Hi, and welcome to Designing Open Democracy Podcast. This is actually an auto recording that we had on the 21st of October 2017 that we decided to show to you guys again. And this event was called Citizens' Democracy, which was hosted by Brian Koo and Nicholas Morange.

As for their venue, the venue was gratefully sponsored to us by a co-working space called York Butter Factory at Melbourne. And the speaker we will be showing you today is Nicholas Gruen, who's a prominent Australian economist, as well as a commentator on economic reforms, innovation and public policy. He's currently the CEO of Lateral Economics and Economic Consultancy firms, covering economic reform and public policy, as well as a chairman of Open Knowledge Foundation Australia, who supports and empowers those who believe in open knowledge and transparency.

So a common thing you will find in his talk is how, essentially, current mass media is like mental junk food. And what this leads to is essentially capturing the population's 30-second sound bite of what they observe, rather than the well-considered opinion of the population. So a way of potentially solving this is through the use of citizen juries, which Hubert will explain in this coming talk.

So let's lead you in with an introduction that he will be speaking about himself and what he wants to explain about this idea of his. So in 2008, Barack Obama was elected. The most important thing that was happening at the time was that the world was sliding into the greatest economic catastrophe since the Great Depression.

And the social media was a big deal. And so we held a policy brainstorming session. And you might not have heard of this very well.

It didn't get a lot of publicity. But anyone could make a policy suggestion and they could vote other people's policy suggestion up and down the ladder. And so we were going to have true internet mediated direct democracy, at least by way of recommendation to the powers that be.

What do you think was the suggestion that came first at a time like that for the US government, the suggestion that won the click baiting competition for voting policy up or down to legalise marijuana?

The second one was to release Barack Obama's birth certificate. And spare a thought for the Americans. They have a fairly unique problem that it seems is much less of a problem in any other country, which of course is the abduction of their citizens by aliens.

So that's what came first, second and third in a very early attempt to bring the internet to bring us direct democracy. So welcome to what I call What's Pop Democracy. You'll be familiar with it.

We live in it right now. And one way of summarizing will be to say that that is what the essential philosophy of our democracy is all about. Of course, you're not forced not to think before you vote, but the whole way in which media works is simply to try to arouse your attention, your emotions, your disgust, your resentment, and so on.

So we are now at a kind of extraordinary point where a policy which was to withdraw from, for the British to withdraw from Europe got up, although it's quite unclear what that meant or in what circumstances it would be regarded as a good idea and what circumstances would not be regarded as a good idea. Is the vote for Brexit, a vote for Brexit if the European Union won't do a deal?

Is it a vote to simply jump out of the EU and take the tariff wall of the EU presents other countries?

Or is it predicated on the idea that we ought to be able to do some kind of deal?

Is it predicated on the idea that by coming out of Europe, Britain would say 350 million pounds a week, which could then be spent on the NHS, and buses driving around England claimed and so on, quite wrongly, and so on and so forth. And then we have our friend, Mr. Trump, a kind of, well, it's hard to describe Mr.

Trump, but not really like anything we've ever seen before. Psychopathic, presumably, completely disorganised mental state, and there it is, the President of the United States. Now, in fact, I want to suggest to you that, just as Australia led the world on lots of things to do with policy, we were one of the world leaders in economic reform, and we did it better than most countries in the 80s, particularly in the 90s, we led the world on this as well.

This is the man who led it, and though his reign is somewhat over now, we lived with the upshot of that, which is that the greatest achievement of the parliament that assembled in 2013 after the 2013 election was the elimination, or was the blasting away of a difficult policy consensus that had been reached over the previous 15 years to price carbon. How many people in this room would like to have a guess at what damage that does to the budget every year?

Ten billion dollars. A third of the budget deficit every year because we abolished carbon pricing. What is significant about that policy is not that I'm against it and most of you will be against it, I think.

What's significant about it is that most parliamentarians were against it. 80, 90 percent of parliamentarians thought it was a completely crazy thing to do. And somehow this system worked itself into a position of implementing it as the signal achievement of the incoming government, as is happening.

And that's a way in which we beat the Brits to Brexit and the Americans to Donald Trump. And one analogy I want to suggest to you is what's happening is that our society is being optimized for the things that evolved on the African Savannah. And I would say this is true of many industries, many aspects of our lives.

And I want to suggest to you that one of the number of things that evolved on the African Savannah was that you didn't eat food that smelled in a way that disgusted you. You liked clean food, you liked food that was rich with fat, you liked sweet food. And that's what we've got.

And food that is very close to being nutritious and has certainly been, a lot of loving care has been given to what it is, is now poisonous. And that's roughly what's happening in democracy. We are getting pretty much exactly what we're asking for in certain kinds of respects.

That's an uncomfortable thing to say, but otherwise, unless you want to play the game, which most people do, that's all those nasty politicians of We're the Good Guys. I don't think that will get you anywhere, but that's how the game is played. We're part of this just as we buy McDonald's handbills.

I want to suggest two very simple ideas to you about democracy. These both come from a rather patrician fellow, quite right-wing. They don't have their sort of logical ideas, so you can dispense with whether they're right-wing or left-wing.

They're basically logical ideas. Joseph Schumpeter is the man. He was the Finance Minister of Austria, as our other speaker might know, was a professor at Harvard for quite a long time and a great historian of economics and a great economist himself.

Here are the two ideas that stood out for me when I read the book about 40 years ago and then I reread the two chapters on democracy. Very simple architectural ideas. There's the first one that one of the fundamental issues of democracy is to navigate the Cognitive Division of Labor.

And in many senses, the Cognitive Division of Labor is kind of the serpent in paradise. Because, of course, a Cognitive Division of Labor introduces principal age and problems. It introduces the need to trust certain people to act on your behalf, meanwhile they have your own interests.

So, that's the first idea. Schumpeter uses the expression leadership. I'm not going to worry about that too much.

The basic idea I'm taking from it is the idea of a cognitive division like that. That even quite simple social organizations have to break themselves up. So, if you look at any club, it's got a treasurer, a secretary, a president, and so on.

That's basically the idea. And the second idea is this. That if you go down to the shop to buy bread, you will engage your rational faculties.

You will know something about what you want. You'll have a lot of background experience in it. You will be trying to attend to a practical question, which is, what's the best bread I can get, as far as sort of divided by value of month for month, if you know what I mean.

That's not the world that we're in in politics. In politics, we actually don't, there's no rational reason for us to vote at all, in terms of our self-interest, because we have an infinitesimal chance of influencing the result. So we're actually about something else in politics, and politics, I will assert to you, based on this authority and your own experience, is essentially run by emotion.

That's the motive force behind it. The motive force. Sorry?

The motive force. Well, thank you. Yes, I should investigate the...

I should investigate the etymology of that. So, those emotions can operate for good. And I'm going to call these feminine emotions.

And this is the emotion of binding us together from within, as it were. And there is also something that goes pretty horribly wrong. And that's typically emotions which take a strongly masculine character.

Now, I'm not saying masculine bad, feminine good. But I am saying masculine is much more likely to come with some pretty nasty costs. Feminine can go wrong too.

But at the moment, I want to suggest to you that we have a polity which is massively pushed in the direction of one set of emotions. So, here is something that somebody once said. They were a, they are, I suppose, a captain in the Australian Navy.

It was quite a joy to hold those little kids' hands and watch them smile. You know, who said, well, what's the event that person's talking about?

It's the same event as that expression. And the first expression was said first, and it was made clear to Commander Norman Banks that it wasn't appreciated by his political masters. And what happened in our politics is that one particular type of emotion came to dominate.

And the problem is most of the things we're stuck worrying about are things that require quite a lot of thought. They'll require compromise and so on. And we have a style of political discussion which actually makes that very difficult.

It doesn't help that the size of soundbites are kind of collapsing steadily. And we have a style of politics, which I call politics as culture war. You know you're on a particular side, you know you're the good guys, and then there are the bad guys.

And we play, you know, we police their speech, we do the whole, it's the works. So, and then this is then, this is then strengthened by our press, which plays on emotion and all of the toxic kind of emotions. This is in Britain.

I was in London and I saw that poster. I was just horrified. I mean, here are wealthy people tearing up the social contract that allows them to be wealthy.

The rule of law, that they are, they're enemies of the people, a fine, Stalinist expression. And the same sort of thing has been happening in this country for years and so on. This is a nice little vignette for you.

Remember when the Indonesians blew away to Australians for smuggling drugs?

And of course, the Daily Telegraph were horrified and orchestrated national outrage that the Indonesians should be served callous. But of course, when they've been caught, the Daily Telegraph was on the other side. You know, throw the book at them, that's what they deserve and so on.

So not a word of that, of course. Power without responsibility. This is when you have the temerity to say that there should be some regulatory system which holds the media to some kind of account.

And so here we are with politics very much in this state and it's now official. So what might we do about it?

That's one of the things we need to do about it. We need, I think, to rebalance the way what kinds of emotions dominate in political debate. And I wish to turn to the origins of democracy to talk about that.

I'm not going to talk very much about participation. I'm going to talk about deliberation. And there's a whole sort of divide we could talk about there in questions or at some other time.

So here are these two ways of representing. So if we take Schumpeter's idea that we need a division of labor, but we can't have everyone having a view about everything any more than we would want everyone to have a view about every criminal case that goes before the courts. Then we need to represent the people and we need to have what I call cognitive elites.

They don't have to be more powerful or more important than anyone else, but they need to spend the time trying to think about the issues. We can do this by election or we can do it by law, which is the way we do it in juries, which is something like random selection or some similar process. It comes as a big surprise to a lot of people to know that the idea of having elections being a touchstone of democracy is a fairly recent idea.

It goes back to the French Revolution and the American Revolution in the late 18th century. Before that, democracy was much more associated with selection by lot. Going back to Athens, the Athenian boule, European cities like Venice and Lawrence during the Renaissance, juries in court and so on.

And here are some things about the different kind of politics that takes place. Elections, this is something that the more I've thought about, the more important I think it is, and I never really see people talk about it. This is again a very simple logical point.

If you want to represent people by elections, that is a competitive process. You cannot beat a politician without beating other politicians to the task of representing the people. And once you become a representative, you then, in your party, try and beat your opponents.

It's competitive and it is aristocratic, and according to both Aristotle and Montesquieu. Now, it has a democratic sanction because the people voted for it, but think about the people in parliament. How many of them, how they represent the age profile of the population, they are skewed in a particular way, and how they represent the education profile and the wealth profile of the population, and you can see the idea of it being aristocratic.

Here we have a unitary system where people's main problem is to try and get to an agreement. In a jury, your job isn't to beat anyone, it's to try and come up with a conclusion that works, and your natural instinct is to compromise it so far as you can manage it to get to some sort of agreement that everyone is happy with. And it is democratic in this sense.

And here is a Greek word for you, which I think is really a fundamental word, and it doesn't mean freedom of speech, though it's sometimes translated as such, it means equality of speech. And one of the reasons I would argue that people like Pauline Hanson are doing as well as they are, is that Pauline Hanson, whether you like her or not, is an authentic politician, and people hear their voice much more through Pauline Hanson than they do through the brand management of many of the other parties. So the idea is then to say, we should be using this kind of mechanism much more.

Now there's been lots of experimentation with these mechanisms. There's a lot of field work which tells you that they work pretty well, and I won't. I will now race through some of these things, but I'll just show you this one.

I think this is a really important point. This was a Citizens' Jury about making Adelaide safe and prosperous, have a good nightlife that was safe. And imagine that being discussed on the radio.

The six foot two man and the two short women, well, they'd come in on the radio and they'd have a good old barn. That's how we do it. And this guy walks in and he goes, oh, I see, I see, there's a problem.

How would I know?

And they rapidly come to a conclusion. The upshot of this is that juries, the people on Citizens Juries almost invariably report the experience is a fantastically good one. The Citizens' Jury in Melbourne of the 43 or however many people were on the Citizens' Jury, two or possibly three people stood for local council at the next election.

That gives you some idea of how that, of how generative it is to this kind of activity. And so what we've got here is the kind of context in which this kind of sentiment might have a better chance. So I'll skip through that, because I'm getting a wind up, but I will tell you what I want to get at, a sort of utopia for me, or where I would like to, you know, you make me the nebulous dictator, this is what you'll get.

And then I'll talk about how I think we should get there. I think we should acknowledge that we are in a fantastic world that has been built over the last 200 years since the French and American revolutions. It's a massive success with some very mousy toxic bits in it.

And so, where the 18th century and the 19th century was about setting up checks and balances between a lower house representing the people and an upper house representing property, I think we should be now moving, and we will now move towards checks and balances between the people as represented by their elected representatives and the people represented as they are in a jury. Now, how can we get there?

Well, I think it's not that hard to get there, because this would be a fantastically powerful form of political activism. If you imagine Tony Abbott promising to abolish carbon pricing, and a Citizens' Jury is funded, and a Citizens' Chamber exists, the media would report it, it would be political news, and I have great confidence that when people concentrated on the two policies and found that one was a policy, the one that was for carbon pricing, and the other one was really a kind of set of sound bites to get through a radio interview, and that it was going to cost them, they were going to have to come up with another $10 billion a year of tax money to get rid of this thing, they would have voted for, they would have prevented. So I think the split would have been something like 60, 70% pro-carbon pricing at a time like that.

That, I think, would be on its own very politically powerful, and a fine piece of legitimation for the sort of world that I want to move towards. That's a list of things that I'd be prepared to defend at some stage, the qualities of the democracy we have now, and I'll just finish with a couple of points on this. I've actually intimated this before.

A lot of discussion about democracy involves a magic trick. The magic trick is that the politicians are letting us down. The politicians are the bad guys, we're always the good guys.

So, we the people always, it disappears like the lady here, whenever we the people need to disappear. When some dirty work is done, like keeping people out of our country, that's the nasty politicians that do that, not the people who vote for the nasty politicians. And I think that really damages a lot of thinking about how to fix democracy.

And I'll finish on this point. Here's a friend of mine, Joe Trippi, talking about this is in 2007. He engineered the Howard Dean campaign, and he was tremendously optimistic about the power of the internet because it was going to bring the people into politics, which, you know, if you remember what Bernard says in Yes Minister, Prime Minister Hacker says to him, it seems that civil service exists just to prevent politicians implementing the sacred promises they've made to the people.

And Bernard says, well, somebody has to. So anyway, Joe and I had part of a bet at this point when I said he was wrong. I think he thinks he was wrong.

But a great deal, so this is much more risk. I should have a date on that. But a great deal of the activism to fix democracy is based on this idea that we, the people, need to take charge.

That was the slogan for Brexit. That was the slogan for Trump. That was the slogan for carbon price.

It wasn't the slogan for carbon price, and I was lying to you. But it just shows you, or pay attention when people are getting into demagogue mode. So here, the founder of Medium and Twitter says, he's going to fix it all up.

He's realized that things don't work. So I tweeted this. But here is another, I'll just show you one other invention in the hyperventilating space of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are going to save us from democracy.

I'm leading Lyft to fix politics. Here's how. So he wrote all this stuff up.

And always the analogy is that it's all about the app, and the app's going to, and to put it in economic joke, and the app's going to lower transactions costs and won't that be terrific?

And that will bring the people in. And of course, the story I've told you is that actually, we need a few more transactions costs in there, that the transactions costs that we've got in there about electing representatives are somehow going wrong. And I'm proposing a way to fix that.

Anyway, so here are the comments. Proud to know you and admire what you're doing. Let me know how we can help.

Thanks, Mary. Appreciate the support. We need more people like you in the world.

Excited to see what excellent progress things are. And every one of these, you go girl, comments gets a reply. I popped in.

I wish you all the best with your adventure, though I fear you're playing by the rules of the existing system. And I made an argument. Life went on.

He wasn't interested in that. He's in automatic pilot mode. Maybe it will work.

Who knows?

So I will leave you there. But I think if you, if anyone tells you this is a solution, get them also to define the problem and give it a good shake and see. I mean, they have to, the solution might not be a solution.

But often, so the solutions people want to build, the solutions that got, got introduced for other problems like finding a date and various other things. So I'll leave it there. Okay, and thank you very much.

Thanks for listening to the end of this podcast. I hope you learned something new today about alternative ways of doing governance through this topic about Citizens Juries. And if you have any feedback that you would like to provide to us, you can reach us at contact at designingopendemocracy.com.

So with that in mind, remember to always think outside the ballot box.