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May 13, 2008
I have found it very difficult to find out what actually happened in the exercise of deliberative democracy that was the 2020 Summit. I knew that prevention was discussed in the health stream, but the initial official report was very bland, whilst the media's talkfest interpretation was less than helpful in informing us citizens about the discussions that actually took place. We are promised a more detailed report by May 30.
Stephen Leader makes an interesting point about the media coverage of the Summit in the Centre of Policy Development's coverage of this exercise in deliberative democracy. He says that:
The media coverage of the Summit has been vintage colour-me-cynical Australian-beige. Virtually none has addressed the Summit as instrument of democratic life. Instead, the dull uniformity of articles and clips asserting that no good thing can come from the Summit has been depressing. That we have a prime minister capable of scholarly reflection and grasp, at ease discussing ideas rather than sending them off-shore to an island quarantine station, has largely escaped their attention. Only a fragment of the Summit material has thus far been published and it will be weeks before it all becomes available, but most media have already closed the books.
I concur. As I was holidaying in NZ at the time of the Summit I could only find out about the deliberations by reading what happened through the media's prism. That prism implied that little happened at the talkfest in terms of the process of deliberative democracy generating new ideas.
The mainstream media said very little about linking 'talkfest' to deliberative democracy's ideas about active citizenship and more public involvement by citizens. The effect of their narrow view of democracy made me depressed, as the media gave the impression that the same old ideas were being recycled- yet again; and that there was little practical point in transgressing the horizons or limits of the liberal democratic present.
If democracy is based on a set of power relations and we are tangled up in power and knowledge relations that both constrain and enable the possibilities of citizenship, then we subjected to power and subjects in our own right. So we need to develop strategies for governing through citizenship.
From this perspective we can interpret the media discourse as a critique of deliberative democrats as nostalgic romantics. The media's discourse is that the stress on the positive values of political participation and the limits of negative freedom of a utilitarian based political culture, should be dismissed as unrealistic. It's pie in the sky stuff, despite the democratic deficit.
Stephen Leader questions this media critique by stressing the significance of the ideas that arose from the citizen deliberations in the health stream. He says that the single most interesting idea in the Health Strategy Stream related to prevention: to the government having a conversation with the major urban developers, food manufacturers and retailers in order to make it easier for people to choose goods that do not screw up their health.
Rudd could convene such a meeting as a follow-up to the Summit, in the spirit of the Summit. Seated around the table in this forum would be:
....the CEOs of companies that build our cities, design our parks and cycle ways, determine the style of new buildings, decide upon the walkability of a new suburbs, choose what food will be retailed, advertise it, run our commercial gyms and more.[The] PM could say "Ladies and Gentlemen: we have a problem and its called obesity. What are we going to do about it?" Small changes by CEOs ripple into waves - slowly reducing salt, fat and sugar in processed foods, designing mandatory park spaces so that people use them rather than avoid them, developing coherent walkability plans for cities and so forth could all be done at low cost through the combination of commercial, community and political will.
Such a forum was recommended. This kind of deliberation opens up spaces for us as subjects in our own right to be able to care for ourselves so as to keep us well.
We citizens need to actively involved in the deliberation and debate surrounding the laws that govern us, rather than seeing these laws simply as instruments externally provided to protect individual pursuits.The 2020 Summit was a step in this direction.
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Gary,
this account of the health stream links with the governance stream . What happened there, apart from the old talk about dumping the British monarchy and introducing the republic?
Was the democratic deficit addressed?