Michael Green

Writer and producer

Renewed interest in renewables

In Environment, The Age on

WOODEND residents are staging a renewable energy revival, spurred by the incoming state government.

The local sustainability group is launching two green energy projects: a new solar energy scheme and the resurrection of a longstanding plan for three community-owned wind turbines.

Today, at the Sustainable Living Festival in Woodend, Energy and Resources Minister Lily D’Ambrosio will announce a $100,000 grant for a 30-kilowatt solar farm.

The panels will be installed at the old timber mill, where the tenants’ ongoing electricity bills will be reinvested in further solar panels. It will create a “perpetual fund” for community renewable energy, says Ralf Thesing, president of the Macedon Ranges Sustainability Group.

Last week, D’Ambrosio announced a $200,000 grant for the central Victorian town of Newstead to become fully powered by renewable energy.

She says the new government will “support and stand alongside” communities such as Newstead and Woodend, who are planning “to better control how their energy is made and where it comes from”.

“Everywhere I go, whether it’s metro Melbourne or regional and rural Victoria, people love renewable energy,” D’Ambrosio says. “That’s why we’re seeing many communities coming up with plans to make renewable energy part of their everyday life. They’re bottom-up approaches and they’re a terrific boon for local jobs.”

The Andrews government is preparing a “renewable energy action plan” and finalising the guidelines for its $20 million “new energy jobs fund”. It will also release a discussion paper on community-owned wind power.

For the clean energy advocates in Macedon Ranges shire, the election result was transformative. “It changes our situation completely – from being banned, we’re now unbanned,” says Barry Mann, who is helping coordinate the wind power project.

In 2010, under the previous state Labor government, the group was awarded a $50,000 grant for a wind monitoring mast. But the funding wasn’t finalised until after the Liberal party won the election. Within three weeks of handing over the cash, the new government had imposed a wind power “no-go” zone over the entire region.

“It was pretty clear to me that the policy wasn’t based on any evidence or community consultation. It was a purely ideological thing,” Mann says. “Now it’s a bit like ‘Groundhog Day’. We’re back to where we were four years ago.”

Within weeks, the monitoring mast will finally be installed at their preferred site, in a pine plantation about 5 kilometres from Woodend. The proposed turbines would produce enough electricity to offset the annual consumption of Woodend, Macedon and Mount Macedon combined.

“Just because our project was banned didn’t mean we would disappear, because we know it’s got too many benefits for locals,” Mann says. “I think most Australians get the fact that climate change and cheaper renewable energy aren’t going away.”

The Andrews government has promised to scale back tough planning restrictions on wind farms. Under the changes, only residents living within 1 kilometre will retain the right to veto projects – down from 2 kilometres. The planning minister, rather than local councils, will be responsible for deciding applications.

The controversial wind turbine “no-go zones” – which include the Yarra Valley, the Mornington Peninsula and the Great Ocean Road – will stay, but community-owned turbines in the Macedon region will be exempt.

Planning minister Richard Wynne says he expects to receive final advice on the planning amendments within a fortnight.

“We want to encourage more of these community wind farms, because this is about communities taking ownership of climate change in a very practical way,” he says.

The outlook is not so promising for large-scale wind farms. Kane Thornton, CEO of the Clean Energy Council, says that while the industry is pleased the planning rules will be relaxed, investment in big projects has stalled, pending a decision on the federal Renewable Energy Target.

The Abbott government has yet to announce its stance on the RET, after its review panel recommended the target be reduced. Subsequently, a further review by the Climate Change Authority recommended the target be maintained.

“The RET is the main driver to investment and, at the moment, the biggest barrier,” Thornton says. “Until the federal situation is resolved we’re not going to see a big rush in large-scale projects in Victoria.”

Leigh Ewbank, from Friends of the Earth’s “Yes to Renewables” campaign, says that if the federal government continues to hold back investment, state policies should fill the gap. The ACT government has legislated a 90 per cent renewable energy target for 2020.

“The ACT policy is driving construction of renewable energy projects,” Ewbank says. “Victorian policy makers can take similar action.”

The Victorian Liberal party appears to have had a change of heart under the leadership of Matthew Guy. For the first time, the state has a “shadow minister for renewables”, David Southwick. He says Victoria has the opportunity to be a leader in renewable energy. “We want an industry that can deliver more clean energy and clean energy jobs.”

Southwick says his party is seeking a “positive outcome on the Renewable Energy Target that supports local jobs in Victoria”.

Read an edited version of this article at The Age online

Reviving the race on a cleaner Yarra

In Environment, The Age on

LAST year, Matt Stewart rode along the Yarra every morning, from his home in South Yarra to his work at Melbourne University. As he pedalled, he wondered about the condition of our river. Could it be improved?

He began researching the Yarra’s urban history. “I found a story from 1932 which spoke about an iconic race where 100,000 people lined the banks,” he says. “It was the biggest open water swimming event in the world.”

With a group of friends, Stewart resolved to revive the “Race to Prince’s Bridge”.

Their organisation, Yarra Swim Co, is aiming for the race to begin again next year. “It’s ambitious,” he says. “We want to inspire people to see the river as a place for recreation, where we can swim permanently in the future.”

The 3-mile swim was first held in 1913, from the Twickenham Ferry – now the site of the MacRobertson Bridge, in Burnley – to (the then) Prince’s Bridge, near Flinders Street Station.

Coburg swimming club members who took part in the 3-mile swim, c1937. Coburg Historical Society.

In 1929, it set a world record for the number of competitors and 100,000 people lined the banks to watch.

Footage of the 1932 race is on YouTube: a reporter asks the female winner of the race – “Miss Gill, of Hawthorn” – how she found the Yarra. “Pretty dirty!” she laughed.

The Race to Prince’s Bridge ran annually until 1963, when it was cancelled because of concerns about water quality. The race was revived, and then canned again, in the late 80s.

During summer, the EPA and Melbourne Water monitor water quality in the river and display the results on the Yarra Watch website. This week the water was suitable for swimming at Kew, Warrandyte and Launching Place in the Upper Yarra. It is illegal to swim in the Yarra downstream of Gipps Street, in Abbotsford.

For the last three years, Dr David McCarthy, from Monash University, has been studying the microbes in the river that could affect human health. His research won’t be complete for another year, but he says water quality deteriorates after rain, when stormwater flows into the river, bringing contaminants from our streets. In very heavy rains, the sewer system overflows into the waterways.

Dr McCarthy says one long-term solution to poor water quality is better stormwater treatment – to capture and treat rainfall where it lands, before it is released into the environment.

The Labor government has proposed new legislation, the Yarra River Protection Act, to guard against overdevelopment along the river’s banks.

Yarra Riverkeeper Andrew Kelly says the new approach must be broader than planning alone. “The river falls on the edge of many people’s responsibilities but not right in the centre for anyone.”

He is hopeful that the new wave of interest in the river will help the Yarra’s cause. On Facebook, 13,000 people have promised to take part in an “inflatable regatta” on the last Saturday of March. The blow-up boats will launch at Abbotsford and land at Bridge Road in Richmond.

Read this article at The Age online

An enterprising lot

In Community development, Social justice, The Big Issue on

It’s the buzzword across the community, corporate and government sectors, but what is social enterprise? And are those doing good just do-gooders?

PLAZA Palms was once part of the Cairns Colonial Club Resort. Its 71 units, with steep pitched roofs, are clustered on a large 10,000 square metre property, complete with a resort-style pool, only a few kilometres from the Cairns CBD. By 2010, it had fallen into disrepair and disrepute; it became a backpackers’ hostel, then accommodation of last resort.

“I’ve got numerous stories about people who came to this property and never escaped it – never escaped the system,” says Janet Guthrie, its new proprietor.

When Plaza Palms came on the market, Guthrie and her friend Stuart Wright saw opportunity. Both had worked for more than two decades in Aboriginal health and welfare, for government and for non-profits. They’d had enough. They wanted to risk something different.

“What I see is a very tired and lethargic homelessness sector here in this region. In Cairns, the rate of homelessness has increased,” Guthrie says. “I’m like: ‘Sorry, government, your plan is not working’.”

So, in 2011, Plaza Palms became Three Sistas, a for-profit business dedicated to providing affordable crisis and temporary accommodation. Over 270 people, including 44 kids, now live on site. Almost all of them are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders. Many, Guthrie says, are people “regurgitated through the system”, or mob from Cape York, who’ve come down for hospital appointments “and get trapped here for a number of reasons”.

There’s a café, a convenience store, a coin-operated laundry and a heavy emphasis on individual responsibility. A bus service takes kids to school – but it’s a service for which the parents must pay. Tenants are on six-month leases; as part of the deal no alcohol or drugs are allowed on site and visitors mustn’t stay past 10 pm. Three Sistas employs seven people, each of whom had been long-term unemployed.

This year, construction will begin on 20 new units to serve as patient travel accommodation – for that, Three Sistas has partnered with Indigenous health organisations in the Far North.

“We don’t receive any government funding,” Guthrie explains. “We don’t want any, simply because we see what happens to organisations that do. We never want to become complacent. We know we have to work hard everyday to produce income to keep our model alive.”

Three Sistas is a social enterprise.

It’s one of a growing movement. At a time when corporate capitalism roars as the engine of catastrophic inequality and environmental degradation, social enterprise has moved beyond buzzword to great hope. Here’s an answer for our throbbing mess: business for good.

“Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish,” said Bill Drayton, social entrepreneur, academic and founder of the Ashoka Foundation. “They will not rest until they have revolutionised the fishing industry.”

Drayton, an American, did more than anyone to popularise the concept throughout the 1980s and ’90s, and his is one of the most cited quotes about social enterprise. But his choice of analogy prompts reflection, for aren’t the oceans already overfished? And in whose interests would a revolution be – the industry or the people? Can it be both?

*

Jo Barraket had been an environmental activist until, in the early 1990s, cooperatives caught her interest – self-funded, they seemed better able to pursue their own ends than the grant-driven organisations she’d worked with. Later, Barraket switched to academia and wrote her PhD on the social and political dimensions of the cooperative movement. She describes coops as “the original form of social enterprise: they’re member-owned businesses that exist to meet some unmet need”.

So began Barraket’s “research fascination” with all kinds of social enterprise. She emphasises, however, that she’s not a wide-eyed advocate. “Just like any other citizen, I think some forms of social enterprise are fantastic, and some are frankly not my cup of tea. I do think that needs to be acknowledged.”

She waited ten years for the sector to collect some information about itself; until, impatient with waiting, she did it herself. The research, conducted in 2010 with Social Traders, suggested there were about 20,000 social enterprises in Australia, working in every industry of the economy.

Professor Barraket, now director of Swinburne University’s Centre for Social Impact, is updating that study. While it’s too early to interpret the data, she will venture that “social enterprise is alive and well”.

But – ahem – what exactly is a social enterprise?

 It’s a matter of debate. British social enterprise expert David Floyd cites folklore that Londoners are never more than six feet away from a rat. Likewise, he says, at a social enterprise conference you’re never more than six minutes away from “the social enterprise definition debate”.

Prompted by her Australian research, Professor Barraket adopted a big tent approach: social enterprises are organisations that exist to serve a public benefit, trade to do so, and plough a substantial part of their profit or surplus into fulfilling their mission. That might include charity op shops, community-owned wind farms, or cafes waited by refugees; fair trade chocolatiers, healthcare cooperatives, or recycling businesses staffed by people with disabilities.

She notes that her interpretation is broad enough to include Sanitarium, the large food company wholly owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

“Just being a social enterprise does not indicate that it’s more socially progressive than the thing next door,” Barraket says. “One person’s social purpose might be seen by another as quite regressive, depending on what their values are.”

The Big Issue – which is one of Australia’s best known social enterprises – employs a stricter definition: social enterprises should be not-for-profit and create work for marginalised people.

“There can only be one first principle – either shareholder return, or social benefit,” explains The Big Issue’s CEO Stephen Persson. “We all know businesses that will jettison environmental, social, or employment outcomes to ensure they deliver the profits that are expected.

“Our first obligation is not to make more and more profit, but to deliver a social return – and not go broke in the process,” Persson says.

The Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, based at Oxford University, takes another line. It holds a torch for the entrepreneurs, not the enterprise. Its director, Dr Pamela Hartigan, is adamant that the two are different. A social entrepreneur pursues transformational change. A social enterprise may or may not; it could just chase money to support a charity’s existing programs.

Recently, Floyd, the British social enterprise blogger, has written that the definition debate has migrated upstream, to the academics and investors. Practitioners are too busy trying to keep their businesses afloat. But by anyone’s definition, more people are trying – and talking about – social enterprise.

Professor Barraket links its popularity to the rise of ethical consumption and the desire, especially among younger people, for workplaces where you don’t have to check your values at the office door. Social enterprises have also been “manufactured” by governments, she says, as they shift to market models of governing: outsourcing and devolving services to private providers. Traditional charities, too, are seeking new ways to secure their funding.

“We’re experiencing a contraction of resources relative to social demands in most societies in a complex world,” Barraket says. “That environment lends itself towards new thinking about social interventions and about business models.”

In this territory the role of social enterprise becomes fraught, liable to accusations of complicity in creating the disadvantage it seeks to address. In the UK, Conservative prime minister David Cameron has championed social enterprise as part of his vision for “Big Society”; it’s a key plank in his plan to slash budgets. Local governments’ discretionary spending will fall by two-thirds by 2020, leaving civil society to pick up the slack.

Persson foresees a similar situation in Australia: our aging population means fewer tax dollars will support growing social need. “The government should and will, I hope, always provide these services in part, but the economics will be really challenging. Unless we come up with different methodologies to deliver services sustainably, we’re leaving those people on the margins in a desperate situation,” he says.

As well as supporting street vendors to sell magazines, The Big Issue runs women’s subscription and school talks programs. One of its latest initiatives is The Big Idea, a competition in which university students spend a semester developing a business plan for a social enterprise. This year’s winners, from Central Queensland University, were Angus Hughes, Jessica Kahl and Mattison Rose, engineering students who devised The Shelter Project, flat-pack emergency housing made from pallets.

It’s one of several such incubators, including programs run by the School for Social Entrepreneurs, Impact Academy and Social Traders – where every month, about two-dozen people attend introductory workshops. “The first message we communicate,” explains Mark Daniels, its head of market development, “is that if you’re not prepared to run a small business, which involves worrying about wages and taking a risk, then social enterprise probably isn’t for you.

“People fall in love with the social side, but our key advice would be you’ve got to be really good at business to run one of these.”

His organisation founded the Social Enterprise Awards in 2013, and that year, the prize for “Youth-led Social Enterprise of the Year” went to Thankyou Water, a bottled-water business that devotes its profits to water aid projects. It has expanded into muesli, soaps and hand creams.

For Daniels, Thankyou is the perfect example of scalable commerce. “Now they’re in Coles and Woolworths they’re reinvesting millions every year, because they built a really strong business proposition,” he says.

Bottled-water is popular, but it’s a dubious product, banned in one Australian town, as well as a few schools and campuses. Its production and distribution wastes water and energy; its consequences are more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and more plastic in the oceans. Consumer advocate Choice estimates that it is almost 2000 times more expensive than tap water.

The business has reverberations, but measuring them makes for a difficult and contested calculus. While it is a brave observer who casts judgement, there is certainly cause for contemplation, not only celebration.

Throughout 2013, the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council coordinated a seminar series called Reconstructing Social Enterprise, presented by experts with “a critical yet sympathetic perspective”.

In the first seminar, Pascal Dey and Chris Steyaert, from the University of St Gallen in Switzerland, called on academics to ditch their “rose-tinted view” and instead, to provoke and intervene: to engage in “myth-busting” about the connection of “social enterprise to system-wide social change or to the sweeping eradication of the intricate problems of our era”; to interrogate failures; to question how social enterprise is used by people in power; to analyse how it contributes to the common good – are market solutions the best way to solve the ills of a market society?

Alan Greig has spent decades investigating and championing all kinds of ways to do business for good. Among other roles, he’s a director of Social Business Australia. With long experience, he’s both enthusiast and cynic.

Social enterprise can be part of the mainstream economy, he says. “It’s not your everyday business of empowering and enriching the individuals who set it up. It’s about empowering and enriching communities.”

As an advocate for cooperatives, and employee- and community-ownership, however, Greig is sceptical of the notion of an entrepreneur as a lone social hero – as in Bill Drayton’s quote about fishing and revolutions. “It attracts a certain kind of determined individual wanting to change the world by ‘doing good’,” he says. “But I’d like to see more emphasis on group enterprises where the focus is more economic – on tackling inequality by using business ownership to share wealth more broadly, for instance.”

Greig is also a member of a working group charged with investigating legal models for social enterprises here and overseas.

In the United States, registered “benefit corporations” have a special legal status recognising that there’s more to their business than the bottom line. There’s a similar model in the UK, called “community interest companies”. Both enshrine the businesses’ social and environmental purposes and guard against mission-creep. In the UK, they can sell shares, but the company can’t be wound up or merged for the personal gain of the shareholders.

“There are massive reforms happening in all the Anglo countries,” Greig says. “Australia is just very backward with these things.”

*

In October, Three Sistas became a certified ‘B Corp’, a voluntary, international standard for good business practice. There’s no special legal status attached and not all B Corps would be considered social enterprises, but for a fee, you can be assessed for social and environmental performance. Three Sistas’ score placed it the highest in Australia and among the best in the world.

And yet, it has not been received benignly: Guthrie says they’ve been criticised by other service providers, accused of profiteering from poor people. She sought B Corp status to help demonstrate their accountability to their community.

Their enterprise is still young, but Guthrie is ready to offer a verdict: “It works”. From their experiences, she and Wright spied a business opportunity to answer a social question: a way to make a living and a difference.

She believes there’s no contradiction, in their case. In fact, the nature of social enterprise will help it succeed: while government contracts and handouts breed complacency elsewhere, she says, Three Sistas’ tenants are free will vote with their feet. She has to do a good job.

“We’ve got skin in the game. Everything I own is tied up in this business. If this fails for me, there goes my children’s future,” Guthrie says. “It’s a case that it won’t fail, because I can’t allow it to.”

 

An edited version of this article was published in The Big Issue, No. 476.

Decisions by the people

In Community development, The Age on

It was a bold experiment in democracy: asking 43 citizens to help shape the Melbourne City Council’s $5 billion, 10-year financial plan. How did it go?

WHEN Shuwen Ling received the letter from the City of Melbourne, she thought it was spam. Or maybe it was a fine? “It was on good quality paper,” she explains. “But when I read it carefully, I thought: ‘This is pretty cool’.”

Ling is nearly 20 years old and it’s three years since she left her hometown, a few hours from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She studies finance and civil engineering at the University of Melbourne and lives in an apartment near the Vic Market.

She was one of 6,500 people who received the letter, 600 who responded, and finally, 43 who were randomly selected to reflect the city’s demographics. Their task? To make recommendations on the council’s budget for its first ever 10-year financial plan – spending that is worth, in sum, up to $5 billion.

It’s an experiment in “participatory budgeting”, a subset of the political theory known as “deliberative democracy”.

Citizens’ juries, such as this one, are being used increasingly often around the world. They’re another kind of representative democracy, one that steers policy making away from the entrenched positions of political parties, lobbyists and squeaky wheels, and towards the considered voices of ordinary, well-informed citizens.

In Melbourne, the “People’s Panel” was coordinated by the newDemocracy Foundation, a not-for-profit research organisation that says it’s aiming to move our democracy out of “the continuous campaign cycle”.

The panellists were posed this question: “How can we remain one of the most liveable cities in the world while addressing our future financial challenges?”

I spoke with five of them, including Ling, from the panel’s inception to its aftermath. The process began in August, and in the following weeks, they spent six Saturdays hearing evidence from councillors, staff and experts of their own choosing. They read reports, did sums, asked questions, and wrangled over the answers. It was a bigger commitment than they’d expected, but most poured themselves into the challenge. Would the council act on their recommendations? 

Councillor Stephen Mayne is the chair of the city’s finance and governance committee. He says there’s a “genuine malaise” in our democracy, one we suffer in our municipalities just as much as in the state and federal arenas. “People are jaundiced about politics. There is quite a bit of disengagement and a lot of negativity. This is a model that potentially rebuilds trust and engagement.

“As long as I’m on council I’ll be pushing to implement a credible amount of the recommendations,” Mayne said, before the panel had finished its deliberations. “I think that if you give 50 people a lot of information, just like with juries, they’ll usually get it pretty right.”

*

When Maria Petricevic entered the first session, she felt a little intimated. Dr Petricevic is a Collins Street dentist – her practice overlooks the town hall. “I was scanning the room and thinking: ‘Are other people better informed than I am?’”

She is enthusiastic about Melbourne – throughout university, for seven years commuting on the V/Line train from Geelong, she dreamed of one-day moving north. “I just love this city,” she says.

By the second session, she felt more confident about her ability to contribute, but slightly overwhelmed by all the information. “It’s been an eye-opening experience,” Petricevic said in the lunch break. “I just have so much more insight into how much goes into operating a city”.

It was a bright Saturday in September and the panellists were gathered in a grand room on the lower level of the Melbourne Town Hall. Through the windows, you could see the legs of pedestrians and the bodies of trams passing by on Swanston Street.

The City of Melbourne’s chief finance officer, Phu Nguyen, gave the group a rundown on the current budget, and its longer-term projections. “We’ve reached a level of what I call ‘Peak Parking Revenue’,” he said. “People are complying more than they used to.”

He laid out the broad challenges for the city over the coming decade, all with implications for the bottom line: rapid population growth, climate change, technological transformation and economic uncertainty.

The renewal of the Queen Victoria Market site could cost up to $250 million, and serious upgrades to infrastructure and facilities will be required. On current estimates, he said, the council will fall short of cash.

The panellists split into small groups for a “speed dating” session with councillors and senior staff. With the weight of town hall above them, and established voices in their ears, it was hard to imagine the panel’s advice straying too far from the status quo.

But one of the panellists, Hani Akaoui, an architect with a thin moustache, a considered manner and an office at the top end of Bourke Street, noted that his fellow citizens weren’t shy about asking critical questions. “We want to be informed,” he said.

Cr Mayne used the speed dating to pitch his agenda, including rate rises, more efficient staffing practices, and selling Citywide, the council’s wholly-owned waste service company. “I can see the potential political power of the recommendations, so I was very keen to push them to focus on the big material issues,” he said later. Some were swayed, others irked; all noted his forceful approach. (The panel recommended against selling Citywide.)

For the third session, the panellists were able to request any experts they wanted – among those chosen were demographer Bernard Salt and climate scientist Graeme Pearman.

In the break, Bruce Shaw, a barrister who lives in Southbank, expressed his scepticism about the ubiquitous cheerleading for the city: “If I hear one more person say Melbourne is the world’s most liveable city, I’m going to scream.” (Later, he did – quietly.)

While they aren’t hemmed in by party politics, the panellists do bring their own concerns. Shaw thinks our public transport is poor, especially the sluggish trams, and must be made more reliable. Ling was interested in high-rise developments – her dad is a property developer in Malaysia. In Melbourne, she thinks, there are too many new towers, too tall and too small inside.

Renee Hill recently moved to Kensington with her partner. She works in marketing in the finance industry, and her primary worry is about how the city is promoting sustainability and preparing for climate change. “If we don’t start planning now, we won’t be in a position to deal with it,” she says. “That’s really top of mind for me.”

This represented one of the main struggles for the panel. The council’s powers are constrained. Decision-making on critical issues such as public transport, planning for big buildings and systemic responses to climate change all rest elsewhere.

“We always have to remember that the purpose of the exercise is to improve the budget of the city,” Akaoui says. “It’s not theoretical, and it’s not master planning; it’s literally financial.”

An annual budget of $400 million takes some reckoning. Can the hoi polloi analyse it? And can they do it on Saturdays?

Professor John Dryzek, from University of Canberra, is one of the world’s experts on deliberative democracy. He says there’s been an “explosion” of citizens’ forums in the last decade, and experience has proven lay people worthy of the task.

“All you need to do is give people time,” Dryzek says. “Give them access to information, enable them to ask questions of the experts and people really can get their head around incredibly complex issues.”

The Danish Board of Technology has been running these juries for 20 years, seeking citizen’s views on controversial issues such as genetically modified food and electronic surveillance. Recently, South Australian premier Jay Weatherill has convened deliberative panels on questions of how to reduce alcohol-related violence and how motorists and cyclists can share roads.

Participatory budgeting, too, has a rich recent tradition. It began in 1989 in Porto Alegre, in Brazil, where thousands of citizens participate in directing an average of about US$70 million from the city’s budget.

Earlier this year, the Darebin City Council in Melbourne’s north convened a citizen’s jury to direct $2 million in spending on community infrastructure. The residents returned with eight recommendations, including a new neighbourhood house, exercise equipment and sports courts.

Dryzek says citizen’s juries are a way of refreshing our political realm and injecting qualities otherwise in short supply, such as listening and reflection. “Australian parliament in particular is unremittingly adversarial,” he says. “People are interested in scoring points rather than really seriously reflecting upon the issues.”

Each jury requires careful planning and hard decisions about demographics. The task of making the panel demographically representative is not straightforward. Age and gender splits are obligatory, but what about wealth, ethnicity or sexuality?

In Melbourne, there are over 116,000 residents and nearly 18,000 businesses, but two-thirds of rates revenue comes from the latter. The facilitators, newDemocracy Foundation, recommended that the People’s Panel should comprise an even split of residents and non-residents (both business owners and workers). As a consequence, 60 per cent of the panellists were male – a proportion said to reflect the over-representation of men in CBD businesses.

Professor Dryzek describes the high proportion of non-resident panellists as “very unusual”. Iain Walker, the foundation’s CEO, says representation among the 40-odd panellists is descriptive rather than statistically exact. “The test for the community is: ‘Do I see people like me involved?’”

*

On the fifth Saturday, the citizens deliberated. But they didn’t finish, so they had to return for an unscheduled sixth day. To pass a recommendation, the panel required 80 per cent agreement. Each person was given an electronic voting paddle and five options from “Love it” to “Loathe it”. The results flashed on the projector screen immediately.

This process – the jury’s deliberation – is the system’s promise, its claim to legitimacy. For outsiders, however, its merits were impossible to judge. The panellists had resolved that in order for everyone to feel comfortable venturing their opinions, they would close some sessions to observers. And so, whenever they were debating or voting, they excluded their fellow citizens.

Shaw maintains that when the room was closed, no one dominated. “The word ‘democracy’ describes it well,” he says. “Whether or not the council will regret it is another thing.”

Ling observed that some people who came with strong opinions softened them, or compromised significantly. The facilitators instructed voters to apply the following test before spiking a proposal: “Can you live with it?”

For the most part, agreement came easily. “There’s been a lot more consensus than I expected,” Hill reflected.

On the final day, as the clock ticked, the pressure rose. “The people who were pushing wacky ideas saw that the game was up,” Shaw says. “We finished up with a good report, with a realistic number of ideas presented fairly.”

Their 11 recommendations, released in mid-November, include proposing rate rises each year of up to 2.5 per cent above inflation, more spending on mitigating and adapting to climate change, extra bike paths, selling “non-core” properties, reducing new capital works and pressing the state government for a higher tax on developers.

*

There’s a pitfall common to many of the citizen’s juries, however: their recommendations are often ignored. In this case, the council promised the People’s Panel a formal response at its meeting on November 25. At the council meeting, Mayne was effusive as he presented the official reply: “I think they’re excellent recommendations,” he said.

The councillors postponed their response, however, and instead, referred the proposals to staff for analysis and modelling. When the council’s draft 10-year financial plan is released in April, the panel’s report will be included in its entirety, along with an explanation about whether or not each recommendation has been adopted.

Hani Akaoui was in the gallery – he’d returned early, especially, from a business trip to Sydney. He was pleased with the outcome. On the question of rates, he believes increases are reasonable. “The overall mood of the panel was that the council is doing a good job. We’re happy with the city and we want to keep it at the forefront.”

Among the panellists, the process engendered loyalty and pride – and, also, not a little chagrin that they weren’t given more time. But they had an opportunity to participate, deeply and meaningfully, in civic debate.

“You really should know that people have been so passionate and committed to participating,” Maria Petricevic says, citing evidence: one man sent his views by text message from hospital, where his wife was in labour; another woman was undergoing chemotherapy, but continued to attend.

Petricevic feels like she has made a contribution to the city she loves. She’s also gained trust in the council for its commitment to community engagement. “Other levels of government could take a leaf out of that book,” she says.

Ling will – “probably, hopefully” – still be here in a decade, but if not, perhaps her younger brother will instead. She, too, feels she’s made a contribution to the community, and it has kindled her interest in the affairs of her adopted city.

Now this panel is over, Akaoui believes others should begin. “I think this shouldn’t be done once in a blue moon,” he says. “It should be done every year.”

Read a version of this article at The Age online

 

 

Danny

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THERE’S a homeless man living in our street. Or, more accurately, living in his car on our street. I first noticed him early this year. I’m not sure when he moved in – he’s good at it, see.

I know lots of my neighbours, and no one else seems to be aware of him (although I haven’t mentioned him to them, either).

I’m going to call him Danny.

Danny comes and goes. He parks on our street half the days of the week, more or less.

My house is in a row of terrace houses in a pretty, inner-city suburb. We have old trees and green grass. When I sit at my desk, I stare out the window to the street. Danny, like me, is a creature of habit. He usually parks directly across from my room, on the other side of the road.

One morning in summer I was staring out the window when I saw the driver’s side seat of a car slide upright, and the door ease open. Danny stepped out. He wore low-slung, loose jeans with a rock ’n‘ roll studded belt, and a heavy metal t-shirt stretched over a round belly. He had a receding hairline, close shaved, except for a curious long black fringe flicked behind one ear. I watched as he meticulously cleaned his car. From his boot he retrieved a container of Windex and a cloth. Later, he returned to the boot and collected a dustpan and brush. He took a plastic bag full of rubbish to the bin in the park.

Another morning, soon after, I looked out the window and saw Danny leaning on his car smoking a cigarette, speaking to two young women. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I was pleased – from their body language, things seemed to be going well. They talked for some time, ten minutes perhaps. But then the women stiffened a little, and the conversation broke off.

The months have passed. Each evening, when I arrive home, I look for his car. Each morning when I wake, I look again.

In the wee hours one Saturday night, I pedalled home from a party and saw Danny crouching next to the parking meter. I couldn’t tell what he was doing. The next morning his car had gone but the parking meter was decorated with graffiti, in thick black felt-tip texta. Words like death and devil and forbidden, repeated over and over in gothic capital lettering.

The previous week the council had installed new bench seats in the park and I saw that he’d inscribed the timber of the benches similarly; likewise, a ‘For Sale’ board on a house across the road; and, I noticed, the wall of a nearby supermarket.

Within a week, the council had scrubbed the parking meter clean, but his words remain on the bench seats.

I am glad about this. I have rented a room on this street for several years, many of which I worked from home; during that time I knew all its comings and goings. Once, the day after returning from a long hitch-hiking adventure, I bumped into Martha, an elderly neighbour. “Oh, you’re back!” she exclaimed. “Freida told me she thought you were back!” Freida is another neighbour, further down the street. I liked that. I care about place and identity, about the physical and psychological markers we lay down, about the people we know and who know us.

One evening last week, Danny was already in his car – seat fully reclined, window slightly open – when I rode home at half past seven. Periodically, his hand would stretch up and out the window to tap the ash from a cigarette. He was still there the next morning at eight o’clock, when I collected my newspaper from the step. It had rained. That must have been a long, lonely night, I thought.

When I left for work, his car had gone. In the parking bay were his leavings: several cigarette butts, an empty can of beans, an avocado peel. Occasionally, I’ve noticed the remains of vomit on the asphalt. Most days he leaves no trace.

And so the year has passed, and Danny always returns. I’ve never spoken to him. I would like to say hello, if happenstance allows, but otherwise, I have resolved to leave him be. He has a street to call home.

For the last few days, however, his car has been there, but he hasn’t been in it. I walked past it this morning, and noticed a sign in the windscreen: “STUFF OFF WITH YOUR PARKING FINES”. Another sticker, by the driver’s door, said “FUCK OFF”.

I wonder about his life. It doesn’t change anything, but there is someone Danny doesn’t know, who knows he exists. I wonder whether or not he would like that.

Read this story on Right Now

Read a long story about homelessness I wrote for the Big Issue and this follow-up piece on the people I met.