Dialogue: No power to the people in citizens' referendums

JOHN PARKINSON* says that overseas experience shows that referendums have become the tool of the bullies themselves, rather than of the little guy standing up to bullying.


So a group of business leaders are planning to launch a major campaign to challenge MMP. Excellent - I am all for collective debate on issues as fundamental as the way we are governed. I am all for citizens being able to question received wisdom, to challenge the status quo.


But before a (so far) narrow group sets the agenda of that debate for the rest of country, it might be worth reflecting on how likely it is that we will get reasoned debate out of the citizens-initiated referendum process. That might lead us to question the methods of the Citizens Majority Trust and its leaders.


Citizens-initiated referendums are promoted as though they give power direct to the people - supposedly making them the most democratic device we have.


In many states in the United States, for example, the device was created in the hope that it would protect ordinary people from the enormous power of large industrial interests, while in Switzerland it was part of a package of measures to ensure that no one section of society would be able to dominate another in that ethnically, religiously, culturally and materially diverse country.


Yet experience shows that, over time, they have become the tool not of the little guy standing up to bullying but of the bullies themselves. An examination of the overall patterns of referendums in California, Switzerland and New Zealand reveals these trends:


The debates do not come close to the requirements of reasoned communication, open participation, equality between participants and full information. They are simply the clash of two sets of half-truths and prejudices.


The issue and voters' views are often much more complex than a yes/no answer to a simplistic question. How did people vote on Norm Withers' penal reform package in 1999 if they supported victims' rights but not the other parts of the question? Even the Chief Electoral Officer has given up trying to produce information packs because he cannot get clear statements from the various sides.


Well-financed sides have mixed results in pushing their ideas through, winning about 50 per cent of the time; but they are very successful at killing others' ideas, winning almost 90 per cent of the time. Furthermore, it costs enormous amounts of money to get a petition organised and to run a public campaign, which weights the whole process in favour of the best-funded rather than the best-argued.


In New Zealand, we have tried to address that inequality by imposing a spending cap of $50,000 during the signature-gathering phase and $50,000 during the campaign.


But those amounts are a drop in a bucket compared with what it really costs to hold a major public debate, including buying advertising, paying public relations consultants, writing and printing and distributing brochures, holding public meetings and so on. The effect of the spending cap has been to keep the public uninformed.


Finally, citizens-initiated referendums are not even particularly democratic, if by democracy we mean the right of each person to self-government (and I acknowledge that that is a contestable definition). Instead of empowering the people (whoever they might be), referendums tend to empower those who already have power, those who already control resources and the dissemination of ideas.


There are many other issues, some of them arcane debates among democracy theorists like myself, some of them the stuff of daily public argument, some of them both. But what is the alternative?


That is something that democrats all over the world have been looking at over the past 10 years. The principles that unite the new ideas are about making public policy depend on inclusiveness and better arguments, not the loudest voices or the biggest cheques.


While these alternative forms of democracy are in their infancy, it is possible to start applying their principles now. We can do this by exercising our memories (remember why we got rid of first-past-the-post?), by exercising our imagination (what other options might there be? Is what Peter Shirtcliffe tells us the only way?) and by critically discussing the arguments of a campaign. Citizens' initiatives are good at none of these tasks.


Vain hopes, perhaps, and surely only an academic could be so naive. But that's exactly my point: assess the argument, not the person making it.


* John Parkinson, a former Auckland consultant, is doing a doctorate on alternative forms of democracy at the Australian National University, Canberra.