Page 580 - Week 02 - Thursday, 22 February 2018
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I sincerely thank Mr Coe for bringing this motion forward. Deliberative democracy is something the Greens have been talking about for I do not know how long, but possibly decades; certainly a long time. The Greens are very concerned that our democratic system is not functioning or certainly not perceived to be functioning as well as it could be. We want to see ways to make it better, to make both better decisions and decisions the community as a whole feel are better decisions. I am very pleased at all the positive comments Mr Coe made about deliberative democracy in general.
I was very pleased to see the Law Society’s report on this particular exercise. I was one of the people they spoke to, and their report basically said it was a very good process which should be continued. Yes, they had a number of small concerns; I remember talking to them about the advertising process. They said it had unnecessarily politicised it. While that statement had some truth in it, the problem was encouraging people to believe there was an issue, because if there were not an issue people would not sign up to devote at least three weekends to this exercise.
The subject is certainly not the first thing I would have chosen for deliberative democracy. As someone who was on the public accounts committee in the Seventh Assembly, we did an inquiry into CTP—Mr Coe was involved in that as well, from memory—and I admit that it was not the most inspiring thing I have ever been involved in. I suppose I bring that experience into my feelings about that, and that is one of the reasons I am so positive about this specific trial.
Mr Coe talked about the concept that we were not going to be able to scrutinise this bit of policy development. I would argue the opposite in this case: I think the Assembly has a much better chance to scrutinise the policy development. We have just had a bill presented by Mr Ramsay about courts and other justice. I have not read it but I assume it is entirely worthy; I do not know. But my point is that the public debate in terms of getting that organised has been very low.
I know a little bit more about the Lakes Amendment Bill because I will be speaking on it, and there has not been a citizens jury for that. There has not been a lot of public debate about this. The government has seen some issues and some public servants have developed what I am shortly going to say is an entirely reasonable solution to those problems. My point is that most of our policy development is not out there in the open. Arguably, it should be more open, and that is one of the reasons that deliberative democracy is a good idea.
To say that this one is shrouded in secrecy is simply, in my opinion, not the case. I went along to a half day on one of the weekends so I was able to see the jurors and the facilitators in action. I must say, the facilitators appeared to me to do an excellent job. All the information the jurors were given was available to the public as a whole—including, of course, the 25 members of the Legislative Assembly—to see via the your say website. If we want to be informed as to what is happening in terms of that policy development, we can be informed; it is all out there.
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