Manningham Council is partnering with newDemocracy to deliver the Manningham Community Panel. The Community Panel will feature 40 people chosen through a democratic lottery and tasked with providing recommendations they find agreement on to answer the question: Council has a budget of $147 million, but we can’t do everything and need to make hard choices....Continue reading
Read our submission here. We thank the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters for this opportunity to contribute to the inquiry into the administration of the 2023 NSW state election and other matters, including political donations and truth in political advertising. Reforms to the political donations and campaign financing laws in New South Wales must...Continue reading
newDemocracy received a brief from Climate 200 to explore how electorate-level engagement could be improved by applying deliberative principles. We agreed that local Members of Parliament (of all parties) could better engage with a wider range of citizens if a more representative and meaningful approach could be developed. newDemocracy undertook a pilot project with Member...Continue reading
In May 2023, the Association of Australia Medical Research Institutes (AAMRI) hosted a deliberative panel made up of 30 randomly-selected people drawn from medical research institute staff and researchers from across the country and stratified to match the medical research institute workforce in Australia by gender, seniority, job type and institute type. Over the course...
President Biden convened the first Summit for Democracy following his election in 2021. The initial Summit focused on some ‘traditional’ democracy topics but tended to omit new and emerging approaches. newDemocracy was in contact with the US State Department to make the case that arguably Citizens Assemblies were arguably the most promising democratic innovation: in...Continue reading
Around Australia there is growing demand and momentum for deliberative engagement practice. This includes changes to the Victorian Local Government Act to mandate deliberative engagement practice, the NSW Government producing a deliberative democracy toolkit, and the increasing number of local councils and utilities making use of citizens’ panels or juries in their long-term strategic planning....Continue reading
We thank the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters for this opportunity to contribute to the inquiry into the provisions of the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Amendment Bill 2022. Our submission is focused on the temporary disapplication of section 11 of the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1984 (Cth). The relevant clause: Section 11 of the Referendum (Machinery...
The November 2017 Symposium event convened by newDemocracy sought to challenge opinion leaders by asking them what practical testable improvements could be made to our democracy in order to improve public trust in how we make public decisions. It sought to move the discussion from complaints about problems to potential solutions. This project is one...Continue reading
The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe has published an explanatory memorandum that calls on the local and regional authorities of Council of Europe member States to implement deliberative methods. The memorandum heavily references newDemocracy’s work throughout. You can read the document here. Summary In recent years, governments have increasingly...Continue reading
You can read the guidelines here and the summary here. The OECD report Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave (2020) demonstrated that public authorities from all levels of government increasingly turn to Citizens’ Assemblies, Citizens’ Juries, and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems. As the use of...Continue reading