Page 3182 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 23 August 2017
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Given all this great background of successful exercises, I am calling on the government today, as part of the budget review, to commit to a participatory budget for the 2018-19 budget which commits the discretionary portion of the city services budget, which we anticipate is in the order of 20 per cent, to an allocation through a participatory budgetary process. We chose 20 per cent because it is enough to give participants real choices to make without having to spend a lot of time on things that actually turn out to be things that the citizens cannot, in the short term at any rate, influence.
It will deal with things like whether we should have new playgrounds. Should we put more money into maintenance of our existing playgrounds? Should we have more roads? Should we spend money on more roads or should we have a road diet for a while? Should we spend more money on footpaths, or more or less money on graffiti removal or rubbish collection? How much do we really care about graffiti? Would we prefer to put the graffiti allocation money into better footpaths?
Because our Australian examples have used city services, we thought this was the obvious place to start. I am calling on the government to ensure that the pilot, when it does happen, is designed by an advisory group with relevant expertise in deliberative democracy processes, including practitioners, academics and the community sector. The pilot should be convened by the government and informed by a set of principles developed by ACTCOSS and CAPAD to ensure that the deliberative mechanisms are trialled in a robust, respectful and informed way.
These two requirements are set because we need to make sure we start off with a well-designed process. The ACT has not done participatory budgeting before; so we need to learn from those who have. We need to ensure that the pilot, of course, uses a randomly selected but representative cross-section of the Canberra community and provides the panel with all relevant information.
It is essential for the usefulness and the legitimacy of the process that the panel be representative. It is essential that the panel be provided with relevant, accurate information so that it can do its job. That is vital. That is one of the weaknesses of much community consultation in the ACT, the lack of relevant and accurate information for the community to do its job.
I am also suggesting that it needs to be subject to independent post-implementation analysis, which will be made public and used to inform the model for an expanded participatory budgeting process in the ACT. That is because we need to see this as the first step, make sure that we learn from it and do better in the future.
I reiterate that I am calling on the government to commit to using a participatory budgeting process to inform the priorities of the entire ACT budget by the conclusion of the Ninth Assembly using the lessons learned during the pilot. I actually think this is a very modest aim. I am talking about informing the priorities of the entire budget. I am not talking about dictating.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video