I was intrigued to see the idea of a Citizen’s Assembly hit the headlines today. Why wouldn’t I be having suggested the same thing a few years ago? Here’s a post on Club Troppo from 2005:

I suggest that we choose an assembly of citizens by lot (at random) from the electoral role. Those citizens would then be given the option of participating in a third house of Parliament. I don’t suggest overturning representative democracy, so I think it would be unacceptable to give the chamber the blocking power of the House or the Senate. But, to give the new chamber some teeth I’d give it the power to initiate bills and a delaying power like the House of Lords in the UK which can delay legislation (I think for one year) but cannot block it indefinitely. (It could not block budget bills).

The most visceral response I guess I’ll get is ‘not more politicians’. But they’re not politicians. They’re citizens. There’s more cost involved, but its not a major consideration if one thinks this might improve the quality of our democracy.

The advantages are that we would develop a chamber where there really was a legitimate voice of the people. Further that voice would not be ignorant like a vox pop is. I expect the vast majority of people in the chamber would be conscientious in trying to understand the issues on which they spoke and voted. From time to time the process would turn up political talent which could then work its way through the party system. I think politics is one of those professions like policing and psychotherapy which tends to attract people who should be doing something else! This process might well turn up some people who were uninterested in the self assertion and/or struggle that politics involves, who might nevertheless become major contributors to our political culture.

It’s disappointing that the idea has been scorned so instantly by various operatives around the traps. Of course the atmospherics for its introduction might have been better – this is a rescue operation with the alternative political heroics having fallen over. But I find it hard to see how anything but good can come from such an experiment.

The essence of these things is for them to reinvigorate, reinvent and relegitimate democracy.  At the moment, there’s an absence of deliberative democracy because anything that can be focus grouped or discussed to a worthwhile conclusion (like an ETS, an RRT or a GST) can go from being conventional wisdom to electoral poison with the expenditure of a few million dollars telling how [insert policy] is dreadfully unfair to [insert demographic or celebrity] and will beggar us all.

As I’ve argued recently and not so recently the Accord was a great success essentially because it performed that function.  And I expect that well done, the people’s chamber can do it too. You see there’s nothing much in the idea.

The 2020 Summit was a similar idea but it was implemented in a daze, without any thought about what the government wanted out of it. The people’s chamber has promise because a government that wants to lead can use it to lead — and it can offload a lot of the burden of what I call political heroics (where the goverment leads as it did with the RRT or John Hewson did with the GST and everyone else gets to take potshots at it from the sidelines.)

And as I’ve mused, maybe Gillard is the kind of politician who can pull this off. But remembering all those people trying to wish their thoughts and values into Rudd’s head, I could be doing the same thing. Only time will tell.

Still, even if I’m cynical I still find it hard to believe that the people’s chamber won’t lead to good things.  I had no such hopes of the 2020 Summit. Actually that’s wrong. I did have hopes. High hopes and low expectations.