[LINK] E-Democracy

[Tom Worthington]

At 04:57 PM 11/26/2006, stephen at melbpc.org.au wrote:
>... why not enable Australian citizens to participate in our 
>law-making process at a stage which still enables sensible 
>amendments, based on public comment. ... these two sites could very 
>easily include drafts of the bills
>together with a simple form-page allowing for citizen comment. ...

So why don't you suggest it to the members of Parliament?

In 1995 I requested the Senate put its Internet regulation inquiry 
on-line and they did <http://www.tomw.net.au/sensub1.html>.

Politicians are likely to do it if they will get more publicity as a 
result. If it eases the workload of their staff, that helps get a 
good hearing. But if you suggest something which will let more people 
send unhelpful rants and increase the workload, it is unlikely to happen.

A web form allowing for citizen comment is unlikely to be useful or 
accepted. Perhaps instead there could be a low cost on-line form of 
parliamentary inquiry. There would be no face-to-face hearings, but 
the details of each piece of legislation could be provided. The sort 
of non-partisan briefing papers the Parliamentary Library does a good 
job of providing could be presented. Submissions could be invited, 
made available and the arguments distilled. Citizens could then 
indicate which views they support. The parliamentarians could then 
see what is being supported. In effect this would be a form of 
taxpayer subsidization of the sort of private research which 
political parties do. As long as everyone gets the results, that 
should be okay.

This would help ordinary MPs who have difficulty keeping up with 
legislation. It would allow them to deflect some of their troublesome 
callers to the inquiry. They could look good to their electorate by 
quoting bits from the inquiry web site (or more likely plagiarizing bits).

No doubt Steven Clift has examples of this on his E-democracy  web 
site: <http://www.publicus.net/articles/edemresources.html>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml