WORK

Our projects include the design and management of citizens’ juries and assemblies, contributions to significant publications or reports, and parliamentary submissions or other advocacy documents.

Training

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Facilitating Deliberation Masterclass

Around Australia there is growing demand and momentum for deliberative engagement practice. This includes changes to the Victorian Local Government Act to mandate deliberative engagement practice, the NSW Government producing a deliberative democracy toolkit, and the increasing number of local councils and utilities making use of citizens’ panels or juries in their long-term strategic planning….

Projects

Manningham Council Community Panel

Manningham Council is partnering with New Democracy to deliver the Manningham Community Panel. The Community Panel will feature 40 people chosen through a democratic lottery and tasked with providing recommendations they find agreement on to answer the question: Council has a budget of $147 million, but we can’t do everything and need to make hard…

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North Sydney Community Housing Forum

New Democracy received a brief from Climate 200 to explore how electorate-level engagement could be improved by applying deliberative principles. We agreed that local Members of Parliament (of all parties) could better engage with a wider range of citizens if a more representative and meaningful approach could be developed. We undertook a pilot project with…

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Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes Deliberative Panel

In May 2023, the Association of Australian Medical Research Institutes (AAMRI) hosted a deliberative panel made up of 30 randomly-selected people drawn from medical research institute staff and researchers from across the country and stratified to match the medical research institute workforce in Australia by gender, seniority, job type and institute type. Over the course…

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Innovation in Opinion Polling

A widely held view is that governments rely heavily on polling to make decisions. Our experience, drawn from liaising with MPs, government agencies and stakeholders, is that polling is infrequently drawn upon and that MPs will often rely on anecdotal evidence – people who contact the MP directly through their offices being one example. At…

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Western Sydney University Students’ Panel

Western Sydney University is partnering with The New Democracy Foundation to run a world-first students’ assembly that openly shares the problem of student representation with students themselves. This project announces WSU as a leader in democratic innovation and student politics, setting the standard for Australian universities and drawing the focus of inspiration for an international…

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City of Sydney – Planning for 2050

In its Sydney 2050 plan, the City of Sydney will listen to the community and then outline what it sees as the shared future vision of what the city can become. The City has engaged newDemocracy to design and provide oversight of the Citizens’ Jury. We will operate a deliberative process with approximately 50 randomly-selected members…

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Byron Shire Council – Community Solutions Panel

The Byron Shire is well known as a domestic and international tourist destination, with over two million annual visitors. Local residents and tourists alike place significant value on the unique character of the area and its lifestyle. The conundrum before the Council is how to balance the protection of that character with demands for more…

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ACT Government – Housing Choices

The ACT Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate is conducting a review of Housing Choices in the ACT. The next stage of engagement will comprise a consultation method that helps reach the core of community concerns through considered engagement. The ‘Collaboration Hub’ is a deliberative democracy process that will draw out key ideas as well as…

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United Nations Democracy Fund: Democracy Beyond Elections

New Democracy and the United Nations Democracy Fund have recently announced a 2-year agreement centred on doing democracy differently. Making democracies more inclusive requires bold and innovative reforms to bring the young, the poor, and minorities into the political system to start to address the crisis of political representation, which sees people becoming less and…

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Yarra Valley Water – Price Submission Process

Read the Citizens’ Jury’s Final Report here. In developing its 5-year costed plan, Yarra Valley Water must pair customer and community feedback with its own in-depth knowledge of its water and sewerage networks, and the challenges these services face. Pricing cannot simply be an expert task. Additionally, Yarra Valley Water is faced with the fact…

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Local Government Victoria – Democracy in Geelong

Geelong Citizens’ Jury Final Report | Victorian Government Response to Citizens’ Jury Final Report In April 2016, the State Government acted on the recommendation of an independent Commission of Inquiry and dismissed the Greater Geelong City Council, and committed to consult the community about its local governance model before the next council election….

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Nuclear Fuel Cycle Engagement – South Australia’s Department of Premier & Cabinet

New Democracy exists to find improvements in how we make trusted public decisions – democratic decisions – that represent the informed will of the people. To do so, we seek to run practical projects in controversial areas of low public trust and where genuine public discourse is impossible, as the topic generates immediate opinions and…

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City of Greater Bendigo Citizens’ Jury

The City of Greater Bendigo has a large urban area home to around 85% of the local government area’s population; in turn, this is surrounded by an array of rural areas and small towns. In most circumstances, this pattern generally leads to a sense that the centre “gets everything” at the expense of the outer…

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Infrastructure Victoria: Meeting Victoria’s Infrastructure Needs

As citizens and voters, we all want and value infrastructure. Unfortunately, over the years, this has led to the community looking at public decisions about major public investments with a weary cynicism: Is this really the project we need, or is this simply a project to appeal to a marginal electorate? This perception is enough…

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Penrith City Community Panel

Balancing competing needs in a growing community Penrith City Council is a large, iconic council area and, like many local government authorities in New South Wales, it is growing and changing rapidly. That change brings with it both opportunities and pressures on services and finite resources. With nearly $300m of future infrastructure needs already identified…

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South Australian Minister for the Environment

Who Pays? Agreeing on Fair Shares in Infrastructure Funding for South Eastern Drainage Many government decisions fall into the category where all avenues of action are open to criticism from some interested party. This is especially the case where it is viewed that “the government should pay” – and more so when the government has historically…

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Noosa Community Jury

In 2013, Noosa Shire Council de-amalgamated from Sunshine Coast, with the elected representatives ascribing their electoral success (and that of de-amalgamation) to their position of putting more decision-making in the hands of the local community. In 2014, newDemocracy was approached to provide advice on structures and processes which could deliver on that commitment. The Noosa…

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Marrickville Infrastructure Jury

Like many councils across the country, Marrickville Council face the challenging problem of renewing a vast portfolio of aging capital assets – from roads, to parks, to pavements, stormwater drains and beyond. There are also new assets the council may wish to build, such as cycleways and greening initiatives, to be factored in, while at…

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City of Melbourne People’s Panel

Read the Panel’s recommendations here. Participatory budgeting processes traditionally focus on a component of discretionary budget – such as a representative’s ability to ringfence a couple of million dollars for community facilities. However, in many ways the larger challenge in budgeting is the dominance of interest groups coupled with the capacity to present any and…

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Premier of South Australia – Cycling in the City Citizens Jury (Recruitment only)

In South Australia, Premier Jay Weatherill has continued to use the Citizens Jury methodology as a way of hearing a community view in policy areas where organised – and polarised – advocacy groups can drown out all other voices. Consistent with our position of not working to repeat past methodologies, in this case, NDF was…

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City of Canada Bay Policy Panel

The City of Canada Bay has once again appointed the Foundation to conduct a citizens’ Policy Panel to provide policy advice to Council on lease conditions fair for the proposed use, where Council-owned buildings are formally leased to third parties for their sole use on a discounted or subsidised community basis. The City of Canada…

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Moorebank Intermodal Citizens’ Jury

Moorebank Intermodal Company (MIC) was established by the Australian Government to oversee the development of a freight terminal at Moorebank. The terminal will improve the distribution of freight arriving in Sydney through Port Botany and on the interstate rail network. The terminal will benefit the NSW and Australian economy, but it will also have an…

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Darebin Participatory Budgeting Citizens’ Jury

The Darebin City Council established an infrastructure fund and made a commitment to consult with the community to determine how this fund would be used. Council decided to use a Citizens’ Jury process to get advice on how this money ($2m in 2014 – 2016) should be spent. The Council determined to accept the Jury’s…

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City of Sydney – Safe & Vibrant Nightlife

In September 2013, the Foundation was appointed by the City of Sydney to conduct a Citizens Jury which mirrors the process underway for the South Australian Parliament through Premier Jay Weatherill. Importantly, the City of Sydney’s role is complemented by the commitment of Premier O’Farrell to table the results of the Jury’s deliberations in Parliament…

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Department of Premier and Cabinet – A Vibrant and Safe Nightlife for Adelaide

In April 2013, the Foundation was appointed by the Department of Premier and Cabinet to conduct a Citizens Jury to complement other measures and policy responses linked to alcohol related violence. In all spheres of government, it can occur that good decisions don’t get made for fear of the political cost through a vox pop…

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Citizens’ Jury on Energy Generation

In July 2012, as part of the Inquiry into the Economics of Energy Generation, the NSW Parliament will commission a jury-style process to make a structured contribution to the public inquiry process. The Foundation will operate two policy juries – one in regional NSW and one in Metropolitan Sydney – in order to identify an informed…

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City of Canada Bay

In May 2012, the City of Canada Bay Council commenced a process to devolve decision-making to a random selection of 36 citizens drawn from the local government area. They are being asked the question ‘What services should we deliver in the City of Canada Bay, and how should we pay for them?’. This Citizens’ Panel…

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The Australian Citizens’ Parliament

This was Australia’s largest deliberative event, convened on the topic of democratic reform, asking the question how Australia’s political system could be strengthened to serve us better. It brought together a representative sample of Australia drawn from each of our 150 electorates. The project was funded by the newDemocracy Foundation with the support of the…

Contributions

Summit for Democracy

President Biden convened the first Summit for Democracy following his election in 2021. The initial Summit focused on some ‘traditional’ democracy topics but tended to omit new and emerging approaches. New Democracy was in contact with the US State Department to make the case that Citizens’ Assemblies were arguably the most promising democratic innovation: in a…

Council of Europe Explanatory Memorandum

The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe has published an explanatory memorandum that calls on the local and regional authorities of Council of Europe member States to implement deliberative methods. The memorandum heavily references New Democracy’s work throughout. You can read the document here. In recent years, governments have increasingly…

OECD: Evaluation Guidelines for Representative Deliberative Processes

The OECD report Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave (2020) demonstrated that public authorities from all levels of government increasingly turn to Citizens’ Assemblies, Citizens’ Juries, and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems. As the use of such processes increases, so does the need to determine and…

OECD: Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions

The OECD has collected evidence and data that support the idea that citizen participation in public decision-making can deliver better policies, strengthen democracy, and build trust. This report focuses on representative deliberative processes in particular, as part of a wider effort by democratic institutions to become more participatory and open to informed citizen input and…

Westminster Foundation for Democracy: An Introduction to Deliberative Democracy

This guide from Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD) and the New Democracy Foundation is designed to support the needs of elected representatives and their advisors—those who would like to strengthen how elected politicians engage with their voters. It is meant for those decision-makers who want to be inspired by new and innovative ways to bring…

NSW Parliament: New Options for Parliamentary Committees

New Democracy has developed a suite of proposals to complement the existing parliamentary inquiry processes. Read the full document here. Parliamentary Committees are the backbone of our Parliament. They scrutinise problems and policy as MPs on these committees develop expertise in their particular subject areas, bringing an informed view to the consideration of legislation. At…

Submissions

Submission: Inquiry into Victoria’s Upper House Electoral System

You can read our full submission here. The New Democracy Foundation commends the Victorian Parliament’s Electoral Matters Committee for seeking to engage the public in the proposed redesign of the Victorian Upper House electoral system. newDemocracy is a not-for-profit foundation that advocates for innovative ways to modernise democracies. We are experts in how to deliver…