January 31, 2025

The people's house: building a new institution

32 minutes

In this discussion, Gene Tunny and I discuss my leading article in my Substack last week. There I agued that our political systems are built on representing people through elections whereas there’s another way to represent the people — by sampling. We can create bodies that are representative of the people because they’re chosen by lottery from the people.

And here’s the thing. The systems built on these two ways of representing the people are so different they can be thought of as two different strands of DNA in our democracy. And I want that other way to represent the people — as occurs in juries — to play a much larger role in our political system. But how to bring that about?

Well, it’s quite likely that Australia will have a hung parliament after the next election — that any government that forms will need the support of a growing cross-bench. So I want that cross-bench to demand as a condition of supporting one side or the other that it establish a citizen assembly.

And we need a standing citizen assembly, rather than temporary, subject-specific ones.

Why? For reasons discussed in the article — which is here.

Please join us in the discussion below.

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