CAfSA News no. 1 February 2025
Greetings to all on this preliminary mailing list for the CAfSA news bulletin. The idea is to keep it brief, frequent, and highlight developments in deliberative democracy internationally (lots happening!), nationally and in SA. Here goes…
International
Ieva Česnulaitytė from DemocracyNext, reports that measures of how democracy is faring globally suggest that advances in the last 35 years have been eroded away, and that in terms of the health of democracy the world is back to where it was in 1986. She has also published a new report on how citizens are increasingly supportive of citizen assemblies (CAs) in Eastern and Central Europe, where levels of authoritarianism have returned to levels not seen since the end of WW2 (see https://www.demnext.org/projects/cee). Commenting on this surge of interest in deliberative democracy, a member of the 2024 Kosovo Citizens’ Assembly offered this: ‘If we had tools like this in the 1990s, we might have avoided the Yugoslav wars’!
Australia
The Adelaide-based consultancy democracyCo completed two ‘People’s House’ events in 2024, in which federal politicians used CA principles to learn about the concerns of their electorates (see https://www.democracyco.com.au/the-peoples-house). The two federal electorates involved were Canberra and Casey. Alicia Payne, MHR for Canberra, reported afterwards:
“I’ve seen people committed to every little step of getting this right and people who’ve never met each other before engaging with each other. It’s fantastic. Absolutely worth my time.”
SA
The local CAfSA committee secured funding in 2024 from Nurturing Evolutionary Development Inc. Assoc. to hold a national conference in Adelaide in mid 2025 on the potential of citizen assemblies to improve public policy making. Invitations have now gone to a number of speakers – more on this soon! In the meantime, the group has locked in a date and venue – Woodville Town Hall, on Sat 14 June. On Sunday 15 June, at the same venue, a workshop is being planned for local government officials and councillors on how they could be using deliberative democracy techniques like CAs to better engage with their ratepayers in developing local government policy.
Work continues on a website for CAfSA, and we hope to be able to make it public soon.
If you’d like to become more involved in CAfSA, by all means email us on contact@cafsa.org.au. We’d love to have some keen younger people too, especially to help us use social media to promote citizen assemblies as the brilliant way forward for democracy it truly is!
An award-winning writer, columnist, critic, academic, broadcaster, public intellectual and former political candidate. Dr Elizabeth Farrelly is trained in architecture and philosophy.
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.
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.