Putting the people into politics : The Australian Citizens' Parliament

The authors compare two initiatives designed to enhance public participation in Australia: the Australia 2020 Summit (conducted in April 2008) and the Australian Citizens’ Parliament (October 2008 — February 2009). The comparison centers on participatory inclusion and process design. Although both processes aim to prompt reassessment of the existing parliamentary political system and to generate ideas for improving it, different conceptions of participatory democracy underlie their designs. The 2020 Summit reflects the idea of participation as a process in which government officials consult with persons they identify as stakeholders. Questions are formulated in advance by officials for the purpose of eliciting information relevant to the task of formulating sound policy. In contrast, the Citizens’ Parliament (CP) emphasizes the primacy of the public in the policymaking process, and hence the importance of enabling citizens themselves to “set the agenda” for discussion. Participants are selected at random to achieve a demographically representative cross-section of the population as a whole. Instead of privileging the views of experts, the CP seeks to validate the knowledge participants have acquired through “lived experience.” The initial impression of the authors is that the Citizens’ Parliament succeeded in providing officials with more valuable, authentic, and innovative ideas than did the Summit. The authors speculate that the Final Report of the Citizens’ Parliament will have a greater positive impact on public participation than the governance recommendations from the 2020 Summit.