Page 581 - Week 02 - Thursday, 22 February 2018
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The jury has given their initial report. I have read that through, and it has proposed a number of principles. From that have come a number of possible options, and right now I understand that the actuaries are beavering away to try to work out how that would work. I am quite happy that the actuaries beaver away at the back end because that is well beyond my capabilities, even when I was younger and my maths was better.
I am totally in favour of the idea of getting the deliberative democracy process right. That is one of the reasons that I have concerns about Mr Coe’s motion. The first obvious problem, of course, was that while the CTP deliberative citizens jury is still in play, there has been another one: the carers voice panel was formed to design the ACT’s carers’ strategy. Why was that not part of this motion? If this motion is actually about ensuring that we do deliberative democracy better, it logically would have been part of it. I am not sure why Mr Coe omitted it. It is possible that Mr Barr’s suggestions yesterday about donations were relevant to that; I do not know. But it is a surprising omission.
I admit that this amendment was circulated only this morning, but in this amendment we have tried to look at something to help advance the cause of democracy in the ACT, particularly deliberative democracy. We are noting that the CTP panel is not a standalone thing; it is part of a process. I understand the carers strategy has been completed. The Assembly last year voted to do a deliberative democracy and participatory budgeting process feeding into the 2019 budget. That is going to be really interesting. And the government has just started doing an online community panel. All of these are trying to go in the same direction—deliberative democracy to improve our democracy.
I think we should really focus on the “deliberative” part of it, which is a bit of where Mr Coe went to in his remarks. One of the considerable issues with how we do our democracy is that people in general do not have access to enough information to make informed decisions. Partly this is because they do not allocate enough time for that, understandably, given all the other things that people have to do in their lives just to keep them going. But one of the big pluses of the deliberative democracy process is that a representative group of people will actually spend the time and get the information provided to them to make better informed decisions.
My amendment talks about four processes and notes that they aim to broaden the range and number of Canberrans to participate in and have input on major decisions about our city and the direction of policy reform. Each of these exercises is going to provide new learnings which will improve our government and improve the outcomes for all Canberrans. That is the whole idea of the exercise.
I am calling on the Assembly to support a referral for a committee inquiry no later than the autumn sittings of 2019. I note that this general issue of consultation is something the planning committee has talked about as a possible inquiry. I am not in any way trying to suggest that the planning committee is the obvious place for this. I think all sides of the chamber have talked about these issues. We had an MPI about consultation, in fact, on Tuesday.
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