A key member of Australia’s Inner Commentariat, Rob Burgess, recently wrote a column Should Australia try Democracy. To which one Frank Aquino responded:
Back in the day, it was the obvious approach to take give that we couldn’t all fit inside Parliament House and vote on every matter before it. Now of course we “virtually” can. Sooner or later we’ll drift intentionally or unintentionally into an online form of democracy in which everyone votes independently (an egomocracy?) making it impossible for special interest groups to skew the will of the people to their own ends. In a sense it has already started, as this and other debate forums demonstrate. All that’s missing is the voting mechanism (and the commitment, of course). Possibly even in our lifetimes. What do you think?
Frank is correct – it has already started. And YourView is providing a voting mechanism. Indeed, not just “a” voting mechanism but two: the raw vote (like other online polling) and the “collective wisdom”. It is the latter, of course, which – when properly identified – ought to be what guides and constrains government in a true democracy.
Jed Blore
paulmonk
Tim van Gelder
In Spain the movement of “indignados” and people related to Democracia Real Ya are already proposing ideas like this. One of their proposals is, for example, what they label as Democracia 4.0, which would essentially allow citizens to vote from home on issues they’re interested, but it goes further than that, a certain number of votes (estimated by number of total citizens in the nation and number of seats) by citizens would actually take a proportional number of seats back from parliament and into the citizens. There’s a lot more information about this in Spanish, but follow the link below for a brief outline in English.
http://demo4punto0.net/en/node/16
Let’s not forget also that Switzerland has a great number of referendums allowing citizens to vote on key issues. Or, what Iceland did, getting random people to discuss how to draft the new constitution, streaming the meetings online, and getting citizens to give feedback online which was then discussed in the next meeting. The constitution went through this, very public and transparent, process for months and was then voted upon in a referendum.
There are a lot of ways that our democracy could become a lot more transparent and participatory. The problem is that there is no willingness to do so from the political and corporate elite.
Thanks Iurgi. Very interesting and relevant. I’m going to read up about the Spanish Democracy 4.0 movement.
You say “The problem is that there is no willingness to do so from the political and corporate elite.” Correct. The guiding idea behind YourView is that this shouldn’t deter us from from making our own democracy more transparent and participatory. YourView isn’t asking permission from our political and corporate elite. It is providing Australians a platform to make their views known. Eventually, when we have sufficient momentum, we’ll take a place at the table – and maybe even change the table itself.
Thanks for your reply Tim. I agree with you. I think the idea behind YourView is interesting, I’ve been involved from the start and I hope it is a great success. I sense, there’s an increasing number of people dissatisfied with how things are going and I hope we get organised for real meaningful change.
Thanks.