Harnessing the beautiful diversity of Western Sydney

A short tale of a Citizens' Assembly

I chickened out. Sitting in my hotel room a few hours before the event, I reread the talk I was to give at the launch of the permanent Citizens’ Assembly being established in Western Sydney and I realised it was too long, that I would go over time.

I ummed and arred about which sections to hack out, and one of those I ended up scribbling all over with a biro I found in the desk drawer in my room was the paragraph that talked about love and kindness and how important those things are to the community engagement we were there to talk about. I convinced myself that it made me sound too wishy-washy, that maybe the audience wouldn’t respond to what I was trying to get at.

Boy, was I wrong.

The entire evening was a testament to exactly that, to the fact that a community brought together under the right circumstances and with a shared commitment to making that community better is, almost by definition, steeped in love and kindness.

Back in August last year, WentWest, the nonprofit Primary Health Network in the area, provided financing and support for two two-day citizens assemblies (CAs) on the subject of health outcomes.

Like all such Citizens Assemblies, the idea was to bring together a random sample of local people—ordinary citizens with no expertise or training in the topic under discussion—along with policy and medical experts. Over the two days, they would see if they couldn’t understand the issues better and suggest solutions that drew on their own experiences of dealing with the various health organisations—from local GPs to the various hospitals—to find practical solutions to this enormous aspect of public policy.

The assembles that were held last year—one consisting entirely of First Nations’ participants and developed in conjunction with the local Indigenous population—were so successful that WentWest decided to provide funding for a permanent Assembly. So, what is now known as the Western Sydney Citizens’ Assembly will be an ongoing structure and a range of other local people will be invited to participate in appraisals of the way healthcare is delivered in their area. The idea is to influence government policy and provide data so that governments are better able to address these issues.

Organiser and coordinator, Dr Coralie Wales, speaks at the WentWest Citizens’ Assembly

I think the permanence of this Citizens’ Assembly makes it unique in Australia, but god, I hope other communities take inspiration from what they have done and that it isn’t unique for too much longer.

There were about two hundred people at the event I spoke at on Wednesday evening, including 50-odd people from the community who had been part of the Assembly’s that were run last year. Many First Nation’s people were there, and the diversity of Western Sydney was well represented. I was able to speak with a lot of those involved during the early part of the evening and I was struck again by something that I’ve noticed with all the Assemblies like this I have investigated around the world, looking at how they work and what they achieve.

The thing that stands out is the transformative effect they have on those involved.

The first such event I attended was the Deliberative Poll (a variation on the CA idea) held in Canberra in 1999 prior to the Republican Referendum, and I remember being overwhelmed by the way in which the citizen participants spoke about their involvement and the obvious inspiration they drew from being part of the process. As one person said at the time of the Canberra gathering, “Can I just say that as an elder citizen that I’ve been tremendously informed and stimulated by this gathering. I would just like to say how wonderfully I’ve seen the democratic process at work.”

The same thing was evident on Wednesday night, and everyone I spoke to was brimming with enthusiasm for what they had been part of. For many of them, this sort of public participation was a new and daunting experience, but by the end of the process, they were fully engaged citizens keen to do more. They had not only gained knowledge of how healthcare works and the scale of some of the problems the system faced—by reading the provided literature and listening to various experts speak—they had educated those experts in turn, sharing their experiences and concerns about engaging with healthcare in the area.

Part of the event on Wednesday evening was that all the participants came up on stage and gave an account of what had happened during their particular Assembly, and the themes of love and kindness came through again and again. I had chickened out on using those words during my speech for fear of—I don’t really know—but here were all these people genuinely moved by the experience they’d had, proud not only that they had made a positive and practical contribution to an important social/political discussion, but thrilled to have met and worked with new people, formed new friendships, and strengthened community ties.

Even getting up and speaking at an event like this was a challenge for many of them and one young woman, the mother of a beautiful four-month old daughter, told me after she spoke that standing at the lectern was harder than giving birth! But they all spoke so beautifully, straight from the heart, displaying not just the practical knowledge they had gained through the Assemblies but the sense of democratic empowerment that had been instilled in them by this simple process.

I don’t think there was a dry eye in the house.

Unfortunately, though perhaps not surprisingly, none of the politicians who had been invited to the event bothered to show up, and I can’t tell you how angry this makes me.

So much of the received wisdom of contemporary political discussion, the received wisdom of the political class, is that we are more tribal than ever, more divided. The thing is, events like the one I attended on Wednesday evening expose those claims as, not so much a myth, but as a convenient dismissal by the political class of their own failures. To the extent that those claims are true, they are true in large part because the political class have designed systems to generate that sort of outcome. For many in the professional political class, politics has become a self-centred pursuit, while media reporting on it play a facile game of faux balance and top-down moral policing, and it is no wonder that we get results like this that showed up in a recent Essential Poll.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and five minutes at an event like the one on Wednesday night—let alone the Assemblies themselves—would show the likes of Clare O’Neil that any “virus of populism” that might exist is being engineered by a cynical and out-of-touch mainstream political and media system that has lost touch with very idea of democracy as self-governance. When people, ordinary people, are given the opportunity to involve themselves in their own governance the words that emerge are not virus and populism but love and kindness and inspiration.

If we do end up with a power-sharing parliament after the next election, where the crossbench might be able to influence the terms on which their support is won, it will be a travesty if demands for these sorts of Assemblies to be funded and normalised as part of the political process—installed as a genuine structural reform of how we do politics—are not on the bargaining table.

The moment would present a huge opportunity and the community independents and the Greens in particular need to seize it.

And really, for the community independents and the Greens, this should be a no-brainier given how they themselves have used this sort of engagement to rally their own communities. They know its power. But it is one thing to organise such things in the leafy suburbs, or the inner city, where more people have the time and resources to pursue these things—and I am not knocking that at all—but is important that the option is extended across demographics and to the whole country; that support is given to those who don’t have these resources.

As I wrote in Voices of Us, “The question the independent candidates will have to ask themselves, therefore, is whether they will be agents of change who use their skills and momentum to bring what they have achieved in their electorates to the rest of the country – to those electorates without the advantages of the ones they represent – or whether will they settle, pulling up the ladder behind them.”

Are Citizens Assemblies perfect? Are they a panacea? Are there not risks and pitfalls with such structures? No, no and yes.

But for heaven’s sake, after attending an event like the one in Parramatta on Wednesday night, I am more convinced than ever that they are an essential feature of any system of political practice that wants to avoid the “virus of populism” and all the woes and miseries of a democracy that loses sight of its most basic commitment to meet with, listen to, and honour the needs of communities across the nation.

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