4Th May 2017 Function Room, Theo Notaras Multicultural Centre, 180 London Circuit, Canberra City
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4th May 2017 Function Room, Theo Notaras Multicultural Centre, 180 London Circuit, Canberra City Canberra Conversations 1 CITIZENS’ JURIES: THE ANSWER TO IMPROVING COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT IN THE ACT? Community engagement and participation in decision making has become a challenge for all democratic governments. Citizens’ juries, community panels and other forms of deliberative democracy are becoming increasingly popular across Australia. Are these forms of participatory engagement the answer to community discontent in the ACT? This Institute for Governance and Policy Analysis (IGPA) Canberra Conversation Panel Discussion will consider the use of deliberative democracy processes from the perspectives of a government sponsor, a researcher and a practitioner. They will draw on their extensive experience to reflect on the benefits of these processes, what situations they are best suited to, and how they can go wrong. The panel will go on to discuss how deliberative democracy processes like citizens’ juries might be used in the ACT. The event is jointly convened by Professorial Fellow Jon Stanhope AO and Adjunct Professor Dr Khalid Ahmed PSM in partnership with Deliberators without Borders, who provided funding support, and the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) ACT Network. It will be in the form of a panel discussion facilitated by Kirsten Lawson and Jon Stanhope. Canberra Conversations 2 John Stanhope: The University of Canberra, and in that role that I’m pleased to be associated with, The Canberra Conversation is a series of seminars which the Institute is pleased to support. It would bring what we think are issues of interest to Canberra. I share this is a role with adjunct professor Khaled Ahmed. The topic as you know, today’s conversation is ‘Citizens Juries: The answer to improving community engagement in the ACT?’ Before introducing the panel today, I’d like to take this opportunity by acknowledging that we’re meeting on the land of Ngunnawal peoples. I would like to begin by paying respects, and I acknowledge the continuing contribution which Aboriginal people make in the life of our community. We are very privileged today to have a panel of people who are very experienced with the issue of community engagement, particularly in deliberative democracy with an experience in specific issue of citizen’s juries. Gail Failamb is the Director of Participation and Partnerships in the Department of Premier and Cabinet in South Australia. She is responsible for fostering an inclusive approach to policy-making, programme development and service delivery across the South Australian government. This includes the strategic implementation of the SA Government’s engagement policy: Better Together and oversight of YourSAy, a centralised online consultation hub for government and associated social media. Dr. Simon Niemeyer, a colleague from the university of Canberra, is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance. His research covers the broad fields of deliberative democracy and environmental governance, particularly in respect to climate change. His focus is on the forces that shape public opinion and how this can be improved so that the expressed preference of the public better reflects their collective long-term interests. Emily Jenke is the Co-CEO of Democracy Co, an Adelaide-based company specialising in participative and deliberative practise. Democracy Co specialises in 3 key areas – supporting public servants with their adoption of these processes (including the politics that comes with this work); enabling stakeholders and partners to participate fully; as well as designing, facilitating and supporting citizens to contribute at their best. Our facilitator today is Kirsten Lawson, a woman that needs no introduction. I am sure she is well known to each of you. She leads Fairfax Media’s coverage of ACT politics. Kirsten is a long-time political reporter, she returned to the ACT parliament in early 2014, having covered ACT politics in the late 1990s, a time I am sure of few of you can still remember well. During the days of Kate Carnell’s chief minister ship, and federal politics in the Howard era. I’m joining the panel in a sort of fashion as ex-politician. Something that I know probably from time to time, I have failed some of your expectations in relation to consultation and Canberra Conversations 3 engagement. Be aware that I expose myself to future questions, in relation to some of the policies. Having said that I am aware about the cynicism in the Canberra and broader Australian community in relation to mutual trust, politics, and critical process in government of the extinguished politicians and governments to engage and to reflect. I think it’s a complex issue having experienced it in 10 years as chief minister. I always carry with me feeling or concern, that despite our best efforts as politicians and as governance and the determination or willingness and the wish to engage, but we never seem to satisfy our constituencies that we have done the job, or done our parts. This issue, whose time has come, an issue that should how do we as communities come together to discuss as a community to discuss the issues. I thank you very much for coming today. Kirsten Lawson: [crosstalk 00:05:24] I think we are going to give each of the panelists some time before I ask the questions. You can come up here, it might be easier. [crosstalk 00:05:41] Five minutes for each of the panelists, then some questions. Gail Fairlamb: Thank you very much for having me. Beautiful day in Canberra. When I first came to this country, I landed in Canberra so it’s kind of like coming home. I appreciate being here today. So, in my role as the Director of Strategic Engagement in South Australia in the Premier’s department. I’m responsible for the Reforming Democracy Policy. And that policy really came about in 2015. It is commitment lead by our Premier and holds the government to being more open to bringing community views and perspectives into, essentially, government decision-making. And the policy was co-designed by the Premier’s office and I think it represents a fairly ambitious and potentially courageous attempt to make systemic change across the public service. Opening government, involving people in decisions, but also involving people in the creation of new public value. So why are we doing this? Well, you know that across the world, we’ve seen trust in politicians, trust in government, trust in public servants, trust in the media, trust in all around civic institutions, declining. And why is that? I think that’s a really burning question. That’s not the question I’m going to answer here now. But it is a question that I think we can move, use things like deliberative democracy and open government to try and mediate some of the trust that is perhaps declining. So, Reforming Democracy trials a number of open innovation, open democratic innovations, and they build from them the principles which is our guide to community engagement. And I encourage you to hop online and have a look at those. Canberra Conversations 4 And deliberative democracy is one part of that policy and it’s a really important, part but it’s only, if you like, the flagship part of it. What’s also important for us is the public service in South Australia is to build capacity in the system. So it is all about public servants. So, when public servants engage the community, they are skilled, they understand, and do something about what they hear from communities. So, we have a number of different things that are covered by that part of that policy that include deliberative methods like citizens juries, like people’s budgeting where we put an amount of funding out and the community decides on how that should be allocated. They also have direct democracy like the YourSAy website where 60 000 people have signed up to participate in government decision making and all government agencies are required to host their engagements there. Country Cabinet where we take politicians out into regional areas to talk with communities. And we’re also doing open innovation challenges. We are bringing the community with platform that would enable open innovations, challenges to solve problems, and to generate new value for our community. So it’s really important to say that deliberative democracy is one part of that policy, it’s a very important part of it. And deliberative democracy and the Reforming Democracy Policy is an acknowledgement by the South Australian government that we need to be more open. We need to be more open about bringing people into decision-making, and the reason we need to do that is some of the problems we are solving are really complex. They’re difficult. They’re not easy to solve. If they were easy, we would have solved it already. So sharing that comes space with communities helps build empathy from the community about what government has to do, and also helps government understand what the community needs to do. And deliberative democracy is about taking community sentiments, which, you look across all social media platforms, you can get the sentiment that’s here, and sentiments there. When there aren’t engagement, we just consult in a very normal consultation way, you can get a broad range of sentiment, it doesn’t help government decide what the community would do if they have access to the information if they were given the opportunity to deliberate—the time, the space, access to the expert—that’s what deliberative democracy is about. It’s about the everyday citizen coming into a place where they are supported to give some policy advice to government.