If you haven’t read the earlier parts, you may want to do so: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

tldr

• elections alone have not prevented democratic decay
• we are in a crisis
• democra.me’s BeatJosh injects truth back into politics
• how to help

Who should I vote for?

Politics is not a public relations exercise. It is fundamentally a contest of ideas about what best serves the national interest. It is the ability to evaluate competing visions of the common good that marks out a truly great people.
John Howard
- Australian prime minister, 1996–2007

We decide who to vote for based on what we know of the candidates and their parties. In Australia we must vote, but there is no need to know. Since a significant number of us have little time for — or interest in — politics, tools such as the ABC’s VoteCompass are great time saver. They ask us a series of questions on contentious political issues — immigration, abortion, funding for healthcare and so on — and then tell us which party our views correlate with most closely. Internationally, isidewith.com is equally helpful. Here, for example, I can look at the range of opinions across the United States:

I was surprised last time I used VoteCompass that my own views aligned with a small political party I had not heard of before and which didn’t have a candidate in my electorate. In fact before the May 2019 federal election, I only received a paper pamphlet from two parties, indicating that other parties didn’t have the funds or candidates to campaign in my area. And online I can only recall seeing ads for the United Australia Party, which wasn’t my cup of tea at that moment.

Without such online tools or direct advertising, I am left to figure out who to support from news snippets, conversations with friends and family, and my own upbringing.

My personal experience confirms the conclusion of Mark Stears of the Sydney Policy Lab. Getting to the table to engage in the contest of ideas which John Howard spoke about requires a big dose of money and organisational power. The most wealthy and organised parties are the Australian Labor Party and the Coalition of the Liberal Party and the Liberal National Party. They are the perennial heavyweights, and any protest votes get frittered away across a smorgasbord of smaller parties. That will not change without institutional reform, such as banning political donations or political advertising.

We’re not getting any younger here

The world’s moving on so fast, these young people… they don’t think like we think in politics. There’s got to be that sense of a big future vision.
Alastair Campbell
- Political commentator

In 2019, the average age of a person who watches ABC news in the evening is 72. Good for you, for keeping yourself informed on issues of national importance, and because you’re in a dwindling slice of the population.

Since 1971, we have enjoyed longer lives, on average. Plenty has changed in the world since then. The internet is pervasive, we read the news on our phones, the Berlin wall is in pieces, the space shuttle came and went, the world population has doubled, a billion Chinese are better off… The capitalist system is working, right? Are we so comfortable now that that we fret about the second-tier issues? In so far as the threat of nuclear war has receded a little, yes. It was an existential threat. It took a coincidence of visionary leaders — Gorbachev and Reagan — to turn that corner. Whatever their other failings, they will be remembered for this. Other solitary, visionary leaders have come and gone, yet the big, hairy, global issues remain:

1. Inequality
2. Overpopulation
3. Climate change
4. Pollution

With each day that passes, these stresses compound the untruths. The untruths cause us to hesitate instead of acting to cure democratic decay. It should come as no surprise that political institutions framed in the horse-powered era are inadequate as we enter a new Great Filter. We need to shore up our democracies.

Raising the baseline of citizen awareness

In recent times, struggles over whether to share the wealth have been a key reason for democratic failures.
Sam Wilkin
- Geopolitical analyst

democra.me’s aim is to act as a multiplier for citizens who want to reverse democratic decay. Our first project, BeatJosh, injects truth into political promises, statements and news by providing a clear context for any taxation or spending decision:

• The Brexit bus promised to take the £350M a week being paid to the European Union and use it to better fund the NHS. Is this number correct? Is it significant? What do UK residents get in return?
• The Australian Education Minister claims that his party is providing “$310bn in extra funding” to government schools.
• In the USA, “Green New Deal”, “Medicare for all” and “free college education for all” either are or are not realistic.
• In Malaysia, Uganda and Namibia, where did all that money disappear?
• In France, how else could a fuel tax have been handled?
• Why doesn’t Hong Kong have better public hospitals?
• In Sri Lanka, why is 51% of the entire budget devoted to ‘Financial Service’?

In particular we can’t have our cake and eat it; there are two sides to every coin. Political decisions are fundamentally allocation decisions. With deficits and debt the norm, every promise of extra funds to one group means another group will miss out. Have some honesty, treat voters like adults, and get out in front of the big issues that threaten us all.

How you can help

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We’d all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We’re doing what we can
The Beatles, Revolution

As of December 2019, we are working on the second iteration of BeatJosh, and considering a number of subsequent initiatives. We’d love to have your help, whether that be in loading a budget for your area, building products, suggesting ideas or just spreading the word. We look forward to hearing from you below, on Facebook, on Twitter or via our website.

Democracy and its discontents — part 4 was originally published in democra.me Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you haven’t read Parts 1 and 2, I recommend doing so. See you back here in a few minutes.

tldr

• civics education should be extended to everyone
• direct democracy is intriguing but embryonic
• politicians should engage more closely with their constituents
• citizen orientation would benefit all electorates
• citizens’ assemblies work around institutional inertia

So what’s to be done?

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Some of these claims get recycled to support even more outlandish and less accurate positions. Some of these can even end up part of major political speeches and policy commitments. Managing public expectations starts with a trusted, reliable base of information that is credible and neutral.
Matthew Warren
- Author

There is a gap between what we have today and the governance we’d prefer to have. How do we repair democracy, rollback democratic decay? If you’ve ever watched civil engineers at work, you’ll know that there is more than one way to build a bridge.

Extend civics education

In time, not very much time at all, it will be the decisions of the children we teach today that will shape the world.
Simon Longstaff
- Philosopher

One simple idea is to teach civics more intensively at schools. In the middle school curriculum, civics fall somewhere into that gap between legal studies, economics and history. Most students will also make a trip to Canberra to visit the various federal institutions, as well as visit the Museum of Australian Democracy.

In New South Wales, some primary students have the option to take ethics classes each week instead of scripture. This challenges them with such knotty questions as, “Should we eat whales?” and “Is it ever okay to break a promise?”. None of these classes attempt to prescribe best practice responses. Instead they are opportunities to think deeply about the topic and engage in reasoned, respectful debates with one’s classmates. This is the opposite of the tweeting emotional messages into the void, and exactly the skill we need as adults to deliberate the big hairy issues. Unfortunately this is only available in New South Wales and is not available to all children in every school. Given our mandatory voting requirement, it should be.

On a related note, the Governance Institute of Australia has released its fourth annual Ethics Index and highlights the fact that there are plenty of adults that could benefit from ethics education too.

Direct democracy?

To compel a man to furnish funds for the propagation of ideas he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.
Thomas Jefferson
- US president 1801–1809

While we all need to vote in Australia, how important is it that we inform ourselves enough to be able to vote knowledgeably? There is no requirement that we do so. Is this akin to needing to attend school but not needing to understand anything? We require bar workers to be certified in the responsible provision of alcohol. We require drivers to be able to drive. In situations where our activity might cause harm to someone else, we make sure everyone is aware of the risks and responsibilities. We have professional members of parliament (who take an oath of allegiance to Elizabeth) between us and the eventual outcome, and any risk of poor governance is not attributable to one single voter, so the same risks do not apply to our current voting process.

The technique of allowing voters to indicate their preference electronically often comes up when talking about modern democratic innovations. If we dispensed with MPs and citizens could vote on motions proposed by others, how would that work? Would we want to risk being led into a conflict with a neighboring country by having an uniformed majority vote “Yes” on their phones? Can we say that today’s news media is sufficient to guide the national conscience? As I outlined in Part 2, the answer is ‘no’. This is why organisations such as Mivote which advocate for a more direct form of democracy require electronic voters to inform themselves on issues that they vote on:

Unfortunately, despite all the good intentions and brainpower behind it, I have yet to see direct democracy get off the ground anywhere in the world. I suspect it is an idea whose time is yet to come.

MPs in conversation with constituents

In some ways, the electoral process itself occludes deeper flaws in democracy. Voters take comfort in their ability to remove individual politicians when they err, yet this possibility leaves underlying structures largely free from critique, improvement and enhancement.
Dambisa Moyo
- Economist

One commendation for solutions like Mivote (along with Flux and Online Direct Democracy) is that they give us citizens a say in democracy between elections. At the moment in most electorates around the country, there is arguably inadequate consultation between MPs and their constituents. Although there is a legal requirement that local councils consult with residents, there is no requirement that federal MPs do so.

Ex-treasurer Joe Hockey was my local MP for many years but our relationship consisted of my reading Joe’s printed letter once a year listing his achievements. His replacement, Trent Zimmerman sounds a little more accessible, listing the following touch points:

• Forums for residents, held during working hours
• Community surveys
• Regular mobile offices in shopping centres to allow residents to meet and talk without the need for a formal appointment, and at major festivals
• Participation in community events
• Open door policy
• Email

To reverse democratic decay, it’s going to be important for all MPs to preserve open two-way communication lines with citizens of all ages and backgrounds. Unguided, politicians tend to listen to wealthy businesses and organised groups. If ministerial resources are stretched to the point where only the squeaky wheels get oiled, we’re doing ourselves a disservice. Digital tools such as Politizr, CitizenLab and NextDoor could be helpful in gathering all the voices into a coherent choir.

Orienting new residents

A good citizen is someone who cares enough to inform themselves before they cast a vote.
Tanya Plibercek
- Politician

Have you ever moved to a new (part of) town and received a personalised message from your local council and your state and federal MPs inviting you to engage with them and join the local community? Perhaps it’s a sit down lunch with other new residents at a reputable local cafe? Or a chance to join a monthly webinar with the MP in Sydney or Canberra? Or an invitation to join the official Facebook groups for the area? No, neither have I. While this orientation process is normal in welcoming new employees to businesses —“this is your company email address, here’s the colour printer, here are the fire exits and here is how our intranet works” — it’s not being done in civil society.

By and large, we move houses a lot more than our parents did. New jobs, schools and marriages account for a lot of these moves. Each time we move, we disconnect from one community and need to connect to the new one. In an earlier era, a common faith might have tied us together with anyone anywhere, or a local pub, or a shared enjoyment of “Hey Hey It’s Saturday” (the most popular TV show in the 1980s when there were only two channels to choose from in some parts of the country). Government in Australia still revels in paper-based communication, electoral rolls, rate notices and on-demand transactions. The relationship feels more like the one we might have with a letter box or bank rather than one we enjoy with a school, a company or a club. (This is not the best time to have a bank-like relationship with customers.)

To rebuild trust in politicians, existing government institutions need to reach out and engage in community-building, drag us out of our heads-down, working, streaming, social media-heavy existence. My own local council is trying hard to do this, but still lacks an on-boarding process which would be simple to set up. Consequently democratic participation is a ‘narrow church’, especially within communities where English is not the first language.

Citizens’ assemblies

The obsession of our short-term politics, focused daily on point-scoring and blame-shifting, has essentially killed off mature, longer-term, policy leadership, development and implementation.
John Hewson
- Politician

In the same way as juries pull a random group of citizens together to resolve a criminal justice matter, in Australia and beyond citizens assemblies are being used to deliberate and solve knotty problems such as how to address man-made climate change.

It is precisely because we have democratic decay that these alternative bodies are spawning — to build consensus where the electoral process consistently fails to produce leaders who can lead us through a tough nationwide change. (FDR / Churchill / JFK anyone?) They are ideally suited to the big, hairy problems which require an informed and collective decision which will affect everyone.

Some critics argue that we shouldn’t rely on new bodies just because our existing institutions aren’t up to the task — that we should fix our existing institutions instead. The problem with this is that the majority of people that have the authority to fix the institutions — parties, parliament, and legislation — are caught inside them and have even less incentive to change than you and me. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a person to understand something, when that person’s salary depends upon not understanding it.”

I for one am happy that citizens’ assemblies achieve some progress, even if the only progress is the enlightenment of the participants. Life is too short and the inertia is too great. What is the last big decision that we as a nation made? How does that compare with Jacinta Ardern’s list?

In Part 4…

I’ll get into elections as well as what we’re doing at democra.me to join the dots and reverse the tide of democratic decay.

Read Part 4

Democracy and its discontents — part 3 was originally published in democra.me Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you haven’t read Part 1, I recommend it. See you back here in 5 minutes.

tldr

• the internet has forced news organisations to build new business models
• the people we live with are less likely to consume the same news as us
• trust in news and politicians is at an all-time low
• how do we progress without a clear understanding of the truth?

Senator, we run ads

I was still explaining to people on election day that there was no death tax.
It was really hard to convince them. They’d seen it on Facebook.
Brian Owler
- Unsuccessful candidate in the Australian 2019 federal election

The Museum of Australian Democracy is housed in our previous house of parliament. It’s a fine old building directly opposite the current Parliament House. The upper floor of the House of Representatives was previously the press gallery. It is an incredibly cramped space with noisy typewriters, ashtrays and other artifacts of a previous era. As you’d expect in a museum, explanatory panels accompany the exhibits, and one covering the era 1927–1988 struck me:

I smiled a faint smile to learn how reporters considered television such a threat when it was first introduced. What a slippery slope we’ve come down!

I’ll believe it when I see it

Editors, producers and journalists, just like politicians, craft stories around their audiences’ desires. They mine the deepest prejudices and fears of a particular demographic group, and regurgitate them dressed up as news.
Lindsay Tanner
- Australian member of parliament 1993–2010

In the early stages of the Falklands War, I listened to a commanding officer being interviewed by the BBC imploring the audience to trust what they saw on television and not necessarily believe what they read in the newspapers. His contention was that if you could see it, it was more likely to be trustworthy.

Fast-forward 35 years to 2017 when research conducted in the UK showed that only 5% of adults ‘trust the news media a lot’. Along the way you will have whizzed past many triumphs of the free press but also some tragic failures:

• Paparazzi hunting down the Princess of Wales in a Parisian underpass
• False pretexts leading the US and the UK into an unwarranted war in Iraq
• A global financial crisis which saw thousands of people lose their homes while financial institutions and car manufacturers were bailed out by the US government
• Phone-hacking-as-journalism in the UK
• Wall-to-wall coverage of the circus of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential campaign eclipsed any semblance of rational debate over important economic policies

During this time Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning came forward, but thousands of journalists lost their jobs and news organisations shut, sold or downsized — victims of the internet. They were the lucky ones: colleagues in Russia and elsewhere were murdered.

Fast-forward another two years and throw these into the mix:

• Emmanuel Macron’s approval rating plummeted within three months of his assuming the French presidency
• Cambridge Analytica taught us to rethink our social media habits
• Donald Trump has made 13,435 false or misleading claims within 1,000 days of assuming office and stopped holding press conferences
• The US government debt has reached an eye-watering $23tn
• Despite winning the last election, six months on, the Australian treasurer, Josh Frydenberg continues to tweet debunked figures and smug memes:

Journalists were supposed to uphold democracy by holding our politicians to account. The internet came along and hit them like a bowling ball. Not only do politicians now speak directly to netizens without the filter of the press pool, newspaper subscription revenues have withered and attention spans have shortened.

Whereas an earlier generation might have sat down to watch 30 minutes of news and weather every evening — perhaps as a family, from one of a handful of TV channels — we now all have our own feeds / tribes / bubbles / channels and our own devices. A community that previously shared a common understanding of local issues, and consumed news items that were alternately noteworthy and mundane, now drifts apart in a flood of information, each of us clinging to a different piece of the puzzle.

At a post-retirement award ceremony in June 2019, Kerry O’Brien, one of Australia’s most treasured journalists said,

[W]e the journalists have to share the responsibility for the great failures of our time. A time of enormous ferment and challenge, failures of politics, failures of journalism, failures of society in the end. For instance 40 years after powerful evidence first kicked in that human-caused climate change threatened the world with an existential disaster, we’re still stuck in the mire of drab, dishonest arguments that will come at great cost to future generations and we the journalists have not cut through the fake news effectively. We have not properly held politicians to account.

Little wonder then that trust in the news and politicians is low, and expected to get worse.

The new Luddites

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
Douglas Adams
- Author

So do we just wind back the clock, break up the looms and tax Google and Facebook more equitably? Should we fashion more caps and implore our communities to Make ___ Great Again? Should we just hope that next time around we elect better leaders? How does a strong, unbiased, publicly funded news organisation do its job when it is pressured by the government? If it is not wealthy enough to cover foreign news, the diplomatic service is defunded and journalists are targeted, how can citizens know what is truly happening elsewhere in our world?

Q: How does a blind person walk across an unfamiliar road?

A: Very tentatively. So when there’s a truck coming, we have a problem.

In Part 3…

I’ll suggest some ways we can shore up our democracy and reverse democratic decay.

Read Part 3

Democracy and its discontents — part 2 was originally published in democra.me Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.
George Orwell

tldr

• Australians are unhappy with their democracy and politicians
• Big hairy issues are not getting tackled
• Dishonesty can be a helpful political strategy

Canberra to Cambridge

The Museum of Australian Democracy at the Old Parliament House in Canberra has just launched a new exhibition on the topic of ‘truth decay’. According to the Canberra Times, it focuses on the importance of journalism in holding governments to account. Given the results of recent polls, it is timely.

The ABC’s Australia Talks survey — which has been completed by 54,000 people and is still running — tells us that 90% of Australians don’t trust politicians to tell the truth. Admittedly such surveys are likely to appeal primarily to the frustrated and the digitally savvy, but it’s a shocking outcome.

Ipsos’ survey from December 2018 concurs — Australians trust politicians less than any almost every other profession:

In the same vein, the Essential Report indicates that Australians trust political parties the least (15%) while our various levels of government enjoy diminishing levels of trust the more remote they are: local (42%), state (31%) and federal (28%).

This is a relatively new crisis for us down under. The University of Canberra tracks our satisfaction with democracy and found that there was a huge drop between 2013 (72%) and 2016 (42%) which has not recovered since. It doesn’t help that we’ve had six changes of prime minister in 12 years, some of which have been caused by internal rifts in the ruling party.

And Australians are not alone. As you can imagine, the Brits, the French, the Hong Kongers, the Italians and the Americans aren’t chuffed either:

You literally have to go the ends of the earth to find healthy democracy: Norway and New Zealand.

So what?

If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists — to protect them and to promote their common welfare — all else is lost.
Barack Obama

There are — to my mind — four big, hairy problems in the world today:

1. Inequality
2. Overpopulation
3. Climate change
4. Pollution

These are in no particular order. (I’ll refer to these as the Big Four. Please comment below if you have others to suggest.)

Millions of articles, reports, studies, blogs, speeches, books, phone calls, emails, podcasts, documentaries, and UN debates have addressed these matters. Despite these efforts, in my lifetime, all Four problems have worsened.

The problems are interrelated. For example, sending US manufacturing jobs to China so that US companies can improve their profitability means more money for the shareholders and fewer jobs at home. That’s bad for inequality (B1). It also results in more greenhouse gas emissions as products manufactured in one country are shipped to another, instead of being made and sold nearby (B3). And weak environmental protection in China — at least for the first few decades — meant that increasing water and air pollution affected those living beside those factories and further afield (B4). The saving grace here was that China — and only China — put a lid on population growth, but that lid has now partly been removed (B2).

While the Big Four are older than the developed world’s democratic decline — let’s call this DD for brevity — they are multilateral issues which touch everyone on the planet whose solution will require consensus and sacrifice.

Here’s the rub. Without fixing DD we will never solve the Big Four.

Try telling people…

• who are wealthy, to pay more taxes
• to have fewer children, or — even less palatable — to forget about trying to cure the sick
• to stop eating so much meat, and reduce plane travel
• to stop producing / using plastic

Off on a bit of a tangent, I’ll concede that climate change (B3) could also be solved by discovering and industrialising a new, stable, safe, powerful and non-polluting energy source. And we can hope that chemical recycling or some other similar breakthrough will eventually help us with pollution (B4). But these feel like science fiction at the moment: more akin to the discovery of electricity and quantum mechanics, than to inventing steam engines and smartphones. They will not transform the world within the next 12 years, but by all means let’s race down that path, and invest heavily in scientists and their research.

Ask not what your country can do for you

An assault on truth is an assault on democracy.
Tony Hall
- BBC director general

If we all agree that the Big Four need to be tackled urgently — not that this consensus exists right now — then how do we go about it?

The normal path to democratic change involves electing leaders who can ensure that laws and taxation and spending patterns are adjusted to address an issue. So how does this work if we no longer trust the democratic process and politicians lie?

It doesn’t. We need absolute integrity and honesty in our representatives. But if they are dishonest during the campaign, how can we know which candidate to choose?

Three years on, the candidate that lied the most is now the 45th president of the United States and — as was reported by USAFacts today — there is now an eye-popping disagreement about what a fact is.

Meanwhile the Poms are still trying to pin down what Brexit meant and how much of the money that the UK was sending to the European Union will actually get spent on the National Health Service instead.

In Australia, our last national election (in May 2019) saw the incumbent government returned to power, meaning that we’ve voted for more global warming and more inequality. We’re not an ill-educated, insecure, desperate nation. Yet there it is.

Not only, but also

In Part 2, I explain the importance the news media has been playing in our democracy. In Part 3 I’ll suggest some remedies for DD.

Democracy and its discontents — part 1 was originally published in democra.me Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.