electric buses and we can live with this local tax, whatever it is.’ When people say, ‘And this will cost $5 billion, and I accept that cost,’ we actually do the tough part of politics.
And that’s… that’s… sorry, that’s the direct answer to your question. If you see a trade-off being confronted, that is the most useful thing we do for politicians. When we do the prioritization in infrastructure, it’s what they say ‘no’ to.
We did an infrastructure backlog project for Marrickville Council. It was great that they put up the certain things they were willing to pay for. What was really instructive is what they said, this is broken and we don’t care. Turned out people did not care about cracked pavements. Not when they saw the price of it, concerned, and realized there were other things around stormwater they wanted to prioritize. So, confront the trade-off is what you should look for.
Max Rashbrooke: Brilliant, right, thanks for that, Iain. Chris, I think you wanted to add a couple of things.
Chris Finlayson: I think the most important thing that’s been said tonight is what Iain said about 92% of people first preferencing One Nation wanting to blow the system up. Well, I think the answer is, there’s no point calling them deplorables or people from flyover country, or whatever. The critical thing is, one, make the existing system work, and two, bring them into the system so that they are part of it. And if some of these ideas look a bit airy-fairy at first glance, I think that’s wrong. I think they’re worth looking at very closely, because we do not want to go that way in this country.
Closing
Max Rashbrooke: Wonderful. Well, thank you for that closing reflection, Chris, and I think it’s absolutely true and pertinent at this time.
Look, thank you very much, for being a wonderful audience and for all those great questions. Before you go, I know that there are some supporters of IDEA in the audience, and I want to say thank you very much for that. If you’re not yet a supporter of IDEA, then – and you’ve found this of interest – this work that we’re doing here, these kinds of panels, are very much part of our wider mission to bring these kinds of ideas forward, but also to foster debate, and sometimes disagreement about them. We’ve got a big work programme ahead, and we need more support to action it. So if you’ve enjoyed tonight, I would love you to go home, sign up as a supporter, as a subscriber of ours, that would be fantastic.
But for the moment, thank you very much for coming along, and can you please give our panellists and our speaker a round of applause?