The Summit's 'wild ride'

Along with a thousand other Australians, I was lucky to attend the 2020 Summit. I was not sure what to expect, but imagined reams of butchers paper and the latest in group management techniques.

I was right about both, but failed to anticipate just how chaotic and challenging the Summit would be. The main problem was how little time there was to spell out, let alone to debate, the key issues. Despite the event running over two days, each of the ten streams of 100 was given only seven hours to come up with its big ideas.

At other times we trudged around the long corridors of Parliament House, attended lunches and drinks receptions and sat in the Great Hall as a studio audience for chat style sessions made for television. Although entertaining, the last ate up badly needed time. The result was that several streams came up a couple of hours short and failed to reach a final, let alone polished, set of ideas.

This showed in the reports delivered on the Sunday afternoon. Some had errors, others have been the subject of complaints that they missed ideas and that other ideas were included without agreement. A positive aspect of this chaos was that it removed any fear that the process was stage-managed to deliver a particular outcome.

Despite these faults, I would not have missed the Summit. It was inspiring to spend a weekend with 1,000 Australians who had given up their time to debate the future of the nation. Many had travelled great distances at their own expense.

I was in the governance stream. Our areas included reforming parliament, fixing the federation, protecting human rights and media freedom, open government, participatory democracy and the republic. Many of these have been on the agenda for decades and already have well debated solutions. They are less in need of new ideas than a dose of political will to get them fixed.

The republic demonstrated the strengths and weaknesses of the Summit. A highlight was the strong support for putting the republic back on the agenda. Monarchists have said that the Summit was far from representative, and they are right. It was not a forum like parliament in which people were chosen to represent constituencies, nor were the participants chosen to include all views and perspectives. People were selected because they had ideas for 2020, not because they were to dwell on the past.

What can be said is that when 1,000 Australians from across the country came together to imagine the nation of 2020 they overwhelmingly declared it unthinkable that Australia should still then be a constitutional monarchy. They rejected a foreign monarch for Australia in 2020, especially one mandated by right of birth and subject to laws that exclude Catholics and favour the succession of men over women.

At the final session the republic received the largest and most sustained applause. Like the apology to the Stolen Generations, it showed how we can be inspired by aspirations and symbols and that people want a system of government for a modern, open democracy.

Where the Summit fell down was in its capacity to develop the best plan to take the republic issue forward.

Within the governance stream, I was in the group of 25 people charged with looking at charters of rights, Indigenous recognition, constitutional reform generally and the Australian republic.

Debate over a charter took up much of the time due to disagreement between those who believe that human rights are already well enough protected and those, like myself, who feel that it is time that Australia joined the rest of the democratic world in having a national law to protect basic freedoms.

While the group ultimately agreed by a majority that there should be a national process to ask Australians their view and that a charter of rights is desirable, little time was left to debate the republic process.

The group agreed that the republic debate should be community driven and should lead to a model having the stamp of popular ownership. However, there was uncertainty about the mechanics of how to achieve this and little time to resolve it. On the Saturday the group said that the republic should be tested at two referendums, with the first vote merely to make the transition to a republic by severing links with the crown, and a second to fill in larger details like how to appoint a president.

The next morning the group changed tack. Conservative republican Greg Craven and I argued instead for a plebiscite, a national indicative vote, on whether Australia should become a republic. If successful, this would be followed by a single referendum on a particular model to change the Constitution.

This provided only the bare bones of a way forward and left much unsaid. It was the best that could be agreed in the ten minutes we had to deal with the question.

Although a plebiscite and referendum is the right way forward, the Summit did not put forward a timeline for the move. Nor did it set out a proper process to ensure that people have their say in the lead up to the plebiscite and then on which model should be put to any referendum. From the very beginning, the community must have the main say in shaping the process and outcome, lest the idea of a “politicians’ republic” again take root and undermine the whole endeavour.

If a plebiscite is successful there should be major intervening step between it and the referendum. This would decide the model to go to the people. I favour a representative drafting convention to meet on and off over a period of months. There would be winners and losers in this process when it comes to choosing the final model.

It is crucial that a fair process has given those whose model does not make the cut the best chance to put their case. We must not repeat the flawed ten-day 1998 republican convention. It debated the key issues so quickly that many people who lost out became bitter and were recruited by the “no” case.

The Summit was geared to produce big ideas like the republic. Unfortunately, some smaller ideas got lost along the way. These included reforming donations to political parties and many sensible parliamentary reforms.

It also included my proposal that a new preamble, or opening set of words, to the Australian Constitution should be put to a national competition. This could capture the public imagination like the 1901 competition to design the Australian flag which attracted over 32,000 entries. The competition would start up a conversation in schools and around the country about the values and the principles that bind us together.

Despite its flaws, the Summit was a great success. It was an important event in our history because it marked a break from the usual suspects and the normally narrow confines of Australian political debate. Even though the attendees included the Prime Minster, his cabinet colleagues, premiers and opposition leaders, the politicians were often the quietest people in the room.

My hope is that the Summit is only the beginning of more national conversations about how we are governed and the country we aspire to be in the future. I would like to see governments hold more ideas summits, though not too soon, and certainly taking account of the lessons from this time round.

We should also hold a constitutional convention every ten years, or half-generation, so that engaging with our system of government and its problems is a regular, expected part of our public life.

Above all, the Summit was an experiment in a new way of doing politics in Australia. It was about opening up a window to different voices and to the randomness of what a thousand Australians could come up with over a weekend. It was a wild ride.