Public ideas
A chat about democracy
Magna Carta Place, Canberra
We are electing Members of the House of Representative and a Senate, but if you had recently landed in Australia without knowing much about our constitution or political traditions, you might believe we are choosing between two elected presidents or kings, with almost unlimited executive power. One of the two candidates even claims to have unlimited power over states on crime and other matters.
Nick Gruen has given us something to think about in his Substack contribution Collective governance or tyranny? A chat about our own Magna Carta moment.
A chat between Gruen and artificial intelligence (which probably draws on thousands of years of writing) goes through the many only partly-resolved issues about democracy – the balance of power that is distributed and power that is concentrated at the tip of a pyramid, the trade-off between responsiveness of systems of government and their democratic inclusiveness, the difficulty in governing for large or heterogenous constituencies …
Something to think about as we queue to cast our votes.