A Democratic Charter for Australia

Some useful background information on the subjects under debate can be found here.

The Charter: please send comments and amendments to this

. Views we have received so far are listed here: contributors will normally be identified by name, unless you tell us you would prefer not. We have taken account of a number of comments. People who have already signed the charter are listed here.

The Genesis of the Charter

It was early 2004. The North Shore Peace and Democracy group had successfully run a discussion forum, “Truth and Democracy: Casualties of War?”, and were beginning to discuss a second forum for election year, “Secrets and Lies Destroy Democracy” (see www.sydneypeace.com for transcripts of both sessions). The group was discussing all the problems we felt had been exposed by the debates and politicking of the previous few years, around the Iraq War, Tampa, and so on, when someone – the late and sorely missed Jim Wilks – said: “you know, we ought to be saying not just what is wrong with our democracy now, but what we believe would be the better way: what would we feel would be the right way for a democracy to run. Then we should be trying to get politicians of all parties to sign up to those principles.”

From that thought was born the Charter for a Democratic Australia. It took a lot of thought and a lot of debate – and it is still really very much a draft for discussion. Let me tell you something about those debates, and how we came to the shape of the current draft.

We started by looking at a lot of pre-existing documents, to see if they could help both by providing wording for some key clauses, and to avoid massive wheel-reinvention programs. There’s a full list on the website, but obvious starters were the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Charter for Human Rights, and various Bills of Rights, including the ACT one and the Democrats’ draft Bill of Rights for Australia. These turned out to be surprisingly unhelpful: they tend to the demotic declaration of rights of freedom of association and expression, and are in general a bit short on definitions of what this might mean in practice. For example, the International Convention on Human Rights, Article 25:

Every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity, without any of the distinctions mentioned in article 2 [race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status] and without unreasonable restrictions:

(a) To take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives;

(b) To vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors;

Necessary as a starter (and pretty much completely in operation in Australia), but not enough for what we needed.

Conversely, a number of treatises on the improvement of democracy tend to the specific solution to a particular problem – eg lengthy debates on the methods of choosing a President in a post-monarchy Australia, or discussions of the relative merits of various forms of proportional representation. Important issues, but not about the principles by which a healthy democracy might be identified. We also decided that we weren’t looking for technical fixes and changes to the rules and procedures of how things run, but, as Jim put it: “what is it about a healthy democracy that most people believe that we already have, but which isn’t working well in today’s world. Some of our members have interesting arguments to put about how much healthier it would be if we could return to forms of direct democracy – referendums, town meetings and so on. But we were and are worried about how the representative democracy we have now works now – and wanted to try to define how a healthy representative democracy would look by going back to first principles and attempting to write down clearly what those principles might be.

1 Representing the People …

These questions were much in debate at the turn between the 19^th and 20^th centuries, when universal suffrage was just beginning to spread around the world, and a number of newly created states were trying to define their constitutions. (The Constitution of Australia is almost perfectly useless for our purposes, being entirely concerned with State vs Federal rights, not with people’s rights.) Amongst the best of these is ex-President Theodore Roosevelt’s speech to the Ohio Constitutional Convention of 1912, which includes this timeless injunction: “Unless representative government does absolutely represent the people it is not representative government at all.” We felt this went to the heart of our concerns: in particular, we felt that our representatives had voted on a number of key issues as their party wanted, not how we as their electors had wanted.

The classic demagogue’s response to this comes from Burke, as quoted by Tony Abbott at our first forum – my fault; I’d pointed it out to him at the meeting to arrange the forum. In 1774, Edmund Burke said to the Electors of Bristol: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” However, he was writing in an era with no mass media to inform his electors' opinions, and no easy way for those opinions to reach him at a distance. (His electors also chose to vote him out at the next election). In the 21st century, we can do better, and require our representatives to properly represent us. Their electorate is as well, if not better, informed than they are on the issues at stake – eg on the evidence for the existence of weapons of mass destruction – and it is comparatively easy for representatives to consult with their electorate when there is contention and discord, whether by flying back to their constituency or by using modern communications technology.

So, we come to our first few principles, on

Representation:

The primary responsibility of elected representatives is to represent their electorate.
This implies regular open engagement with the communities they represent.
If representatives are receiving high levels of local communication about an issue, then consultative processes should be put in place.

2 … Not Representing Other Interest Groups and Parties

The key problem here is that our representatives are not in fact in general representing their electors, they are representing other people: in some cases they are representing others who are lobbying or funding them, in almost all cases they are representing their party first and their electorate second. It has become very rare for a politician in Australian parliaments to vote their conscience (or the will of their electors) against the party line, unless they have already been deselected or announced their retirement at the next election. It is much more common for people to vote against their party in other major democracies, such as the UK and USA.

Parties tend to make much of their mandate, but there are very few electors who agree with every word of the manifesto of the party for whom they voted - still less, in the Australian system, with every word of the manifesto of the party to whom their final preferences were redistributed. It is far from clear, to give the most egregious example, that the last federal election vote gave a popular mandate to the war in Iraq or to the privatization of Telstra, when so many electors made their final choice on the grounds of economic management alone.

So, another batch of principles, on funding and party control:

Funding:

Sources of funding to all politicians and political parties both directly and indirectly should be public knowledge.
This includes full disclosure to the sources of funds on how their money has been spent.

Party Control:

The party control of representatives in Australia is excessive.
Representative democracy should not be compromised by excessive control over voting according to party dictates.
It is not reasonable for our representatives to assume that because they were elected under a political party label, their electorate automatically support the party position on all issues.

3 Leadership and the Role of the Prime Minister / Premier

Too often in recent times the voting of our representatives hasn’t even been along party lines as set out in manifestos and so on at the election. Instead, they are representing the current views of their leaders, even when these differ markedly from the election ‘mandate’. Modern Prime Ministers have incredible powers of patronage and discipline: vote with them and be in receipt of bounties of ministerial and other posts, and ambassadorships and other public posts on retirement; vote against them and risk de-selection and ignominy. Combined with the doctrines of cabinet collective responsibility and party discipline, it is difficult to see why a backbencher needs a brain to exercise his or her judgement as advised by Burke, as they are merely ‘lobby fodder’, reduced to exercising their conscience only late at night off the record in bars with journalists when the alcohol has loosened the tongue.

The power of the prime minister needs to be restrained for our democracy to work well:

Leadership:

A prime minister who assumes or is given presidential status or authority is contrary to our democratic system of government, and is likely to lead to autocracy.
We need to return to the intended role of the PM as the chair and spokesperson for the cabinet and the government.
Major decisions such as to take Australia to war must be made by the full authority of our elected representatives in Parliament, not by a Prime Minister or Cabinet alone.

4 Information, Honesty and Trust

If we are going to require our representatives to listen to us and give greater weight to our opinions, we need to be sure that we and our fellow electors are as well-informed as possible on the issues we want to raise. This means that we need information to be readily available, and for our leaders to be honest with us on what is happening, what they know, and what pressures are being brought to bear on Australia by outsiders. We have to recognise that this means accepting complexity and moving away from a black and white, good and evil, right and wrong world. We believe that a reduction in name-calling, sloganising and nitpicking amongst politicians would be welcomed by most of the public.

In that context, the next sets of principles are pretty self-explanatory:

Honesty:

There should be full, frank and honest communication between a representative and their electorate.
This includes accounting for past actions and foreshadowing future intentions on actions being done and decisions being taken in the name of the electorate.
There is no place for ‘spin’ in a true democracy.
When dishonesty is revealed, political representatives should stand down.

Trust:

We need to re-establish trust in the political process.
The electorate need to know both immediate and broader political agendas.
If the politicians cannot trust the electorate to understand the truth and come to informed judgments, then how can the electorate trust them?

Information:

The foundation of a democracy is a fully informed electorate.
There should be no need to keep information secret except in limited genuine cases of national security.
The media provide the main channel for elected representatives to account for their actions, and elected representatives should endeavour to deal impartially and honestly with media representatives. The media must be free to run newsworthy, factual stories without intimidation by any government.

5 Minorities

We also recognise that there is the potential for democracy to be ‘the dictatorship of the majority’, and we therefore need to protect the rights of minorities:

Minority Rights:

The rights of minorities should not be dependent on the goodwill of the majority but be protected by laws based on human rights.

6 The Charter for a Democratic Australia

That’s it. The Charter in its current draft form consists of the principles set out above, plus two final statements:

National Identity:

Australia needs to re-establish its past proud place in the world community, which has been undermined in recent years.
Democracy is a high principle that can only be maintained if those in power are true to these principles.

7 A Note on Direct Democracy and Political Parties

You can't deal with all of the detail of modern legislation by having referenda on every part of every decision. There are simply too many decisions made by elected bodies on our behalf. I spent several years as a local councillor in a London borough - which is a unitary authority with enormous responsibilities, covering everything that both councils and states do in Australia from planning to education and social services, and a budget of around A$1billion. Representing my ward electorate properly meant reading through around 5cm thickness of papers each day, and going to around 8-9 meetings per week (as well as holding down a job, as the council work was unpaid). Even with that level of input, I could only actually look at planning and other decisions within my ward, decisions by committees and sub-committees that I chaired, and Policy & Strategy Committee items. And a great many of my colleagues didn’t even manage that.

We simply have to delegate the great majority of these decisions to representatives. If we don’t delegate them to elected representatives, then by default they will get taken by non-elected administrators and by even less accountable bodies like agencies and private/public finance bodies.

Similar problems of sheer volume will guarantee that, even if some people’s desire to outlaw political parties was enacted, equivalent (and, if unlawful, clandestine) ‘mutual support voting groups’ will always arise amongst the elected. In my borough, I had to cast a vote on many issues which I had no time at all to comprehend: I had to trust that my fellow caucus members and committee chairs were making sensible recommendations, as they had to trust me. (Or I suppose I could have abstained, with essentially the same outcome). Similar problems arise in the electorate’s ability to comprehend a (say) federal election in which there are ten independent candidates, each of which has delivered an A4 folded leaflet describing at most the four or five most important of their policies. You and I might go to the web and look at the rest of the manifestos, but most of our fellow electors will plump on the basis of very limited information (or none, if they don’t actually open the leaflets). And when the chosen make it to Canberra, they will start a big program of trading policies until they get majorities for enough of what they wanted: for convenience, we will call the trading group that emerges a political party.

Now, to consultation, and how we could actually use direct democracy.

Clearly, from what I’ve already said, I think you can only use direct democracy for major issues. Some of these can potentially be mandated (eg changes in a Bill of Rights, should we be so lucky as to get one). Being a democrat, I think that the definition of major ought to be decided by the people – ie if some sufficiently large number of people want to have a say, then some form of systematic consultation should be organised. If it is an issue that has national or statewide implications, and it can wait for some months for resolution, some form of referendum is appropriate. But it shouldn’t have to be confined only to the few ‘big ideas’ that fall into that class.

The principles in the Charter suggest that: “If representatives are receiving high levels of local communication about an issue, then consultative processes should be put in place.” How? There are essentially two or three candidate methods: meetings, surveys, and web-based consultations (which are probably a form of survey). Each has advantages and disadvantages.

Town meetings and the like are always subject to capture by ‘stacking’ groups: I remember a meeting of the Tunks Park Consultative Committee at Crows Nest that was called to consult the community on alternative landscaping plans once the (huge) works structures for the Northside Storage Tunnel were removed, where the majority of those actually present (ie 10 out of 15) wanted to keep the big concrete piers because they’d be great for fishing from. Fortunately for democracy, they were ignored: if the meeting had had any legislated power of decision-making, we’d have been at the start of a great round of community unrest and multiple meetings as all the people who didn’t care what sort of greenery was laid, so long as it wasn’t concrete, had to muster whatever majority was necessary to overturn the first meeting’s decisions.

The other fun tactic for meetings is, if you’ve failed to adequately stack the meeting at the start, then keep the debate going until the others drift away, then take the vote once you have the majority of those left 9or until those left are so bored and frustrated that they’ll vote for anything just to get it over). A favourite Trot tactic since before the icepick, now picked up by web trolls.

Surveys of opinion have a bad press, mainly for statistically quite small errors in predicting election outcomes. In practice, what we’re talking about here isn’t subject to those kinds of errors. The reality is, the survey outcome only really matters if the representative is going to be persuaded to vote a different way to what they were going to anyway. Being realistic, the only time this is going to happen is if the survey suggests that a more than statistically significant majority of their electorate is opposed to their current party line, and cares enough for it to potentially affect the next election. Quite small samples can establish whether this is plausible, and the representative would then be wise to get a big survey done so they have evidence for why they voted their conscience when the party carpets them.

Web-based opinion-seeking (like the SMH Webdiary) is in some respects a very limited and self-selecting survey, but has the advantage of allowing respondents to explain their position in detail, and to attempt to persuade others to their side. I think I’d quite like to see a world in which every parliament member has a Webdiary-type platform for their constituents to share their views on the issues of the day (with well-funded and advertised public access in libraries and town halls and internet cafes).