Equality by lot

In the pretty likely event of a hung parliament after the next Australian election, the cross-bench becomes kingmaker. I’m hoping — and expecting — the crossbench to seek greater use of citizen assemblies in governing Australia. But what comes next is crucial.

Some think it would be great if a citizen assembly was held on an important issue — or two or three. Allegra Spender proposes one on tax. Others want one on housing. It would be nice to see them go ahead. But I’m sceptical they can achieve a lot.

First, on their own, citizen assemblies can be useful in lots of circumstances, but I’d say they’re most successful where they solve problems for politicians.

Ireland has become the pin-up boy for citizen assemblies

They’ve probably acquired a higher visibility in Ireland than anywhere else. And two of them have gone very well — allowing same-sex marriage and the repeal of anti-abortion provisions of the constitution. That’s because both solved problems for the politicians.

Irish citizen assemblies haven’t done noticeably better than elsewhere on the other occasions where they typically created problems for the politicians. In these circumstances, if politicians can’t ignore the citizen assembly on account of the profile it’s acquired, they cherry-pick its recommendations.

More importantly, whether or not the politicians accept their recommendations, the citizen assemblies usually contemplated are temporary and, as such, don’t aspire to leave any institutional trace. They also rehearse existing relationships in which we the people propose and the Government disposes.

I’ve gone to some lengths to propose an alternative, A standing citizen assembly effectively operating as a third house. (There’s something similar in the German-speaking part of Belgium). It is not more ‘radical’ than existing suggestions. It establishes an institution with exactly as much formal power as the other citizen assemblies just discussed. None.

The idea that it is more radical comes from what I call its greater ‘imaginative vigour’. Without proposing any change in formal power structures, it follows through on the idea that a different logic needs to enter the system.

I don’t see a citizen assembly as a tricky new ‘hack’. Nor is it that important to me that it seems more democratic. That’s a good thing, but, as we’ve seen in Iraq and Afghanistan and as the ancient Athenians discovered during the Peloponnesian War, more democratic structures don’t always arrive at better decisions.

The more I’ve thought about representation by sampling as opposed to representation by election, the more deeply I’ve appreciated their differences.

By their nature, elections separate the governed from those who govern. That’s why Aristotle called selection by lot ‘democratic’ and elections aristocratic or oligarchic. Montesquieu and America’s founding fathers agreed.

Electoral systems are also intrinsically competitive. And the competition for votes rewards performativity, manipulation and dissimulation.

That plunges electoral democracy into deep pathologies.

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