What’s wrong with our political system?
We rightly have reasonable expectations that living in a democracy provides for the protection of citizens’ rights which includes that citizens actively participate in shaping society. The many dangers now facing us, environmental, economic and social show that our present system is not working. How can Citizen Assemblies change this?
Here you can compare the dismal problems with the current political process and how these can be corrected by Citizen Assemblies. Click on the button for each topic to toggle between how things are now, and what they could be like if we used citizen assemblies effectively.
Simon John Birmingham is a former Australian politician who was a Senator for South Australia between May 2007 to January 2025.
A member of the Liberal Party, he served in the Morrison government as Minister for Finance from 2020 to 2022 and as Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment from 2018 to 2020.
An award-winning writer, columnist, critic, academic, broadcaster, public intellectual and former political candidate. Dr Elizabeth Farrelly is trained in architecture and philosophy.
Elizabeth trained in architecture and philosophy, practiced in London and Bristol and holds a PhD in urbanism from the University of Sydney, where she is also a former Adjunct Associate Professor.
As an independent Sydney City Councillor (1991-95), Elizabeth initiated Sydney’s first heritage and laneway protection policies, and was inaugural chair of the Australia Award for Urban Design (1998). She was also Manager Special Projects at the City of Sydney during the Olympic preparations (1998-2000) and is an award-winning writer and published author.
Elizabeth holds a number of national and international writing awards. As Assistant Editor of The Architectural Review (London) Elizabeth edited the August 1986 special issue ‘The New Spirit’, which won the Paris-based CICA award for architectural criticism. Her other awards including the Pascall Prize, the Walter Burley Griffin Award, the Adrian Ashton Award and the Marion Mahony Griffin Award.
An articulate, interesting and engaging speaker, Elizabeth Farrelly is skilled at making complex issues accessible to diverse audiences both in Australia and overseas.
Dr Sonia Randhawa helped to establish the Sortition Foundation’s Australian branch. She has worked on recruitment for over 50 democratic lotteries, and is working with educators to develop curriculum for secondary school students on deliberative democracy. As part of the organisation’s commitment to acknowledging the First Nations people of Australia, she recently completed an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultural Competence course and is undertaking a Certificate IV in Training and Education.
A founder of the Coalition of Everyone, she focused on Citizens’ Assemblies, building capacity for deepening democracy. Previously she has worked on media democratisation, freedom of information and media freedom in her birth country, Malaysia and as a journalist in both radio and print. She holds a PhD in media history from the University of Melbourne, and an undergraduate degree in philosophy, politics and economics from the University of Oxford.
Iain Walker is the Executive Director of The newDemocracy Foundation, an independent non-partisan research institute exploring how to do democracy better.
nDF sees the democratic innovation problem to be solved in terms of the constraints on elected representatives as a result of the pressures of uninformed public opinion, with the solutions lying in public judgment mechanisms akin to the criminal jury. They design and operate real-world demonstration projects for elected representatives at all tiers of government, and their advisory work includes a range of governments internationally and projects for the UN Democracy Fund and OECD.
Emma Fletcher is Co-CEO of Australia’s leading deliberative democracy company – democracyCo. In this role she designs, and project manages large and complex engagement projects.
She has an exceptional ability to support governments in building genuine collaborative relationships and partnerships with key stakeholders.
Emma’s commitment and passion to raise the voices of all citizens within the democratic process is one part of the driving force behind the success of democracyCo. This vision is foundational in ensuring that democracyCo is a national leader in engagement.
Emma’s background is in public policy, having worked at the highest echelons of the public service in South Australia and abroad. Emma has an unparalleled understanding of the workings and challenges of government having worked across many different areas of policy, inter-governmental relations, politics and in Parliament.
Jay Weatherill AO is a former politician who was the 45th premier of South Australia, serving from 21 October 2011 until 19 March 2018. Weatherill represented the House of Assembly seat of Cheltenham as a member of the South Australian Labor Party from the 2002 election to December 2018, when he retired.
In 2015, Weatherill initiated the Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission to investigate opportunities and risks associated with expanding the state’s involvement in the nuclear fuel cycle. The Royal Commission report indicated that it was not commercially viable to generate nuclear power. Weatherill used the release of the report as an opportunity to undertake “one of the largest” deliberative democracy processes in Australia’s history. Weatherill stated early that a nuclear waste facility would need both public and bipartisan support.
In 2019, he was appointed as an industry professor at the University of South Australia. Weatherill moved to Perth in 2020 to lead the Minderoo Foundation’s early childhood development arm Thrive by Five. In 2024, he joined the Leeuwin Ocean Adventure Foundation as chairman of the board and in 2025, he was appointed by arts minister Tony Burke to the Council of the National Gallery of Australia.
David Van Reybrouck is a Belgian cultural historian, archaeologist and author and is considered ‘one of the leading intellectuals in Europe’ (Der Tagesspiegel). He is a pioneering advocate of participatory democracy. He founded the G1000 Citizens’ Summit, and his work has led to trials in participatory democracy throughout Belgium and The Netherlands. He is also one of the most highly regarded literary and political writers of his generation, whose most recent book, Congo: The Epic History of a People, won 19 prizes, sold 500,000 copies and has been translated into a dozen languages. It was described as a ‘masterpiece’ by the Independent and ‘magnificent’ by The New York Times.
Effective April 1, 2025, David will be appointed Philosopher Laureate of The Netherlands He will devote the next two years to what he calls “vérdenken. On the occasion, he wrote the essay The World and the Earth.
Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics is a widely published policy economist, entrepreneur and commentator. He has advised Cabinet Ministers, sat on Australia’s Productivity Commission and founded Lateral Economics and Peach Financial.
He is Visiting Professor at Kings College London and Adjunct Professor at UTS. He chairs the Open Knowledge Foundation (Australian Chapter) and is Patron of the Australian Digital Alliance, which brings together Australia’s libraries, universities, and major providers of digital infrastructure such as Google and Yahoo. He is a member of the Council of the National Library of Australia.
