Deliberative democracy and the Australian Government’s promised youth engagement model
The Government's promise creates an exciting new opportunity to more meaningfully represent Australian youth, but it needs to look beyond the old toolkit
The Government’s pledge creates an exciting opportunity to strengthen our democracy
Labor has pledged to introduce a new youth engagement model “to provide a voice and structure for younger Australians to directly engage with government and contribute to policy development.” The model will include a “framework to directly and formally engage with young Australians on an ongoing basis.” The model and framework are yet to be defined in detail.
There are a few democratic imperatives for a youth engagement model. Most obviously, young people under the age of 18 can’t vote, so don’t have a direct voice. Young people also aren’t super well represented descriptively; the average age of a federal parliamentarian is around 50.
There is increasing evidence that young Australians don’t feel that their voice is recognised. They’re more dissatisfied with democracy than older generations.
And apart from the inherent value of their voice as citizens, the voice of youth is also recognised as a critical part of the solution to “democratic myopia”. Our democracies are too often short-termist; future generations often don’t figure sufficiently in decision-making.
Deliberative democracy should be used in two ways
I want to argue that deliberative democracy is part of the answer to two questions about Labor’s youth engagement model:
How do you define the ongoing engagement model and in particular, how do you engage youth in doing this?
What should the model of ongoing engagement itself look like?
The existing solutions for engaging youth aren’t sufficient
The solutions
Australia has historically implemented youth engagement models, including a Youth Advisory Council and Office for Youth, but these were removed in 2013. The current government has also announced high-level features of its proposed new model, including annual youth summits, local forums, workshops and town halls.
A bunch of other relatively comparable jurisdictions, including Canada, New Zealand and the UK, have already institutionalised youth engagement models.
Some examples of things these models include:
Competitively selected youth steering and advisory committees (a feature of the ALP’s planned model), and Councils (for example, the Prime Minister’s Youth Council in Canada)
Voluntary participatory forums, like hui in New Zealand and semi-structured, facilitated online discussions in Canada
Youth summits (a feature of the ALP’s planned model)
Preferential recruitment of youth facing barriers, those with highly intersectional identities and youth who are less often heard
In Scotland and Wales, for example, elected youth parliaments
The problems with these solutions
I want to start by acknowledging that these solutions are powerful steps forward. I hugely respect the involvement and contribution of the young people who have volunteered to participate and the commitment of elected officials to give young people a voice in innovative ways.
But having made this point, I do think that there some significant drawbacks of aspects (not all aspects, and you could retain and complement new innovations with some of them):
Representation: I don’t think it can be said that these models really engage the disengaged. I think the commitment to representing youth facing particular barriers in both New Zealand and Canada is critical and should be ported across to the Australian model. I think there should be space for electing and/or selecting young leaders to play certain roles. But these voluntary and elected methods of recruiting folks alone (including recruiting folks facing barriers) will skew towards ambitious and motivated young people who already have strong capacity to engage, replicating the power imbalances we see in existing formal institutions.
Deliberative discussion: I’ve mentioned in other posts the problems with the typical town hall or open forum. In short, the focus is rarely on giving people the opportunity to go deep on an issue, wrestle with different arguments and talk to each other to reach a view.
Empowerment: Where youth steering committees and councils are selected by governments to serve for a certain length of time, there seems to be a lot of potential for government to influence what is recommended. (This is distinct from the government’s power to act on what is fairly and transparently recommended).
Youth deliberation should be used to define the ongoing model
What could this look like?
The ALP (informed by the planned steering committee) runs a youth mini-public to define its youth engagement model. (By youth mini-public, I mean randomly selected young people, say aged 15-30, yes, partly because I would like to set the threshold for youth above my age to ward off existential crisis).
Why?
I’ve highlighted elsewhere the potential in general terms for deliberative democracy to provide better representation and more informed, meaningful participation. Rather than recap these arguments, I want to make a few arguments specifically about why deliberation is a good idea in this context.
Random selection is particularly appropriate for questions of institutional design. Why? Because members of existing institutions and governance mechanisms have a conflict of interest. Some general examples: decisions about the salaries of legislators or political donations. In this context, the steering committee and other existing structures the government puts in place from the outset have an incentive to recommend that they be given significant powers in the ongoing model. The incentives of randomly selected individuals are very different.
Youth juries and deliberative processes have been run with great success in a range of countries, including Australia. These processes completely debunk the myth that youth, specifically randomly selected youth, aren’t capable of engaging in meaningful and informed deliberation and decision-making. A few examples (supported by academic evaluations):
US “Shaping Our Future” youth deliberative process (climate and economic inequality)
MosaicLab Australian youth jury (work and mental health)
VicHealth “Staying on Track” youth jury (how the state can support young adults in the transition from study to full time work)
Parramatta youth jury (racial stereotyping of ethnic groups)
Alicia Payne MP’s recent deliberative town hall on young people and Australian politics
UK youth juries run in Cambridge, Belfast and Leicestershire
I want to specifically call attention to representation of traditionally under-represented youth (features of the Canadian and New Zealand governments in particular). I’ll note some of the ways in which deliberations can seek to protect and amplify marginalised voices. Firstly, certain groups can be intentionally over-represented in the sample. For example, in a “deliberative poll” on Indigenous reconciliation in Australia held in 2001, the sample included 344 non-Indigenous Australians and 46 Indigenous Australians; in some cases, an increase in the number of representatives of disadvantaged groups may help further substantive representation of the group’s interests (with the caveat that these individuals shouldn’t be specifically tasked with representing a particular identity group). Secondly, deliberation itself can promote empathy. And thirdly, the process can be explicitly framed to ask how the ongoing youth engagement model can amplify marginalised voices. To be transparent, deliberative scholars continue to grapple with this issue. But ultimately, any model of election or voluntary participation of course must also grapple with it.
Youth deliberation should be part of the ongoing youth engagement model
What could this look like?
There are plenty of global models for institutionalising mini-publics in various ways (mostly advisory, which this model would focus on). In this case, drawing on the Ostbelgien Model, you might imagine 25-50 young people recruited, with a small financial incentive, to tackle a particular issue every ~3 months. The process might take place over 3 long virtual deliberation sessions held on evenings or weekends. You might also convene a separate mini-public annually (perhaps a feature of the planned Youth Summit) to recommend the issues that these separate mini-publics tackle, or it might be the role of the planned steering committee to set the agenda and provide continuity.
Why?
Many of the arguments made above for combining mini-publics and youth apply here.
But a couple of additional specific points can be made about using the mini-public model to address issues on an ongoing basis (vs just to define the ongoing engagement model):
On time commitment and incentives: School, work and extra-curricular commitments aren’t of themselves barriers to young people’s participation. Standard deliberative processes compensate and accommodate for work, childcare and other commitments. The youth juries noted above demonstrate that young people do participate. But this barrier is why I’m suggesting the model would be to rotate through different mini-publics, rather than attempt a more permanent single body. And just because students are selected randomly, this doesn’t mean that their participation shouldn’t be recognised and celebrated by government, schools and communities. If I were an employer or educational institution, I’d view this experience as a huge asset on a student’s resume.
The kinds of issues the mini-publics might tackle: I’d argue that youth mini-publics are particularly well-placed to issue advice on “intergenerational sustainability problems” and a range of problems that raise particular long-term concerns: to cite a few from one paper (which deals with various international Offices for Future Generations), “ageing populations that will place significant stress on pensions and health and social care” and a lack of “strategic investment” in “infrastructure, undermining the future reliability of utility distributions systems, transport networks and the availability of housing stock”. And there is compelling evidence that deliberation is particularly well-suited to address issues that concern future generations. One recent paper by Simon Niemeyer makes this case with reference to three examples: the Australian Capital Region Deliberative Forum, the City of Sydney Residents’ Panel on Climate Adaptation and the Danish World Wide View on Global Warming forum. The central idea is that randomly selected citizens don’t face many of the short-term imperatives faced by politicians, and the mini-public forum can evoke their “better selves” as democratic citizens via their “deliberative stance”.
What this hasn’t covered
A lot. The key point is that what I’ve suggested would form just one part of a much broader model, which would incorporate the views of other key stakeholders, include components of voluntary, elected and/or selected youth representation and include a range of other innovative ways of promoting civic engagement.
Here are some specific things:
What weight should the recommendations of a youth mini-public carry relative to other stakeholder groups on these issues? This article has assumed a model for specifically soliciting the views of youth as one part of a complex stakeholder environment (including, on the question about the design of the model itself, parents, educators, and political scientists, for example). It’s also worth noting that youth can be represented in ordinary mini-publics, deliberating together with citizens of different ages.
What parameters might you place around the sorts of issues youth mini-publics consider? I’ve briefly suggested that intergenerational issues can be well-suited for consideration by a mini-public, but as I plan to say in most posts, mini-publics aren’t for everything.
How do you connect youth mini-publics to youth maxi-publics? I want to stress that this model should leave ample room for gathering input in a more participatory way and at scale. To mention just two examples of how you might do this: (1) the mini-publics might commission wider surveys or polls, or there might be a phase in the process of otherwise soliciting open input and (2) mini-public participants might be encouraged or even compensated to go back into their communities (schools, workplaces, universities) and share their findings.
What other broader strategies do you deploy to creatively promote youth civic engagement? (For example, promoting alternative models of civics and citizenship education, and including both efforts led by government and by civil society). More to come on this in future posts!
Some really thought-provoking ideas in this blog. I really liked the focus on engaging with those groups that are too often overlooked in these kinds of discussions - and the way that this might go from a principle to a practice, and also the focus on a rotation of mini-publics, rather than a permanent or semi-permanent body. I do wonder, however, what kind of form this deliberate democracy approaches might take, and how that form might be best shaped to reflect young peoples lives and their engagement with the world today (and not older views of what society might think this should look like).