Guy Beres

I admit freely that I have been too thoroughly disorganised to make a formal contribution to the 2020 Summit that has just taken place over the weekend in Canberra. Reading the press coverage and of course the usually insightful contributions from people across the blogosphere, however, I have still been thinking itinerantly over the last week about some of the big issues and questions raised. It is difficult to narrow one’s focus down to a single portfolio or a single idea that is “most important”, given the manifold challenges facing Australia in the coming years. It seems to me though that democracy itself in Australia and indeed across the Western world is in need of reforms that are aimed squarely at keeping people engaged. A healthy society requires that cynicism plays only a supporting role in our conceptualisation of democracy, not the director, producer and cinematographer as it often seems to today.

Now please bear with me and apologies in advance for erring on the side of the zany as I am about to over the fold.

Let’s turn first for a moment towards the democracy of the ancient world – there is an excellent and thought-provoking article from Professor Paul Cartledge here to consider as a starting point. While there are obvious and numerous criticisms that can be drawn owing to the moral backwardness of the era (for example: women and slaves were not entitled to participate in democracy, assembly-goers strictly needed to have had non-foreign parents), Athenian direct democracy is still held up as basically the first and one of the more radical forms of democracy practiced throughout human history. It is a hallmark of Athenian democracy that some of the most sophisticated criticisms made of it back in the day are criticisms that we would probably regard as “undemocratic” today, as Cartledge describes:

Intellectual anti-democrats such as Socrates and Plato, for instance, argued that the majority of the people, because they were by and large ignorant and unskilled, would always get it wrong. In these intellectuals’ view, government was an art, craft or skill, and should be entrusted only to the skilled and intelligent, who were by definition a minority. They denied specifically that the sort of knowledge available to and used by ordinary people, popular knowledge if you like, was really knowledge at all. At best it was mere opinion, and almost always it was ill-informed and wrong opinion.

In contrast, today, we seem to collectively be moving towards a view of democracy that actually favours the majority of the people being actively involved in decisions made on their behalf. The “democracy of the elite” favoured by Socrates and Plato has come to be viewed as synonymous with a certain sort of tyranny in today’s democratic societies. In Australia we know this too well. Our major political parties strive to be more representative, and yet many of us collectively wince when we consider how many trade unionists represent us on the floor of parliament in the Labor Party, and likewise how many lawyers and businesspeople from the Liberal Party do the same.

If a more participatory democracy is what we want in Australia, perhaps it is time to consider some options that increase the opportunities for ordinary people to interact with and influence the government. On this front, and it pains me to the very core to say it, I can see no more promising cue to draw hope from than that provided by today’s erstwhile destroyer of quality television programming, reality television. Yes, that’s right, reality television. As a disclaimer I have never voted on a reality television programme and I don’t recall ever watching a full show end to end without changing the channel (or the television off) in disgust. What interests me is not the content (at least currently), but the lure that audience participation provides. Does anyone really think that these shows would be as successful as they are without the crucial human interaction element, which allows viewers to influence the outcome?

For most of the last decade, television viewers have voted with their television remotes in relation to a swathe of reality television programmes, sometimes unfavourably, but quite often favourably. Some would interpret this as a function of declining television tastes and standards. I would prefer to interpret this at least partially as a function of the basic desire of people to have their say and express an opinion. Here then is a bold and perhaps trap-laden challenge for the Rudd Government: chance your arm with a modern direct democracy pilot! Rather than presuming to know what the people who voted for you think, how about taking a contentious policy decision that needs to be made and putting it direct to the people of Australia, through a television-based poll if that is the medium most likely to be easily digested?

It goes without saying that such a pilot would be an experiment open to widespread and popular ridicule, perhaps for the remainder of the term of the Rudd Government if it went spectacularly pear-shaped – which there is a reasonable chance it might. It would provide further succour to those critics who argue that schemes like the 2020 Summit betray the Rudd Government as a government short on ideas and unsure of how it should approach the administration of the nation. Furthermore, such a pilot would also arguably undermine the robust representative democracy that has served Australia satisfactorily over the past century.

On the other hand, it could be the first brave (and seemingly crazy) step that ushers in a new era of modern democracy; one in which most people, for the first time in living memory, re-engage with the processes of government. Imparting a modern spin on one of the most humbling and yet most fundamentally crucial acts in the civilised world – the casting of one’s vote – could well be the straw that sets the world on an inexorable march towards an improved democracy for the 21st century.

Tags: Direct Democracy, Reality Television

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 10:32 pm and is filed under 2020 Summit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.