Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “Why the West Should Be Like Wikipedia” with Nicholas Gruen

Transcript

“Why the West Should Be Like Wikipedia” with Nicholas Gruen · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:00
Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
0:07
Here's a dangerous idea for you, an uncomfortable question.
0:11
How much influence do you actually have over how you're governed?
0:17
You live in a democracy, presumably.
0:19
Presumably the state is supposed to be acting on your behalf and your interests.
0:24
But how democratic are modern Western democracies in the 21st century?
0:30
We have the circus of political campaigning.
0:32
We have the influence of big business on politics.
0:35
We have political parties that force politicians to toe the line.
0:40
We have conformism.
0:42
We have social media.
0:43
We have a sound bite culture.
0:44
And through it all, how well are the interests of regular people actually articulated?
0:50
Could there be a simple reform that would radically re-enfranchise you and your loved ones
0:58
to live in a place where you decide how things work instead of political parties and corporations?
1:06
Today's guest, Nicholas Groen, is an economist.
1:08
He is frequently described as Australia's foremost public intellectual.
1:12
Some people even call him the most brilliant economist that you've never heard of.
1:16
He used to work in government.
1:17
He has a degree in law, he has a degree in history.
1:19
He has a PhD in public policy.
1:22
He founded his own economic consultancy.
1:24
He now writes on Substack.
1:26
And his latest project is a video series about institutional decline and how to fix it.
1:33
It's called the Shared Center.
1:35
And Nicholas joined me in the Uncomfortable Conversation Studio to talk about TikTok and Instagram
1:41
and social media and what they teach us about how to do democracy badly and how to corrode
1:45
conversations versus something like Wikipedia,
1:49
which might provide a template for how to do democracy well and how citizens' assemblies
1:56
might be able to reform the political system without a huge amount of radical innovation
2:02
using templates that we already understand and know that Nicholas's opinion could genuinely
2:09
hand power back to the people.
2:11
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
2:12
The one and only Nicholas Groen.
2:20
You're biting off quite a lot on this new initiative.
2:23
I'm impressed.
2:24
Yes.
2:25
Well, let the background for us, one thing that I think is interesting is just to think
2:32
about when institutions work and when they don't.
2:34
When people come together constructively and when they come together,
2:37
Yeah.
2:38
Unconstructively.
2:39
And, you know, a point that you make is that when when personal interests and shared
2:42
interests can be aligned, then things are working well.
2:46
Does that stretch that out?
2:48
Sure.
2:49
So this is my little dyad, my little model of life or model of the DNA of life, if you like.
2:57
And it's very simple and it's pretty non-ideological, which is that any human activity of any
3:05
significance, whatever, at least when it involves other people, is an ecology of shared and private
3:13
interests.
3:14
So this conversation, we each have a private self.
3:19
We have private interests, private objectives, but we are engaged in a joint project.
3:27
And if we don't behave as if it's a joint project, then the joint project is the conversation,
3:36
this conversation and either of us can wreck it.
3:40
And one of the ways we can wreck it, that's a terrible way to start the interview.
3:46
The one of the ways you can wreck it is that way, which is to be unbalanced in your own
3:54
interests, is for the private interest to dominate the public interest.
4:00
And if you look and so I use this in the videos that I've made, I talk about a game of tennis,
4:09
and what happens when the rules aren't well enforced, then the players start getting
4:18
jumpy and then they start bending the rules and saying that was in, that ball was in.
4:26
And before long, it becomes a worst game to watch and it becomes unjust because the more
4:33
aggressive player will win.
4:36
So a game, a workplace, our politics, a conversation, everything in human life has this character
4:48
of a biological, ecological entity and the balance between the shared and the private
4:59
is incredibly, is the essence of whether it goes well or not.
5:04
And how you know what the shared interest is, because I mean, sometimes conversations
5:08
can fall apart, public conversations, for example, interviews because there might be a
5:11
difference of opinion about, I think about a debate, I think about Christopher Hitchens
5:15
in a debate with someone and firing and snapping back in a way that if you didn't understand
5:21
the context of this being a highly adversarial environment, you might think is against the rules
5:26
of polite conversation.
5:27
It certainly wouldn't be appropriate at your mother-in-law's Thanksgiving table to speak
5:31
that way.
5:32
So how do we establish what the shared interest is?
5:34
So we have to kind of intuit it.
5:37
We have to, we're literally, well, I was going to say literally making up the rules as we
5:42
go along.
5:43
There are a lot of rules that we can take out of our culture.
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We have to show a lot of intelligence and a lot of shared, and we have to consider each
5:53
other.
5:55
And ultimately, I would argue that we do that in our enlightened self-interest because
5:59
we're both got an interest in a good conversation rather than a bad conversation.
6:03
But that's the problem that we've, now I compare that with a game of tennis where if there
6:09
are problems about the player's understanding what's shared and what's not shared, we bring
6:14
on an empire and that sorts it out.
6:16
We don't really do that in a conversation and when we do, it's usually a bad conversation.
6:20
So when you've got a, I mean, I think, I don't know what you think, but if you compare
6:25
the candidates' debates from 1960 with Nixon and Kennedy and you can watch them on YouTube,
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they're pretty good because there's a shared understanding of what a debate is that a
6:39
debate's about issues and so on.
6:41
There's also a competition going on there.
6:43
Today, everyone's trying to bend the rules of conversation as much as they can.
6:49
They're trying to hit their talking points.
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One of the rules of a debate, a private rule of a debate is if you get asked about a
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difficult subject, you don't face that subject, you're not candid about that subject, you
7:03
change the subject or you say what about when you were in government or whatever.
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So that's an institution, the candidate's debate that has become immensely worse because
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it's more and more colonized by private interest and less and less about the shared interest
7:24
of the viewers and I guess we shouldn't kid ourselves that Nixon and Kennedy wanted a good
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debate.
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They were almost completely consumed by the idea of winning, but at least in 1960, people's
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sense of a conversation was that you didn't just suddenly hit your talking points.
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You actually tried to respond.
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Yeah, I mean, that also comes to your deeper point, which is that you want the institution
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to align with greater interest and the institution of the presidential debate in 1960 was
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probably embedded with a whole bunch of assumptions that more closely aligned that conversation
7:58
with the interest of American democracy.
8:00
That's right.
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Whereas now there isn't.
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I mean, now we have because of social media, because of clickbait, because of whatever,
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because of the kind of hollywoodification of the political system, perhaps there are
8:11
many more incentives to create it as a high rating spectacle and as a thoughtful deliberation
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of people profoundly more demoralized today than they were in 1960.
8:23
In 1960, they believed in the system.
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This is pre-wartigate.
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I think when you ask people, did they respect or did they believe politicians, they said
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they did.
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Yeah, it sounds funny, doesn't it?
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So this is a society which has got a better balance between the shared interest and the
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private interest.
8:49
Now, it's also a much more racist society, a much more sexist society, so I'm not playing.
8:55
It was better then.
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I'm not nostalgic, except for some of those aspects and those aspects have basically been
9:03
eaten away by the acid of modernity, the acid of competition, the acid of media, and
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we're bereft in a terrible situation.
9:13
Presumably there was a downside to that level of trust as well, in the sense that bad people
9:18
could do bad things.
9:19
Well, we know more about the truth.
9:20
Yeah.
9:21
There's a lot more to crack.
9:22
I said everything was okay.
9:23
Yeah.
9:24
I don't believe that everything was okay.
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No question.
9:26
No question.
9:27
I mean, where this also interests me, in particular, just selfishly, is obviously in
9:30
your analysis of the media, too, because there's an analogy that is when presidential
9:34
debates and the kinds of conversations that people have in the media, one of the reasons
9:38
why I got out of the mainstream legacy media is because increasingly I find that there's
9:44
what it means to have a good conversation can be to have actually a pretty lousy conversation,
9:51
but there's a format that, you know, think about an adversarial interview between a journalist
9:55
and a politician on a huge amount of issues, yeah, a counterfeature where they've got
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eight minutes, and it is superficially competitive, but actually it's competitive within a context
10:07
that both of the parties are very familiar and comfortable with.
10:09
Exactly.
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The interviewer knows what they're doing, the politician knows what they're doing, the
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politician has been prepped on these kinds of questions, the media advisor knows what
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kinds of questions they're, and there's this sort of kabuki dance, almost like a, you
10:19
know, professional wrestling match, and nothing is really edified.
10:23
That's right.
10:24
That's right.
10:25
How, in the context in which you are serving this other audience, I mean, right now we're
10:30
having this conversation.
10:31
Yep.
10:32
We are.
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It's also a conversation that is being had between us for the purposes of being witnessed.
10:37
Exactly.
10:38
Right.
10:39
Yep.
10:40
I want to do, if I'm doing my job on this show, then I'm aligning those two things kind
10:43
of as close as I can and trying to have as fair income as legit a conversation as we
10:47
might have.
10:48
Yep.
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If we were really trying to have a good conversation in a pub, so because I think I have
10:53
faith that people are going to want to witness that.
10:55
Yep.
10:56
But it's a lot easier for us to go viral on YouTube if we do something that's more.
11:00
Yes, exactly.
11:01
That's right.
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And it might well be in your private interest, at least your short term private interest
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to go for that.
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And that's what's going on on the internet.
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No question.
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Yeah.
11:12
So that the, in a way, I mean, I hadn't thought of putting it this way before, but in a way,
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the private interest can now go viral.
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The public interest doesn't go very viral.
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The public interest is a different thing at public interest is a subtle thing.
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It's almost by definition not a hostile thing, not a higher rousal thing.
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The sorts, I mean, the kinds of pub, if you want to call them public interest, if you
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like, good stories go viral and their inspiration porn or increasingly just in the last few
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months, AI animals helping out other animals, you know, a ghost rescuing a tiger, a tiger
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bringing with a baby goat in its mouth and dropping it into a safari, four-wheel drive,
12:01
that you think hang on, that can't be right.
12:03
I mean, one analogy that you use to try to tease out the difference between the incentives
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here and the information we're producing and consuming is the difference between Wikipedia
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and social media.
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What is it?
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The difference, well, this is my great discovery, I think, which is much more than people sort
12:25
of think of me and we haven't talked about this yet, but people think of my calling
12:30
out of the citizen assemblies, but there's the other side of it.
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And the other side of it is to notice that Wikipedia is successful, not because it's open,
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that just turbocharges the success, that just turbocharges its success.
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It is successful because it is a meritocracy and we have a very odd relationship with meritocracy
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because we have refracted it through competition, sport is the perfect meritocracy because you
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just get people to compete and you get the best tennis player.
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It's not true of politicians, it's not true of priests, it's not true of business people,
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business people in some sense, it's whoever makes the most money, but okay, is Elon Musk
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doing a good job of his life personally, I don't think so, but he's sort of playing.
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But can't you make the same criticism of a tennis player, are they doing a good job
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of their life?
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I mean, they're playing the game and making the tennis player is making the money of winning
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Wimbledon.
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Yeah, so I guess you can say that what we want out of a tennis player is marvellous tennis.
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That's it.
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And that's got, it's true that it would be possible so you can think of, well, Illy Nostazi
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in my generation and the recent French guys, about 39 are still playing and he doesn't
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win many tournaments, but he's incredible to watch, you know, he does extraordinary,
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well, Nick Kirios is a good example.
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So you can say that's what I really want out of tennis, but then you can change the rules
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to get bring that about and make sure that someone like Nick Kirios wins if you like.
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Right.
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I guess what I'm saying is what we want out of sport is something simple and it turns
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out that just getting people to compete produces extraordinary things.
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Now, that's true in many other areas like business, but the extraordinary things that
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produces many of those extraordinary things are not what we don't actually think are great
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examples of humanity and not what we want our business people to do.
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Right.
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A team who fidgets spinner from Shenzhen is not the peak of human.
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Well, no, no, but, but yes, that's right, but I'm also saying that, that buying Twitter,
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well, I'm also saying, let's make it Facebook.
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Mark Zuckerberg made money in Myanmar with a lot of, you know, there are a hinger went viral
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and a lot of them died and Mark Zuckerberg made some good money out of that on Facebook.
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For people who don't know, there was a kind of a genocide that was a genocide and Facebook
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knew what was happening, most making money out of it.
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People begged them to stop this virality of this, of these hateful things and they didn't.
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Right.
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Lots of incitements to buy against the religious minority.
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That's right.
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That's where you get this divergence between being a good businessman and getting, and the
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world getting out of business, what it wants to get out of business, what it should get
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out of business.
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And we can't make, and unlike tennis, we can't make rules that are perfect enough to
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just say, go for your life.
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Those all in any part of real life as opposed to the artificial life of tennis, although
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you can, you know, you can make up an example for, for example, sake and, you know, give
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an example of someone cheating, but it's very hard to cheat at tennis, and especially
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at once you get beyond a certain level.
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And so there's not that problem there, but in all the important things in life, there
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are always that problem.
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There's certainly the problem, yeah, in all the social areas like this conversation, as
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there's always this, there's always this question.
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And of course, in this conversation, as we were saying, we don't know what the rules
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are.
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We're trying to look after both things at the same time.
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Yeah.
16:43
I mean, it's also one of the fun things about talking to brand new people all the time,
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is each person comes with a bunch of expectations about what conversations are, and how hostile
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they can be.
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How hostile they can be.
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Yeah.
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How interrogated they can be.
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That's right.
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How much fun they can have.
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Yeah, it is a bit of a dance.
16:58
And it's always love.
16:59
I mean, the best ones are always when those actions get thrown out, the window in some
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respect.
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Yeah.
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And you have to, you have to take it.
17:04
Well, we're trying to make something, you know, that's what we're doing.
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Yeah.
17:06
And so Wikipedia, you said it's a, it's a mirror talker, it's a mirror talker.
17:09
A lot of people don't actually know, and I didn't actually, until your work, understand
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how it works.
17:14
And I think it's worth just pausing on that, because it's an analogy that will then be applicable
17:19
to politics in its life.
17:20
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
17:21
What is Wikipedia?
17:22
So, so let me tell you that one of the things I did in government was I chaired a thing
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called the government 2.0 task force in 2009.
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Now 2009 was peak.
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Is there a Wiki for that?
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Very long one.
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They wanted to have Wiki, you know, people published books called Wiki Government.
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And it was, and it was also we were just getting out during that time 2011, I think the
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Arab Spring started.
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And it was a naive time, it was a, people are lovely, you just connect them and wonderful
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things happen.
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And Twitter is going to save the world.
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That's right.
17:57
Yeah, that's good.
17:58
How's that going?
17:59
And I remember the New Zealand police of all people got some, lots of publicity, they're
18:06
terribly proud of it.
18:07
They got into the New York Times by, there was a new police act and they put it up on
18:13
a Wiki and they claimed and I was very sus on this all along.
18:17
They claimed that they wrote that police act on the Wiki.
18:20
Now I just don't believe that because a Wiki is a, is a, is a, an anarchic thing.
18:26
So you need, you, and I, I thought about this, I thought, what, what characterizes these,
18:33
these new miracles and the new miracles were Wikipedia and open source software.
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Those were the things that were being produced and you go, I was just, human beings with
18:43
no affiliation to the, no affiliate entity, no party going there, unpaid miracles and
18:49
just say, and they build behind my people, which is right, yeah, yeah, how does that happen?
18:54
And so I worked out a very simple explanation for why we don't have Wiki government, why
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we can't have Wiki government and why we do have Wikipedia and we have Wiki software,
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which is called open source software.
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And that is that Wikipedia prides it, it, it steers itself towards the destination.
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If you like the rules are the NP of the, the neutral, I think I've, I've got that right,
19:26
the neutral point of view.
19:29
And so if you ask, so, so let me, Josh, you and I can start, we can make at least a billion
19:38
dollars by having a website that tells us whether, definitively, whether Donald Trump
19:44
is a good president or a bad president.
19:46
Now that's going to be hard.
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I mean, we both have a view, but other people have a different view.
19:54
But we can, but if we, if the question is what year was Donald Trump born, then we can
19:59
get to a majority of 99.9% of people who are trying.
20:04
And that's what makes Wikipedia work.
20:06
That's what makes open source software work, which is, it's, it's not the neutral point
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of view, is does this, does this code run or does it crash?
20:16
Is this fact true?
20:17
Or is it not?
20:18
That's right.
20:19
That's right.
20:20
But there are areas of gray, what, you know, what did Donald Trump win the 2020 election?
20:26
Yeah.
20:27
Did he incite the mob at the Capitol?
20:29
Yes.
20:30
And when it comes to questions like that, the process that Wikipedia, which I had actually
20:32
assumed was more open source than it is, I thought that people just go in there and
20:37
edit it.
20:38
And they're always sort of squabbling.
20:39
But through their squabbling, they evolve it into a demonstrating, you know, yes, it's
20:44
unreasonable for everybody.
20:46
Yeah.
20:47
I was even.
20:48
It was something.
20:49
Well, even on off, there was something.
20:50
I should show my view.
20:51
There's even certain things I still don't know.
20:55
So, and I just thought that it then sort of like a sailboat took, tacked its way towards
20:59
the truth through the, the high of mind.
21:02
Yeah.
21:03
But just explain why.
21:04
What happened?
21:05
What has framed it a Wikipedia once and then goes to edit it?
21:07
Yeah.
21:08
You know, that's made a minor edit.
21:09
So, typically, unless it's about Donald Trump or something, whether or some, there are
21:12
some pages that are so controversial, they're locked down.
21:15
But generally speaking, you can go and edit any page and you can, you know, you can see
21:20
a typo or you can say, you know, Moa's went extinct in New Zealand in 1600 and something.
21:29
And you think, oh, well, I've read some later stuff and I'll update that and that works.
21:36
And if you do a certain number of these, you go into another category and you get a new,
21:43
well, I don't think you get a new log on, but you get, you get higher, more recognition
21:49
if you're doing more of these things.
21:51
And that creates, and this, there's a series of steps.
21:54
It's not unlike a corporation, actually.
21:57
You basically, or a video game where you unlock new abilities as you prove yourself to
22:02
be trustworthy.
22:03
That's right.
22:04
That's right.
22:05
And so that's roughly, that's essentially how it works.
22:07
And eventually you get to a point at which there is not just, and then a certain amount
22:10
of time has to overlap to certain of the amendments that you have to have made, have to
22:15
stock, you know, and it not exactly turned out to be up to you.
22:17
That's right.
22:18
Well, that's your reputation.
22:19
Yeah.
22:20
And you eventually get to a point at which there's actually a panel of human beings who
22:24
assess whether or not you're going to be a subway to the next level.
22:27
So it's not just a hard mind.
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It is a, no, it is a mechanism for verifying reliability or individuals who want to participate
22:36
in the project with a, with a base of judgment that because it focuses on the neutral point
22:42
of view, what is the case is a strong base on which you can build a genuine meritocracy
22:48
rather than, rather than a, what many people will experience in their workplaces, which
22:55
is a meritocracy at which probably the people at the top are a bit brighter, a bit more
23:01
competent than the people at the bottom, but there's a hell of a lot of gameplay going
23:04
on.
23:05
And there's a lot of strategic behavior.
23:07
And often the actual work you're trying to do, it's left behind while people strategize
23:13
and kiss upwards, kick downwards, second guess their boss.
23:18
This is just a terrible disease in the public service to which I am deeply allergic.
23:23
And it always had to be.
23:24
Yes.
23:25
And at the same time, they want to be seen to be doing a good job more than they want
23:30
to be doing a good job.
23:31
Exactly.
23:32
Because it comes back to the knee.
23:33
Exactly.
23:34
About this conversation and about the, the shared, the personal, the personal, the personal
23:38
experience.
23:39
Exactly.
23:40
Exactly.
23:41
You're getting away with this.
23:42
I'm slightly right in the bike.
23:43
You get a small deployment at the end of this.
23:44
I'm trying to unlock the stages of this video game that is on a comfortable conversation.
23:46
That's right.
23:47
Yes.
23:48
And so we all know corporations and especially public corporations, I mean, public institutions
23:52
and, you know, academic institutions are very vulnerable to this because they don't
23:56
have the profit motive.
23:57
So there's a lot of status jockeying and showing off and so on within that system.
24:02
So contrast that clean meritocracy of Wikipedia to the other big way of sharing information
24:10
online, which is social media, where the incentives are completely different.
24:14
That's right.
24:15
So the incentives there are click, you know, we have a word for a clickbait.
24:21
And there are lots of different aspects of the human psyche that will get you clicks,
24:26
anger, frustration, the sort of scratch and it's a very famous cartoon early in the internet,
24:35
which you probably remember, which is honey, I can't come to bed.
24:39
Someone is wrong on the internet, you know, just, just the irritation or the, so we, and
24:46
when the, and we're in the early stages of blogging, this, I used to think I was kind
24:50
of privileged in the early stages of blogging when people were having fights and so on.
24:54
I was involved in some of them because I thought to myself, here we are.
24:59
It's like being on a new island and we're, we're civilizing in this rough and ready way,
25:07
this whole new terrain, which has sort of subtly different rules because it's, it feels
25:13
private, but it's actually public and, you know, it's just a different sort of, it's
25:18
just a very different sort of world.
25:20
So, but the fact is that there are these things that you prosper when you're, when you're
25:32
trying to get clicks, you are, it generally takes you away from what, what would be good
25:40
for us all and it does so in a very powerful and a very viral way.
25:47
Well, while we're talking about virality and audiences and even citizens assemblies,
25:51
which we will get to, I should say to the viewers who are watching this on Sub-Sac Live,
25:55
that after we have our conversation here, we will take questions from the citizens themselves,
25:59
from the viewers of uncomfortable conversations.
26:01
Sounds good.
26:02
So, leave a comment in the comment well and if you have a question for Nicholas about
26:06
any of this or criticism of my own ignorance, do so and that'll be you.
26:10
You'll be able to watch that if you're watching live and if you're listening or watching
26:14
the podcast after the fact, then you'll have to be a premium subscriber to get that.
26:17
But this is sort of stuff that we're doing on Sub-Sac on the regular.
26:22
I remember that day, that era of social media where we believed that the claims of the founders
26:29
of social media, which was that when everyone can talk to each other, this is going to open
26:33
up an enormous flourishing of the exchange of ideas because it's going to democratize
26:39
information.
26:41
So, you were reminding when you were saying about your attitude towards people arguing
26:44
on a blog.
26:45
I mean, I remember in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, I still thought that there was something
26:53
to be gained by engaging with people who disagreed with all your social media, right?
26:59
I mean, we didn't, we were such naive, such sweet little lands like, well, we thought
27:04
we were going to stand the whole system was rigged against constructive concession.
27:09
Yeah, that's right.
27:10
And so, I mean, there's a concept here from a philosopher, I mean, I'd like to think
27:16
it's been in philosophy for the last two and a half thousand years, but the philosopher
27:20
associated with it is Harry Frankfurt, who's famous for the, well, a technical, the technical
27:31
definition of bullshit, but I'm actually going to, which we might want to talk about
27:35
as well, but I'm actually going to talk about something else, which is, I think the
27:39
jargon he used was primary and secondary preferences.
27:43
And primary preferences are what I want.
27:46
And secondary preferences are what I want to want.
27:50
They are my school, and civilization, maturing as an individual is hugely about secondary
27:59
preferences.
28:00
And secondary preferences are shorn out of the scene in social media, because nobody
28:09
ever got many clicks for secondary preferences, you're going for this.
28:13
So this is, and this is, in fact, the way I see the modern world, that, that increasingly
28:19
competition, competition in capitalism in the capitalism of, of, of the capitalism of
28:27
our democracy, which is built on a similar basis, where in capitalism, it's how many, how
28:32
many dollars you get, and in, in democracy, it's how many votes you get, and everyone's
28:37
competing, and everyone's going for those primary preferences there.
28:42
If sugar's no good for you in the long run, but it attracts you, we'll do it for money,
28:47
and we'll do it for votes.
28:49
And that's what's going on on social media, but it's gone viral.
28:53
And so just to explain secondary preferences, is that similar to, I mean, anyone who has
28:59
experience with addiction, yes, yeah, understands secondary preferences, yeah, yeah, because
29:04
they want not to be addicted, and they're addicted, that's right.
29:08
But yeah, and the addiction doesn't occur as an addiction.
29:11
And the addiction occurs as a primary desire, as a primary one, right?
29:14
Yes.
29:15
You want to, you want to cigarette, you want to not want to cigarette, correct, but you
29:18
do want the cigarette, similarly if you want a tax cut, you want a tax cut.
29:24
You know that if you get a tax cut, some other things follow it, but you don't focus on
29:29
that.
29:30
Yes, I see.
29:31
Right.
29:32
Yeah.
29:33
So, I was recently involved in some stuff in, in that something to do with the stadium
29:41
that they happened to be building in Hobart.
29:44
And I had a meeting with an independent, and it sounds very common down there.
29:48
Dagger, you sound very invasive with that precisely what this was, but okay, well, it's all right.
29:52
I'm happy to have you to say more.
29:54
Anyway, I was having a meeting, I became quite friendly with some of the, well, many people
30:00
down there, but with some of the independence, I was very impressed that some of the independent
30:05
parliamentarians were saying we're in a fiscal hole, where we're, you know, the government's
30:12
running deficits all the time, debts building up, I want to contribute to a fiscal consolidation.
30:20
I want to, I want to try and balance the budget.
30:24
And they, you know, they said this, that was a, that was a secondary preference.
30:32
And that's the secondary preference of all of the voters.
30:36
But if you are, even if it's, even if you're not in a party where this is, there's sort
30:41
of iron discipline, even if you're not in a party, if you say, well, if you answer the
30:48
question, the got your question, which is how are you going to, how are you going to balance
30:53
the budget?
30:54
You've got to say that you'll either, you'll got to identify either spending that you
30:58
will cut or taxes that you will raise.
31:00
And that just is, that's just gold for your opponents.
31:04
You then become, you know, this person is the, you know, if you want higher land tax
31:11
vote for my opponent, so, so, so, so all of these systems are deeply addictive and they
31:19
take us further away from the people that we kind of know we should try and be.
31:25
Yeah, I see.
31:26
And anyone who comes and says that basically signs their own death warrant.
31:31
Yep.
31:32
And we, in the meantime, us little voters say, how come people won't be candid with us?
31:38
Because we won't, though, for them if they're candid with us, they say what they need to
31:44
say for their immediate benefits, they have to or we get ourselves other politicians who
31:50
will do that.
31:51
Yeah.
31:52
And so there is a, there's a similar filtering system in politics as there is on social
31:56
media in a sense that on social media, the individual is rewarded for personal
32:02
for their personal interests being fed.
32:04
Yep.
32:05
In the absence of any shared interest, shared interest would be that Twitter is not the swamp
32:09
that it is.
32:11
And yet, that's right.
32:12
Yes, that's right.
32:13
That's right.
32:14
That's right.
32:15
That's right.
32:16
Similarly, politicians, you know, shared interest, it would be to the interest of the community
32:20
well, to be a good representative, you know, is, is to, is to govern well, but, but
32:25
yeah, they can't really do that.
32:27
So you pick a couple of examples of instances where we've been able to get around this on
32:32
your way into the idea of citizens assembly.
32:34
So I thought an interesting one is the Irish same sex marriage referendum.
32:38
How did they do that?
32:40
So I think the Irish politicians knew they had a problem.
32:48
Nobody would break ranks.
32:49
The Catholic Church is extremely powerful in Ireland, I don't think I'm telling you
32:53
saying that's there.
32:54
Highly religious.
32:55
It's much less powerful politically now because, you know, it's a sort of emperor's new
33:01
close story.
33:02
I'm not saying people are pretending to be religious when they're not.
33:09
No, no, no, I'm not speaking disrespectfully.
33:11
What we discovered was that the Catholic Church couldn't be as politically influential
33:21
as politicians feared, but I guess the Catholic Church is playing a game a little bit like
33:31
is played in the United States by the National Rifle Association, which is if a politician
33:38
steps out of line, they come after them.
33:42
So nobody wants to break ranks.
33:45
I would argue that that's really how Donald Trump has managed to get the power that he's
33:51
had.
33:52
It's when people complain about electoral funding, they're actually that that's misdirection.
33:58
The funding is really for extortion.
34:01
The extortion is a much more powerful tool than than a bribe.
34:06
And the politicians aren't that concerned about getting the money.
34:09
They like the money.
34:10
They need the money.
34:11
But what they really can't tolerate is the extortion racket, which is we're going to come
34:15
after you.
34:16
We're going to run a misinformation campaign against you.
34:20
And we will primary you that's American language for losing pre-selection in the English
34:27
speaking world.
34:28
Right.
34:29
Yes.
34:30
And there's a sort of a collective action problem in a way.
34:31
Isn't there?
34:32
There's some sort of I mean, it feels almost like a game theory issue where if everybody
34:36
who opposes Trump opposed him once, then they'll be.
34:40
Well, they get rid of it.
34:41
They get rid of it.
34:42
But no individual wants to put their head above the power of it.
34:45
That's right.
34:46
And well, some do and they get their heads blown off.
34:48
And then there's that.
34:49
Yeah.
34:50
And they have to not run again.
34:51
That's right.
34:52
Yeah.
34:53
That's right.
34:54
Okay.
34:55
So sorry.
34:56
Where were we then?
34:57
The Irish same text marriage.
34:58
Yeah.
34:59
Sorry.
35:00
So I think.
35:01
Yeah.
35:02
So I think essentially what was going on was that and this happened here too.
35:03
And it happened in the United States.
35:04
This new issue comes up.
35:06
And the politicians are all thinking, well, look, this isn't political capital I want
35:14
to spend.
35:15
This is a risk.
35:16
So Obama was against same-sex marriage early on.
35:21
And this was true of our own politicians.
35:24
And then.
35:25
So.
35:26
I remember just as in the side.
35:28
Yeah.
35:29
I remember sitting on it at Q and A.
35:31
Yes.
35:32
I was on Q and A.
35:33
And we'd be back in the Tony Jones day.
35:36
Yes.
35:37
And Penny Wong was on the panel.
35:38
And this was pretty.
35:39
That's right.
35:40
This was when Labour.
35:41
So this is a.
35:42
This is the woman who is now the foreign secretary of Australia, the foreign minister.
35:46
So group state.
35:48
Who is she?
35:49
Who is gay?
35:50
Yeah.
35:51
An openly gay.
35:52
And has a life partner.
35:53
That's right.
35:54
Or a wife.
35:55
I think they're married.
35:56
Yeah.
35:57
And she was at the government at the time.
36:00
And the government's policy was against same-sex marriage.
36:02
But her talking points were black is white.
36:04
Go out there and tell people.
36:06
I mean, and to watch the, I mean, if anything gave, maybe lose faith in the party political
36:12
process, it was, it was seeing her twist and contort on that panel, trying to claim
36:20
that she believes something that she patently doesn't believe.
36:22
Yeah.
36:23
Now, I remember in the night, in early 1970s, I remember watching an interview with Bob,
36:30
not with Bob Ork, with Bob Wittland.
36:32
Oh, okay.
36:33
Yeah.
36:34
And I can't remember the issue.
36:36
Maybe it was some state aid for schools or something.
36:40
And the party had changed its position.
36:45
Or, and Wittland had been in the, in a previous election, Wittland had advocated one thing.
36:51
And now he's advocating the opposite.
36:53
And they said in an interview, they brought this up in the interview.
36:57
As you can imagine, the journalist said, well, you were against this.
37:01
So, and, and Wittland said, yes, my, my personal view is not the party view.
37:07
And I am the leader of the party and I'm representing the party's view.
37:11
That's honesty.
37:12
Yeah.
37:13
Yeah.
37:14
It turns out that that's not nearly as slick away to market something is to pretend that
37:18
you, it's, it's not, you can't do that anymore.
37:21
I mean, maybe if you're an independent, like, Allegro spend, uh, seven, eight, eight,
37:25
eight and a half, you know, they come on, they give me hope that in the, you know,
37:29
I love those guys, cause I feel like the only people in Parliament who have the liberty
37:33
to articulate some version of what they're actually creating.
37:37
The, yeah.
37:38
I'm I, I'm a big fan of those people, but I'm, I don't believe, and they have, I think
37:44
they've made a big contribution to our democracy to the stability of our democracy.
37:50
but it is not the case that the fact that they are more accomplished,
37:56
the fact that they are less dominated by party dictates,
38:03
it is not the case that they can rescue our politics from,
38:06
completely rescue our politics from the shocking state that it's in,
38:10
but there are stabilizing, healthy influence in a very bad situation in my opinion.
38:16
So they have to be against taxes and force spending.
38:20
They have to do the same thing as the Tasmanian independence.
38:23
It's much.
38:24
Yes.
38:25
Exactly.
38:26
Yes.
38:27
It's not, I mean, I was speaking.
38:28
I was speaking short-hand.
38:30
Yeah.
38:31
But they're going to think much more.
38:32
They're not just going to say they're trying to win elections.
38:37
To some extent.
38:38
Yeah, true.
38:39
But I mean, you know, a lawyer spender has an easily a position,
38:46
for example, on negative-dearing or, you know, potentially toxic tax.
38:52
Exactly.
38:53
No, no.
38:54
That would do a political party if the party were to take such a position.
38:57
Anyway, the glimmer that I'm trying to get to here in the Irish case
39:01
is the fact that they assemble...
39:02
Correct.
39:03
...as citizens assembly.
39:04
Right?
39:05
Instead of just having politicians do it.
39:06
Correct.
39:08
That's right.
39:09
What they had a random balance.
39:10
Absolutely.
39:11
That's critical.
39:12
That's critical.
39:13
Right.
39:14
So a lot of people associate democracy with a town hall, which is that anyone who is concerned
39:19
about something turns up, I'm not against town halls, but they are not going to produce
39:24
a big, a big change because that is all the most passionate people.
39:30
Yeah.
39:31
I'll be against town halls for you.
39:32
You don't have to say it.
39:33
I think this, too.
39:34
But I think, well, it's like...
39:35
I'm doing a Talkback Radio show and I remember when I was a young Talkback Radio producer.
39:40
And the host of the show would say something and he'd say,
39:42
Oh, the punters love this subject.
39:44
The board's lining up.
39:45
Yeah.
39:46
They love it.
39:47
Well, the board has 12 lines on it.
39:49
Yeah.
39:50
There are...
39:51
You'll talk about 300,000 people.
39:52
Yeah.
39:53
As long as you say something that agitates 12 people.
39:55
That's early social media.
39:57
Exactly.
39:58
That is not a...
39:59
I keep saying to him.
40:00
Exactly.
40:01
That's not a metric.
40:02
So trust that.
40:03
There are two ways to represent the people.
40:06
One is by election.
40:07
You get the people to decide who they want to represent them.
40:10
And the other is the way we do it in juries, in legal juries, which is by sampling.
40:14
So a jury represents the people, not because the people chose the jury,
40:20
but because the jury is the people.
40:22
The jury is just a sampling of the people.
40:25
And that's how they constructed the Irish citizens assembly.
40:30
So randomly selected...
40:33
randomly selected citizens...
40:36
And again, something that's very convenient is that it's a binary question, if you'll pardon the pun.
40:45
And that means it's a yes or no question.
40:48
And that's a bit like the tennis game.
40:52
You know, it doesn't go all over the place.
40:54
I say yes.
40:55
It's limited.
40:56
It's a yes or no.
40:57
And so you'd have gay Irish people and conservative Christian, you know, homophobic Irish people,
41:03
and they'd be sitting around a table.
41:04
Yeah.
41:05
And what did they have to do?
41:06
They had to basically...
41:07
Well, they have to come up with a answer.
41:09
Yeah, they're asked.
41:11
I think the...
41:12
I mean, these rules, the people do different things in different places.
41:17
But one of the things that a citizen assembly will often aim for is a bit like a jury,
41:25
you know, legal jury is a preponderant opinion.
41:28
So not a unanimous opinion, but if you've got 100 people and 99 people,
41:32
you...
41:33
You trying to get to say 80% to 70%.
41:36
Right.
41:37
A super majority.
41:38
And that gives...
41:39
Now, you could just...
41:41
In the first 10 minutes say, let's all have a vote.
41:44
And all go home.
41:45
Yeah.
41:46
And what you're trying to do is you're trying to say to people, as in a jury, in a legal jury,
41:51
this is a...
41:52
You are given a unique privilege.
41:54
You are given a large responsibility.
41:57
You represent the people we want to get the right result for your community,
42:02
for you in person, for you personally, and for you as a...
42:06
Considered more broadly as a citizen.
42:08
And that often these things go for about four days.
42:12
I'm not sure...
42:13
I think it was quite a bit longer with the Irish one.
42:15
And it came to a pretty hefty consensus that same-sex marriage was a good idea.
42:22
That it should be legalized.
42:23
And the parliamentarians at that stage, it got a comfortable majority in parliament and went through.
42:29
So it's sort of...
42:32
It defused the issue and prevented it being the sort of divisive thing.
42:38
It was something that I was quite active behind the scenes talking to all sorts of people
42:44
before the voice.
42:46
In Australia, the voice was a body representing indigenous people that would have an input into parliament.
42:53
And I was arguing...
42:54
And there was a referendum...
42:55
And there was a referendum...
42:56
Whether we would create this thing last year, didn't work.
42:58
That's right.
42:59
And I was saying to all kinds of anyone I could...
43:02
Anyone I could in position...
43:04
In a position of a thought-power authority or influence, you should have a citizen assembly.
43:10
Because that takes you from the opinion of the people, which is very febrile, very jumpy, easily influenced, driven by all kinds of things, fear, emotion, disinformation.
43:26
Put it through a citizen assembly, get 100 randomly selected Australians, and get them to advise people before the referendum.
43:35
And the structure of the citizens assembly functions a bit like the structure of Wikipedia does in filtering conversations based on merit in a way.
43:45
Correct.
43:46
That's a nice report.
43:47
Yeah.
43:48
Which parliament should do and doesn't?
43:50
Yes.
43:51
And which a referendum should do but is more susceptible to all of the deranging effects.
43:56
Exactly.
43:57
The idea that you would articulate misinformation, the equation, grandstandings.
44:01
Exactly.
44:02
And it's interesting the Irish experience in contrast to the Australian experience, where unlike the United States, where it was a judicial decision to legalize same-sex marriage, so there was no...
44:12
Yeah, there was no...
44:13
Which I think is people's involvement.
44:15
Unfortunate.
44:16
Yeah, I think that.
44:17
Like, they rely way too much on their Supreme Court.
44:19
Yeah, exactly.
44:20
The well-liked system.
44:21
Yeah, exactly.
44:22
Yeah.
44:23
But in Australia, the conservative government at the time, when they knew that same-sex marriage was inevitable and had to be done, he'd bind the fig leaf of having a national referendum, which they called a plebiscite non-binding.
44:39
But the whole cost and expense and logistical complexity of getting every single Australian voter to vote on the question, just so that the resounding yes vote could then give cover to conservative politicians to vote.
44:51
For the legitimate way in parliament.
44:53
Since you mentioned the juries, I just want to, before we go too deep in the weeds about citizens' assemblies, how they would work, pours on the justice system, because you also have interesting things to say about how that has become corrupted in a way.
45:07
That the inquisitorial system that they have in Europe is a very different way of going to tease out the truth than the adversarial system that we have in the UK and Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and also in the US.
45:21
Can you explain how courts work in Europe?
45:25
The mythology of a court, I don't mean by mythology, that it's not true, the motivating ethos, the story that the court tells itself, is that the court is in pursuit of the truth, the court is represented by the magistrate, the judge.
45:43
So a court case is a judge seeking to encountering a disagreement, encountering a situation where two parties cannot agree, and the judges' role is to determine the truth in so far as they can, or the likely truth.
46:03
The parties put their case, the parties have a right to be legally represented, to have their legal rights protected, but the judge, the independent party, the whole court case is done so to allow the judge to inform themselves of the truth.
46:27
Now that's how it's done, it's about four times cheaper, it's faster, it's fairer, it's not perfect, and I won't say more unless you want me to.
46:42
But I mean, it's interesting that, for example, in our system, if there's a corporation going up against an individual that they disagree about whether or not there was some contaminant in something, both sides will find an expert.
46:57
That's the expert, the two experts will say opposite things, and a jury will be expected to understand.
47:03
It makes sense of this, because in Europe, the court, the judge would appoint an expert, it would be a single expert, that's right.
47:11
And you think that's better?
47:13
Well, I would say that the English adversarial system, which we use here in Australia, in America, and in Britain, that's very like the candidates debate, it's very like the media story where everyone goes through their talking points.
47:31
The jury is presented with an expert from the corporation, an expert from Greenpeace.
47:39
What do you make? It's utterly useless, and it is a great way, as one legal scholar says, you couldn't think of a better way to devalue expertise.
47:51
So you're very much like you're watching a Twitter spat or anything else.
48:01
And again, just to bring it back to the very first thing we spoke about, which is this ecology of the private and the shared.
48:08
The argument is that the adversarial legal system has got that ecology wrong.
48:15
It's placed the private interests of the two parties to high in the hierarchy, and has given the authority of the court to little authority, and that ends up being not in the enlightened self interest of either party.
48:34
Because it's my personal identity. And it's absolutely incredibly unfair, because basically, I mean, there's a real sense in which we don't have a legal system.
48:49
If you and I are neighbors, and we have, and we, and you have loud parties, and I come and say, can you please not have the loud parties, and we end up having to go to court.
49:01
Well, that's 100,000 bucks down. It's just nuts. It's just completely nuts.
49:06
Yeah. And if I have 500,000 to spend on a lawyer, and you have 10,000 to spend on a lawyer, I'm pretty much winning that case.
49:13
Well, exactly. But the worst thing is that I won't go anywhere near you if you've got, you've got, I won't even try. Yes, you'll win the case, but, or you're more likely to win the case, but I can't risk any of it.
49:27
And even if I lose, I'll drag it out to appeal, and then that cost you in more money.
49:32
Yeah, it is interesting, isn't it, that the pyrotechnics of a big legal battle, I mean, I'm just thinking of like the OJ case, or something like that.
49:38
Like, you know, then these incredible resources and headspinning explanations, and if the glove doesn't fit, then you must acquit.
49:46
Well, well, that sort of, it is like what politics has become. The showmanship, like a spectacle, or the pomp, it's like late Rome.
49:52
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's much more scandalous, I think, in civil litigation. So I think I record, but you look at deaf, I've got a particular thing about defamation, because in defamation, the facts are clear, they're published.
50:11
You could have a, you could have a, and so one of the ways in which you repeat in courts work is that you might get a phone, you know, the, the magistrate might bring some people up and records, you know, the magistrates trying to get to solve the problem.
50:28
So the magistrate is part of saying, look, I think you're being a bit unreasonable about this. If you, if we end up in court in two months' time, and you're arguing that, and it's obviously not true, that's not going to play well for you.
50:43
Okay, so that's the sort of thing that is, that the judge has the authority to do that sort of stuff. So, yeah, that's just a, that's just a vast human in a way.
50:58
It's more human, it's vastly more adapted to its purpose. I think, and perhaps a not particularly pleasant person, I don't know, it was, I think his name was Nicholas Mosley, is the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, the, the British fascist of the 30s.
51:16
And he was defamed by the London tabloids for having sex parties where people dressed as Nazis, something that was the defamation, and it was, you know, it was mostly confection, there was some interesting things going on.
51:38
And he sued for defamation and the costs were a million pounds or more. This is just, this is just outrageous. This is outrageous. And, and in the United Kingdom right now, at least judging from the headlines, it's four years to get to court.
51:56
This is completely unacceptable. There's not a legal system. Yeah, that's a, that's a system which looks like a legal system from the outside and is the law of the jungle, because you know, you can't, you can't, the legal system won't solve your problems if you have to wait for years.
52:13
Yeah, no, I mean, that's, there's a whole lot of question of crumbling British infrastructure, you lack of funding and so on. I had, I had brunch with a barrister in London a few weeks ago, she was saying she's just going to leave the country actually, because by the time a case comes into her chambers, you know, the last summer they were doing it, they were arguing a case and it was, you know, it was 30 degrees or something outside in London, and there's no air conditioning in the old building.
52:37
Yeah, so it was 36 degrees, and they just sent the, the drutches send everybody home. And so then you've, they've already waited as you say, two years to be heard, now they bumped back up the docket to another six bucks or something like that.
52:47
Anyway, that's a whole other, other wins. Another way, and I should also say that if you're just tuning in now on on sub-sac live or on YouTube, then we're going to have audience questions at the end of this conversation with Nicholas Grill and about citizens assemblies, about the erosion of civilized and constructive debate and discourse in Western politics and what the solutions.
53:06
So stick around for that and if you're listening to this after the fact, then subscribe to the premium version of the podcast to hear it all.
53:13
So the other thing that you talk about when you're sort of ragging on the adversarial system where people pick their own experts and so on is the way in which corporations in our modern form of capitalism will audit themselves or be required to audit themselves.
53:31
Well, they choose the audience and they'll just pick, yeah, they'll be to pick their own auditor or self comply.
53:38
As if there, and as if we saw this before the financial crisis in 2008 where the big banks would pay immense amounts of money to the credit ratings agency is to rate them triple A.
53:52
And if a credit rating agency raised its eyebrows and said I'm not sure you are triple A, they would just go to another credit rating agency and threaten to take their business.
54:00
So how does that come to pass that the watchdog is a holden to the people that's supposed to be watching.
54:08
So why are we set it up?
54:11
How did it come to pass that the prime minister appoints high court judges?
54:18
You think might be a bit of a conflict there? There's conflicts of interest. We haven't thought this stuff through.
54:24
We haven't. It's evolved. It's evolved from struggle.
54:29
So these are simple points that I'm making and people kind of pat me on the head.
54:37
And so that's very interesting. And would you come and talk to us in your executive retreat, but they don't do anything about it.
54:46
But yeah, you can this is this is this is a huge deal and we're finding out about it in spades in the United States.
54:55
There are dangerous signs everywhere else, but in the United States, we are seeing an autocratic takeover.
55:03
And that's all based on an incredibly flimsy structure in which so I'm a huge admirer of the founding fathers of the United States.
55:13
The idea of checks and balances is exactly the right one, but they attached it all to the head of state.
55:21
They attached it all to a pyramid. It goes up to a single point of sovereignty, which is a single point of failure.
55:27
But they didn't though. They had three colleagues. Well, they were very clear that they were co-equal branches.
55:32
That's right. And who appoints supreme court judges?
55:36
Well, sure. Yeah, sure. So.
55:39
But who has the purse strings to prevent the chief executive from doing anything Congress?
55:44
That's right. So that was a good thing to do. But my point is a slightly different one, which is that there was another great
55:55
democratizing moment in Western history, much earlier on, Magna Carta.
56:03
The strategy of Magna Carta is a different strategy, which is the real distribution of power because you they introduce this idea that you can't be denied your rights except by the judgment of your peers.
56:18
Remind non-Britz of the Magna Carta.
56:20
12th century and there's a king of England with strange orange here.
56:30
And I'm only joking. And he becomes more and more impossible runs.
56:35
Oh, dear, foreign wars runs up budget deficits and so on.
56:40
And starts increasingly abusing his power and the barons, the powerful, the powerful nobles of England get together and say,
56:53
we're not having this and force him to sign the Magna Carta, which has a series of which has a series of rights in it.
57:02
And one of them is the right.
57:04
Is the right not to be deprived of one's life or liberty without the without that being consistent with the judgment of one's peers.
57:14
Now that wasn't they weren't talking about democracy there. They were talking about that the peers were rather like the democracy in the Catholic church, which only exists at the level of Cardinal.
57:25
So there it's a very similar system, actually, and they say we we want a we want a communal we want this to reflect communal values.
57:37
So where I'm going with this is that in Michigan, Michigan has the right kind of infrastructure for determining the boundaries of electorates because that's something you wouldn't want to give to politicians because they have a conflict of interest.
57:56
So what they've done is a Americans would know this is a district gerrymandering.
58:00
It's an anti-gerrymandering.
58:02
So in Michigan, the they got the it was in this case, the Republicans, the gerrymandering is certainly not beyond Democrats, but they got the Republicans with their hands in the cookie jar with emails from head office saying, you know, do these boundaries give us a top.
58:22
Will we still get government if we get less than if our opponents get 65% of the vote.
58:29
And they said, yep, these boundaries will do that for you.
58:32
And these these emails were tended in evidence to the US Supreme Court. And they said, no, that's just fine.
58:40
So there was the Supreme Court said that it was that it was legitimate.
58:43
Well, what the Supreme Court said is that it's up to Michigan, the Supreme Court wouldn't wouldn't get itself amazing.
58:50
And and so there was now Michigan is one of the 19 states of the United States that has citizen initiated referendum.
58:58
So a young woman on Facebook started a Facebook group and managed to put together a campaign for the Michigan independent citizens redistricting commission, which involves 13.
59:11
It's a bit more complicated than this, but this will do as a as a shorthand explanation.
59:16
13 randomly selected Michigan citizens and they do the redistricting and that's cleaned up gerrymandering and that would be very hard to corrupt.
59:25
We should be thinking about mechanisms like that in Australia for the appointment of judges and import, you know, if we if parliamentary salaries, there's a nice juicy journalistic one.
59:39
We should be taking away from politicians decisions where they have obvious conflicts of interest.
59:46
It's pretty simple. Yeah. It's a pretty simple idea.
59:49
But taking it away in a context in which it's not susceptible to the deranging effects.
59:55
Exactly. Exactly.
59:56
Me voting.
59:57
Yeah. Yeah.
59:58
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.
59:59
Also, and not I mean, the best we've got at the moment and we're seeing this in an Australian debate about a royal commission.
1:00:05
But the best we've got at the moment is we there is still respect in Australia for judges and for their independence.
1:00:11
And there is some respect that politicians show that to that in their appointments.
1:00:17
That can go. It can go in the, you know, Scott Morrison, the previous prime minister appointed cronies to a quasi judicial body, the administrative appeals tribunal.
1:00:30
Completely outrageous.
1:00:32
So it can go. It can disappear like the driven snow at any point. So it's not safe.
1:00:38
But it's a, it's a sky hook. It's a, it's a thing we can appeal to in Australia because it's not corrupt.
1:00:46
And it's reasonably functional at the moment.
1:00:49
But we, but it is incredible to me, Josh, that we look around and no one is saying, how do we harden our democracy against what we can see happening?
1:01:01
And the principles of doing it are pretty straightforward.
1:01:04
Right. Well, I mean, people are saying that they're just not necessarily coming up with your solution after the last election.
1:01:09
After the last election, the Democrats spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether or not they should run on ensuring up democracy.
1:01:14
Yeah.
1:01:15
Or whether that's not political strategy.
1:01:17
That's not political strategy. It's not constitutional strategy. I mean, I'm just, I'm just shocked and outraged.
1:01:26
I'm going for the clickbait obviously.
1:01:29
I'm shocked and outraged.
1:01:31
Leading academic shock and outrage that no one in the Democratic Party.
1:01:36
No one of any prominence at all has said we must, we must reform the pardon power.
1:01:43
It's such an obvious vector for, for constitutional catastrophe.
1:01:50
If the ICE person who it seems murdered the woman in the van is found guilty of murder or manslaughter, Donald Trump will pardon them.
1:02:04
We know that.
1:02:06
He's already pardoned all these violent criminals who did the January 6th stuff.
1:02:12
Isn't it in the Constitution?
1:02:15
It is in the Constitution, so you don't understand that.
1:02:17
Well, Americans have done it more often than we have.
1:02:21
Not since 1970, what?
1:02:23
I don't know.
1:02:24
But anyway, you put it up there.
1:02:28
You say we should be reforming this.
1:02:33
You make the point.
1:02:38
And there are also, yeah, if you're doing that, you at least it then at least.
1:02:46
You can then try to develop some due process, which is a sort of second best approach to this.
1:02:53
Anyway, you just.
1:02:55
No, I'm only quiddling with the idea that there isn't a genuine sense that there's a problem in the States,
1:03:02
because I think a lot of people are trying.
1:03:06
I didn't say that.
1:03:08
I didn't say that.
1:03:09
A lot of people know.
1:03:10
There is a sense of there's a problem.
1:03:13
And we're taking, you know, we're taking whatever the, you know, a pencil to a knife fight.
1:03:20
There's definitely a problem.
1:03:22
But nobody is saying, how do we reconfigure this Constitution, this, and by Constitution,
1:03:29
I don't just mean the written document.
1:03:31
I mean, the way the rules of politics, how do we reconfigure this?
1:03:36
I mean, what I like about your solution is that it avoids the tricky work of thinking that you're going to be able to fix everything by tweaking rules and writing down new processes.
1:03:50
That is the technocratic instinct of most bureaucratic people.
1:03:53
Oh, we're going to have to, let's change the rule about this, let's change the rule about that, let's change it.
1:03:58
Whereas your solution is more organic in the sense that it says, let's just, let's just reform the system by which the rules are debated.
1:04:07
Correct.
1:04:08
And let's use really almost the simplest notion that we have as far as governance is concerned, which is avoid conflicts of interest.
1:04:21
Don't get people to decide things that they have a conflict of interest to decide.
1:04:28
That's really simple.
1:04:30
You'll find that emerging on the playground when kids make rules for games.
1:04:35
Yes.
1:04:36
We have a sense for that.
1:04:39
And create an environment in which people are coming back to the personal interest and the shared interest,
1:04:45
which like at a pub, you know, people will often end a long good chat between mates at a pub or a barbecue or a dinner party by saying,
1:04:54
right, well, we solved all the world problems, right?
1:04:56
Now, if politicians could do that, we'd do what we find.
1:04:59
And there's more than a grain of truth.
1:05:00
We're doing it.
1:05:01
We're doing it right now.
1:05:02
There's more than grain of truth to that.
1:05:03
When a bunch of regular people come together in a spirit of good faith,
1:05:07
where the privacy of their own relationships is upheld.
1:05:11
That's right.
1:05:12
It's being reasonable with each other is upheld.
1:05:14
The importance of being as generous as they can be towards each other's beliefs is upheld.
1:05:18
And listening to them, trying to give people the benefit of the doubt and actually understand where they're going to go.
1:05:23
Give a little answer if you can get all that.
1:05:25
You do get somewhere.
1:05:26
So how do you do that?
1:05:28
Articulate for us what the vision is.
1:05:29
What do you do?
1:05:30
Well, you have the house of a lot of house.
1:05:32
So I'm not appealing to a real bedrock here.
1:05:39
It's not that we have nice conversations.
1:05:42
It is that this is a node of democratic political legitimacy.
1:05:49
The jury has more legitimacy in our democracy than a politician.
1:05:56
Maybe than a judge.
1:05:57
I don't know.
1:05:58
I don't want to make that claim here.
1:05:59
You would certainly, I would certainly make it in the United States.
1:06:03
So this is something that is in our history.
1:06:09
It's in our intuition that if we want to build an institution that will defend the center will defend the shared interests.
1:06:22
It's already there.
1:06:23
We know what it looks like.
1:06:24
It looks like a jury.
1:06:25
It might be it doesn't have to be a jury just of citizens.
1:06:29
It might be a jury of if you're trying to choose judges, it might be a jury which has randomly selected judges or ex judges as part of that population.
1:06:41
But that's the principle.
1:06:43
The principle is give it to a body that isn't stacked with people all of whom have a conflict of interest.
1:06:52
Many of whom will behave quite well, but over a long period of time will learn through the party system to behave less well.
1:06:59
So to give you an example here, again, I mentioned the founding fathers.
1:07:03
The idea of confirmation hearings is a terrific idea.
1:07:06
It corresponds exactly to what I'm talking about.
1:07:09
A confirmation hearings for a jurist, you mean?
1:07:11
For a judge.
1:07:12
So a judge in the United States, a judge of the Supreme Court can't be is nominated by the president and has to get through a confirmation hearings.
1:07:22
By the Senate and the senators of all parties will grill these people and they will and you can't become a Supreme Court judge if you don't pass that test.
1:07:35
And the problem is that these conflicts of interest that each politician has has now become so extreme that everyone simply votes their party ticket in the confirmation hearings or often does.
1:07:56
And so the and so that institution is captured by the parties.
1:08:02
And speaking of social media again, just as on the side, they also use the confirmation hearing as a way to grandstand and 20 seconds social media clips.
1:08:09
That's right.
1:08:10
Exactly.
1:08:11
Exactly.
1:08:12
That's right.
1:08:13
That's right.
1:08:14
And some really good stuff on that in his book while we're polarized.
1:08:17
Yes.
1:08:18
So good idea.
1:08:20
Exactly the right idea.
1:08:22
Slightly cocked up by some very wonderful people, brilliant people who were thinking about politics without really knowing how political parties would turn out and that they got it slightly wrong as they got the electoral college wrong.
1:08:41
But a but citizen juries randomly selecting people and getting them to deliberate is the way to defend the shared center and anything any decision that a politician is making where they have a conflict of interest where it's about the political game they shouldn't be making those.
1:09:02
I want to get to the people's questions.
1:09:04
So just lastly, what just put some flesh on the bones of being specific here.
1:09:08
So yes, we could all imagine that instead of a prime minister or a president appointing a Supreme Court or a high court judge, you might have a body of former senior judges do that right and they're dedicated to do that.
1:09:23
Yes.
1:09:24
Yes.
1:09:25
Yes.
1:09:26
That's the critical point.
1:09:27
Right.
1:09:28
But in terms of the big sort of handing back more power to the people on major issues question.
1:09:33
Yeah.
1:09:34
You also talk about having an actual standing body is another chamber in a sense in addition to the lower house and the upper house which would be a people's chamber instead of us electing our representatives from particular electorates or states as we do in Australia and the United States.
1:09:49
We would also have a jury chamber essentially and you get called up to correct sit in this chamber for a certain period of time.
1:09:58
Yeah.
1:09:59
Would it be a full time thing?
1:10:00
Do you get compensated for it?
1:10:01
Okay.
1:10:02
So you get compensated for it.
1:10:05
I think it would work best.
1:10:07
You would get you would it would be easiest for people.
1:10:10
If you said to them, we and certainly because I want to be because the government's not going to agree to this.
1:10:20
I want to privately fund this.
1:10:22
I want to try and get private funding for this.
1:10:26
So I would actually say to people if you are chosen what we want you to do is give us say four weekend days in the first month and you'll get to meet each other and so on.
1:10:40
And then you'll maybe do one day one weekend day a month plus two or maybe two Zoom call two or two or three hour Zoom calls in the evening.
1:10:52
So you're making it consistent with people keeping their job.
1:10:55
They might do this for six months.
1:10:57
They might do it for a year or two or three.
1:10:59
That's all that's all the design that that's all up to the design.
1:11:03
And the point is that is a body which is self sovereign like the House of Representatives is or the Senate is it decides its agenda.
1:11:15
But I wanted to shadow the parliamentary notice paper that is to shadow what the houses are doing and it's invited to vote on what the houses are voting on.
1:11:29
And what I want to do is I want to say that if the citizens body disagrees with a vote of either chamber they can send that vote back and seek a secret ballot.
1:11:46
Because a lot of what's going wrong is going wrong because of party discipline.
1:11:51
That is why a straight that's how Australia started off with a carbon pricing regime.
1:11:57
You know how much it would be contributing to the budget by now about eleven or twelve billion dollars a year.
1:12:03
We abolished it.
1:12:04
I don't think a citizen assembly as they came to understand those things would have wanted to do that.
1:12:10
And so they would have sent that back to the House of Representatives.
1:12:13
And the parliamentarians didn't want to do it.
1:12:16
They knew it was bad policy.
1:12:18
So you're giving them a chance to do their job.
1:12:21
Right.
1:12:22
And the idea is if it's a secret ballot you're going to get some number of people in the party who will defect.
1:12:29
That's right.
1:12:30
Now you can't do that generally because we have party system and we as a general rule we need to know how our parliamentarians vote.
1:12:38
Yeah.
1:12:39
It's an extraordinary.
1:12:40
But when parliamentarians party determined vote differs from the considered opinion of the people we want to be sure that it also corresponds with the consciences of those parliamentarians.
1:12:51
Knowing a lot of parliamentarians they're actually surprisingly decent people in a very shitty system.
1:12:58
Think of them as people who stumbled into the mafia at an early age and they can't really get out.
1:13:04
It's a very unpleasant job.
1:13:06
Most of them are miserable and they actually got into it to do what they think is something useful for the community in there.
1:13:14
And so this is a but but but but I'm not doing it on their behalf.
1:13:19
I'm doing it on our behalf.
1:13:20
Yes.
1:13:21
And so that's that's the idea.
1:13:23
I like it.
1:13:24
And so the idea and even if it even if this assembly came into existence privately with no formal authority and lacked the authority to be able to compel.
1:13:34
You journals would help at that stage wouldn't you?
1:13:36
Well I should hope so.
1:13:38
You would point out you would say these ordinary Australians think this is it would function the same way as the Australian same sex marriage.
1:13:46
Yes.
1:13:47
That's right.
1:13:48
Because if there was an issue on which the parliament was constantly voting down to the citizens assembly.
1:13:54
That's right.
1:13:55
That would give grounds for parliamentarians fee to be helped to the five more than they currently are.
1:14:00
And let me just say one more thing which is that one of the things that people are terrified by.
1:14:05
I mean I know for instance that Barry Jones is terrified by the idea that they'll bring back capital punishment.
1:14:11
Now what that misses is that that there's this.
1:14:15
You mean the citizens assembly.
1:14:17
Yes.
1:14:18
Because they're the people that's right that the citizen assembly would be a hotbed of populism and it's not.
1:14:23
You can see that it's not because what happens when you what happens in these citizen assemblies is that people change their minds because of course they they know that they're pretty ignorant about a bunch of things and they're happy to change their minds.
1:14:40
But also I don't think that's good a good argument anyway because it shouldn't be an instrument to achieve the particular policies that you want it to.
1:14:50
So what if they were to bring back capital punishment?
1:14:53
No, no, I agree with that.
1:14:55
I agree with that.
1:14:56
But I'm not that there are I guess you know there is going to be some things that I'm going to draw the line at and I'll give you an example which is white juries in the south in the United States.
1:15:07
So this isn't you top here it's not a perfect solution but generally I agree with you and for instance on lots of work things it would be a solution to a lot of work things because people would say sorry I don't I don't sign up.
1:15:21
I'm just don't agree with that.
1:15:23
Yeah.
1:15:24
Even if I did agree even if I did think that they were wrong I would I totally agree with you but I am very concerned about this this journey from the well in a way from primary to secondary preferences from the from the opinion of the people to the considered opinion of the people and there's a big difference.
1:15:44
Yeah, because people can get themselves all excited.
1:15:47
Yeah, people can jump on a side.
1:15:49
This is my explanation for why we are swamped in culture war because it's the way at the user end at the citizen end it's how we orient ourselves.
1:16:02
And at the producer end the politicians end the political operative end political operatives end it's highly entertaining gets you clicks and it mobilizes you base all of this is so I would argue that our competitive
1:16:22
electoral system is the sort of DNA that is producing this yes also to those who say that a citizens assembly would leave us with just at the whims of the opinions of the people I would say a welcome to democracy b
1:16:39
We are already at the whims of the unconsidered.
1:16:42
Yeah, exactly.
1:16:44
Consider the people because politicians are beholden to jump for our new site.
1:16:49
To beholden to click bait.
1:16:51
Those eight minute interviews with adversarial journalist which get us nowhere.
1:16:55
We're all swimming in a soup of our own echo chambers and algorithms like feeds.
1:16:59
So it's not like the comparison is either we have a bit the citizens assembly or we have an enlightened monarch who's going to take care of us all the time we're living in a swamp.
1:17:07
That's right.
1:17:08
That's right.
1:17:09
The winds into something a little bit more constructive.
1:17:11
Nicholas it's fantastic to talk to you.
1:17:13
Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
1:17:15
This conversation is going to continue with questions from some of our viewers.
1:17:20
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1:17:24
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1:17:25
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1:17:28
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1:17:30
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