When I was up in Newcastle, I often listened to Karl Kruszelnicki's science show on JJJ . He is an obviously intelligent and knowledgeable man, who doesn't suffer from the arrogance that often comes with it. One of the features of his show was the ease by which he admitted he didn't know, and would either go off to research it so he had the answer next week; or people would ring in with the answer to the question which stumped him. I recall Karl saying once on the radio, after someone calling in helped him, "There is much wisdom in people".

The Federal and State governments are populated by professional politicians who are become more and more entrenched each year. They are managing the media in such a way, that they can make decisions with impunity, and only have to take notice of the electorate in a short period prior to elections. This is leaving us with inferior outcomes. Our government institutions lack vitality, vigour and relevance. This can be amended partly by greater participation of non-professional politicians in the government process. Basically tapping the profound wisdom that, as Karl commented, can be found in the people.

Non-elected Cabinet Ministers

The Imagining Australia folks in their book have a section on expanding eligibility for the Executive Cabinet. In the Westminster system the formal power of the Executive is spread across the Executive and Legislative. By the Constitution, the Executive is the Queen of England. Her representative in Australia is the Governor-General, who is constitutionally guided by Parliament.

The Governor-General heads the Executive Council. This contains the Governor-General and the Executive Cabinet. The Executive Cabinet is a collection of the Prime Minister and other Senior Ministers, such as the Treasurer, Foreign Minister, etc. The Prime Minister heads the Executive Cabinet and by convention guides the Governor-General. The real power of the executive lies in the hands of the Prime Minister, no matter how ambiguous and obtuse the Australian Constitution is in this area.

The Imagining Australia folks call Australian Government, "responsible cabinet government". Built as it is on the British tradition of responsible government. Even though self-government has survived in Australia since the 1850s to provide a relatively stable political structure, the Imagining Australia folks ask if it can be improved. They see one area of improvement being in opening up the Executive Cabinet to non-elected appointees.

There are two issues surrounding this. The Prime Minister through the wielding of absolute party discipline has become the dominant member in parliament, and has warped the cabinet system to a presidential style of singular executive. Another issue is that those that make up the numbers of the cabinet are often professional politicians with little experience of private industry, or of a non-political speciality. For instance, John Howard was last in private industry in 1974. Since then, a total of thirty-two years, he has been a professional politician.

The Imagining Australia folks write;

We propose broadening the pool from which ministers can be drawn. The prime minister should be able to appoint Cabinet ministers from outside of parliament. Any Australian with the appropriate expertise and experience should be eligible. These people need not be experts - after all, policy experts are often best situated in the public service. Rather they could simply be individuals who have been successful in relevant fields and who, by virtue of their political and managerial skills, would excel in a ministerial role.

As the authors note, it is not a radical idea. The US Executive Cabinet is entirely composed of appointments, rather than elected officials. The President and Vice-President are the only ones elected in the US cabinet. The danger in this system is that individuals who have been rejected in an election will still get appointed into powerful positions. A good example of this is former US Attorney-General John Ashcroft. He failed to win election in Mississippi, yet was appointed into a senior position in the cabinet despite being rejected by voters as unfit for public office.

Another issue that is not covered in the Imagining Australia book, is how the appointments would be approved. In the US system the Senate approves the Presidents appointments. This often means that those who appear unfit for an appointment are closely scrutinized. For instance Alberto Gonzalez, who had given legal opinion on Guantanamo Bay and the practices that were condoned there. Another is the current appointment of John Bolton. It would be in the interests of separation of powers that the Prime Minister puts any outside appointments to the Executive Cabinet through the Senate first, where they can be approved or rejected.

The Imagining Australia folks write;

Such people [those that may be suitable for an appointment to cabinet] could inject new life and ideas into policy-making, informed by sustained practical engagement with particular issues. In a nation of just 20 million people, governments should draw on talent from all walks of life - and should aim to produce a Cabinet that is representative of Australia in all its diversity.

While that is a nice sentiment, nowhere in their book do the Imagining Australia folks seek to draw on anything but specialists. The Imagining Australia book follows closely a doctrine of increasing the number of non-elected specialists into Australian government, economy, policy and culture - with a decreased level of accountability to the public. This is the weakness of the book in my opinion.

However I am comfortable with appointed cabinet ministers as long as the appointments are known well in advance of an election, and that they have to be approved by the Senate - and maybe Ratifiers and a People's Chamber too.

A People's Cabinet

Nicholas Gruen in a recent post to troppo armadillo, advocated a People's Chamber . Nicholas based it upon the shallowness, and homogeneity of political culture - the same base from which the Imagining Australia folks worked from in proposing appointed Cabinet members. In proposing a People's Chamber Nicholas instead saw inspiration in the original democracy itself, Athens . Athenian democracy incorporated aspects of sortition and direct democracy. Sortition is the process whereby officials are chosen through lottery, rather than election or appointment. Unlike post-enlightenment democracy, the Athenian model did not incorporate the principle of separation of powers, nor universal franchise.

The People's Chamber would be a third house in the parliamentary system. One where its representative would be chosen by sortition from the population to participate in government. The chamber would be approximately one hundred people. From a later thread, Ken Parish tentatively agreed with the principle once he determined it didn't require physical presence in Canberra to be effective. It should be noted Nicholas made no determination on any requirements in the physical presence of the chamber in his post, or subsequent comments, but Ken thought small periods of face to face meeting for the chamber were acceptable;

Maybe it could work if the People's House met for (say) 3 or 4 fortnight blocks each year. Any more than that and too many people would be precluded from membership, not only people in my position but single parents, most small businesspeople (including trades), and anyone who is still carving out a career where 3 years absence would adversely impact promotion prospects. That sort of length of time ought to be enough to work, although any shorter wouldn't. And I guess you could turn over the membership every year rather than every 3 years.

The important aspect of this proposal is that there is wider recognition that there is no legitimate voice of the people despite Australia's reliance on proportional voting. Pluralism has largely been destroyed by the parties, absolute party discipline and professional politicians.

Citizen's Representatives and Citizens Auditors

Scrymarch in the past has proposed sortitionists being injected directly into parliament. Chosen by lottery, and serving alongside elected politicians to be involved in forming government, opposition and independents. I cannot find a link for it, as much of Scrymarch's political philosophy is spread across comments rather than articles, but IIRC a considerable percentage was proposed - in the order of twenty-five percent.

Again this was to inject the people directly into the process and take advantage of their wisdom, ability to excel, and their non-political experiences while they are fresh. From a comment ;

I like indirect democracy, and community representatives; but the current mob are not representative. Which is where sortition and ratification comes in. Sortition puts people representative of the population in Parliament. Ratification ensures the consensus reality of the parliamentary village does not become too detached from the people. I see the process of ratification as a final referee, similar to a presidential veto, but with a clearer and less factional mandate.

I think the pace and detail of legislation is inherently too great to be sensibly weighed by a large electorate. Some delegation is required, by sheer division of labour. Mencius made the same point 2300 years ago.

Direct democracy mechanisms can be used well. The Swiss use Citizen Initiated Referenda to great effect. I'm a fan of that system. But the Swiss are pretty civic minded, and that takes time to cultivate. The number of proposals are also an order of magnitude less than legislation.

Another proposal of Scrymarch's was Citizen Auditors. These are spontaneous citizen groups which rise up to audit government - a kind of flash-mob for government auditing. I think this would bring superior solutions, not in government waste, but in identifying expensive, ineffective and impractical policy - which ultimately has to be funded to be implemented. This would definitely take advantage of the wisdom and application of the people and in my opinion would bring some of the fastest returns and improvements.

This proposal would require supporting legislation, which I doubt parliament would implement - government prefers acting privately and avoiding the public space as much as possible. This is also used to avoid criticism. Given the slow oscillication of the Australian system in the change over of government, the incumbent needs to be exposed to more pressure and criticism so that they take responsibility for their actions.

A Ratification Model

In an article titled, "The Fourth Estate" , I proposed a ratification model of parliament for an Australian Republic. In this model the Ratifiers exist mainly to kill repugnant legislation and bills that are not in the public interest. A good example of this would be the US Patriot Act, or Copyright extensions and DMCA like clauses that came with the Au-US FTA.

The Ratifiers would be a flash-mob chosen by sortition for each bill that passes the Senate. They are like jurors for legislation, and only exist for a single bill, in the same way jurors only exist as a group for one case before disbanding. Each group of Ratifiers will consist of approximately one percent of the population. I wrote;

The Ratifiers;

• will have its members chosen by sortition.
• will consist of at least 1% of the population to vote on a bill or a judicial nominee.
• will not be allowed to excuse themselves from the process, however an abstinence will be counted as no.
• will require a greater than 50% no vote on a bill to send it back to the Senate.

Note that the Ratifiers are intended to be anonymous - a secret ballot for each bill. They are also not intended to meet face to face, nor to offer policy suggestions as Ratifiers on a bill. Though they may comment as citizens or affected individuals as part of the normal political discourse. I constantly write on the inability of Australian Government to adhere to legislation that respects our rights and liberties. This would address that issue.

Conclusion

The above article contains four different innovations on the parliamentary model, but all come from the same standpoint; tapping the profound wisdom of the people, and the knowledge that the people know what is best for them - consequently injecting them directly into the political process will only benefit the country above and beyond the current system.

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Tim Ellsworth argues that a free press is a better determinant of a modern democracy than constitutional separation of powers.

From the article:

The most interesting part of the FBI's reported misuse of the Patriot Act isn't the crime itself -- abuse of such broad reinterpretations of executive powers such as the USA Patriot Act and the Military Commissions Act are inevitable -- but the timing of when the abuses ended. They reportedly stopped around the time the warrantless wiretapping story broke.

Love it or hate it, the press has an important role in our little plutocracy: making the government accountable to the people in a way our Jeffersonian republic is sometimes lacking.

The warrantless wiretapping was a failure of separation of powers, the Executive chose to ignore the law, and the Legislative chose to excuse the Executive through Legislation. Ellsworth is correct that public opinion is a strong determinant in political behaviour in democracy and the mass media can have a large effect on what the public is thinking about, even if it can't dictate how the public will think about it.

Yet the free press has given the executive a pass more times than should be allowed for reasons of selfishness, commercial reality or choice of ideology. The run up to the Iraq war being a good example. A free press is better than a censored one, however, the presence of a free press does not produce improved political behaviour because it happens to exist.

We need direct auditing of government by citizens, who can spontaneously organise to conduct projects that dig through government actions and behaviour, including the vaunted 'national security' which has been an opaque rug for government to hide anything repugnant under.

This goes beyond the freedom of information acts, and makes government managerially responsible to a democratic horde of auditors.

Technical forms of production are very dependent on quality control to minimise the variation in their product from the requirements. This means the customer gets a consistent product or service every time. Consequently in industrial parlance quality means minimum of variation from the requirements or specifications. We can probably start looking at Parliament as having inbuilt quality mechanisms to produce quality legislation where policy substitutes in the role of requirements.

This was provoked by Lynn Allison's comment in a speech where she spoke on the Broadcasting Bill Amendment 2007:

I think it is not unreasonable to say that the government should have sorted out these problems before we had to deal with the bill itself.

Allison is talking about the Senate in quality control terms. I have not thought of parliament in that way, but it makes sense that there be statutorial rigour and mechanisms to ensure that legislation matches the specifications closely.

Unfortunately Australia's use of the Westminster system means that there is poor separation of powers between executive and legislative, so policy and legislation come from executive cabinet.

The committee systems are a relatively new innovation in the Australian federal system and act as an important process in collecting requirements from the end-users (and those ultimately paying for it) in the public.

Committees can also act as post production reviews of the product's (the legislation and policy's) performance. This suggests that the committees are more important than the time they get in the media or the public consciousness from a quality control point of view.

One of the reasons I am in favour of permanent sortitionist body, apart from being useful in unearthing corruption, is that they will be able to empirically review policy outcomes - act as an a non-political and non-partisan quality review board. The sortitionists basically act as customer representatives (they are customers as taxpayers).

Another idea I like is adam's of spontaneous citizen auditors, who can form as an active FOI body. Auditing government for corruption, but also policy outcomes.

The current government has control of the House and Senate through elected majorities, unfortunately, because of the strength of executive discipline in bloc voting, this has led to poor quality control outcomes. Legislation, as Allison is arguing, has not gone through a proper quality control process of review in cabinet or committee before being tabled as legislation in parliament.

It would be wise to view parliament from a quality control point of view, and audit it constantly, and frequently, from that perspective.