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Democracy beyond the ballot box: recap of our International Day of Democracy panel

On 15 September, International Day of Democracy,1 DOD and 888 Co-operative Causeway filled a room at The Kelvin Club in Melbourne for "democracy beyond the ballot box", timed for the run-up to Victoria's 28 November election.2 Four speakers took part: an economist, a facilitator, a degrowth scholar and a co-op founder.

Main lesson —

  • "Representative" doesn't have to mean "elected". Choosing people by lot, the way juries already work, is another way to represent the public, and the practitioners on the panel say it works when it's tried.
  • Deliberation works because of its structure: random invitation, paid time, slow learning, and the group making its own choices. Automate the choosing and you remove the part that changes people.
  • The panel agreed on the diagnosis but not on where power actually sits: in parliament, in workplaces and unions, or with capital. That's the argument worth continuing.

The panel

Antony McMullen, 888's chair, moderated a panel of four.

Nicholas Gruen

Nicholas is CEO of Lateral Economics and a long-time advocate of assemblies chosen by lot. His current project is The Shared Centre,3 and he writes on Substack.

Nicole Hunter

Nicole is co-founder of MosaicLab. She led the Yarra Valley Water citizens' jury and co-wrote Facilitating Deliberation: A Practical Guide with fellow MosaicLab directors Kimbra White and Keith Greaves.4

Anitra Nelson

Anitra is an activist scholar with the University of Melbourne's Informal Urbanism Research Hub. She writes on degrowth, housing and post-money economies. With Vincent Liegey she co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Degrowth (2025). Her other work is at anitranelson.info.

Godfrey Moase

Godfrey is co-founder of the energy co-op CoPower and a former Executive Director of the United Workers Union. He writes The Solidarity Wedge on Substack.

What drew them to democracy

Antony opened by asking each panellist "what drew you personally to democratic ways of living and being?" Godfrey's answer was cheese pizza, from a night at the Cheese Board Collective, a Berkeley workers' co-op: "I thought, you know what, this is a pretty good way of running the world… sometimes bread can be very persuasive." Anitra's was living in a commune, "and finding that direct democracy can actually work in practice". Nicole's came from years of government engagement work that was "to be really honest… really boring", until she saw what a deeper process could do: "this has got possibility everywhere". Nicholas started from a warning: "if by democracy you mean the system we have today, this is the system that brought you Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler. So it matters what kind of democracy we have."

"Is tech gonna save us?"

None of the panellists thought technology was the answer. Nicole has watched a fully automated global "deliberation" run by Meta: "you get a time, you fill out a thing, you move on… it is terrifying in my eyes. Because there is no meeting of the minds." Godfrey said technology "displaces social cooperation". The real shortage, he said, is time, and the fix is shorter working hours "so that participation is not bounded by privilege". Nicholas questioned the premise that everyone should be involved in everything. As he pointed out, we already trust an institution most of us never sit on, the jury: "There needs to be a division of labor."

Inside a citizens' jury

Nicole walked through the Yarra Valley Water jury:

  • A random draw of customers, stratified to be "a mini version of the customers in the room". A personal invitation works better than a public notice.
  • At least six days together, half of it learning, with participants picking their own speakers.
  • A minimum-wage stipend. In one process, for an energy organisation, a woman who signed up for the money to pay for dental work became "the best participant I've ever had".
  • Participants write their own report, and the utility commits to including it "to the maximum extent possible" in its price submission to the regulator.

Antony asked how people chosen by lot "learn to be free" (a line from the theologian Kallistos Ware5) without being steered. Nicole described experts told to "let go control", learning built up from pairs to the whole room, and "speed dialogue… like speed dating, but better". Then comes the step she won't hand over:

"That is like the turning point where they go from me to we… there are people in the world who are saying, yeah, we could get AI to do that for us, they could just theme up their ideas, and I'm like, uh-uh, don't touch it, because that choice making the group is doing at that moment has them really understand what they're saying and owning it." — Nicole Hunter

That's a practitioner's counterpoint to tools like the Habermas Machine, which drafts a group's common ground for it.

Elections, lotteries and structure

Godfrey made the evening's key historical point almost in passing:

"If you read Aristotle's politics, elections weren't in the section on democracy. Elections were in the section on oligarchy." — Godfrey Moase

Nicholas built on it. Elections "separate the governed from the governing". Selection by lot means "people taking turns in governing and being governed, which is exactly what happens in juries". His central distinction is "representation by sampling rather than representation by elections".

Several speakers also insisted that shared power needs structure. Antony raised Jo Freeman's The Tyranny of Structurelessness, on how "flat" collectives still had hidden decision-makers. Anitra agreed: "Anarchy is really self-governance. And you have to have processes and they have to be transparent and everything has to be accountable." Godfrey argued that "authority shouldn't be dependent on hierarchy".

A standing citizens' assembly, no permission needed

Nicholas's main proposal was a privately funded standing assembly of around a hundred randomly selected Australians, shadowing federal parliament.

"No, don't ask for any permission. Just run it, turn people over every six months or two years or whatever you decide." — Nicholas Gruen

And, he argued, it's within reach: "It's not that expensive, maybe two million to run a citizen assembly for six months to a year", with fundraising to follow on the back of it.

Audience Q&A

The second half went to the floor. We didn't choose these questions, which makes them a good guide to what the people in the room actually cared about.

Future generations

"Aren't we going to end up with people who just keep voting in their own current self-interest against future generations?" — Audience question

This is a standard objection to sortition: any process only includes people alive now, so won't a random jury just vote its own short-term interest? The panel gave four different answers:

  • Give the future a seat. Nicole described processes, which she said are used a lot in Japan, where a few participants are asked "to act like you're the future, or to act like you're the trees". "I'm not saying it's perfect."
  • Frame the question. Anitra said that asking about "a one planet lifestyle" builds future generations into the question from the start.
  • Change what's being counted. Nicholas said a jury isn't racing to 51%: "you're saying what can we live with?" He contrasted that with elections framed around "what is in it for me". He drew on Hannah Arendt's point that the secret ballot "leans heavily on the idea of privacy and therefore of the individual rather than the res publica".
  • Look at the pressure people are under. Godfrey: "I think capitalism gives democracy a bad name." People who won't vote for a lower quality of life, he said, are scrambling to make a living in a system he called "parasitic upon our present now as well as our future".

Degrowth in practice

"Do you live in a tiny house? How do you negotiate degrowth? How do you apply it in Melbourne?" — Audience question

The questioner, an urban planner, called degrowth something "as urban planners we're all grappling with". Anitra's answer was more concrete than the word suggests:

  • Commoning, meaning shared ownership and care of resources, run through assemblies and working groups.
  • Universal basic services that everyone can access, with limits.
  • Maximum rather than minimum housing sizes. Planning rules would set "the maximum amount of space that people occupy", the reverse of today's minimums.
  • Enabling rules that let people build and repair their own homes and grow their own food, rather than rules written for industry.

The aim, she said, is to live "as modestly as we can, but also as convivially as we can". She pointed to Degrowth Network Australia, which she said meets online every month, and to Melbourne's Naarm Degrowth.

From theory to action

"How do we move from sitting in a fringe corner talking about what democracy could look like theoretically into something… urgent… how do we do it?" — Audience question

The questioner pointed to the AfD in Germany and One Nation at home. The answers showed the clearest difference between the panellists:

  • Nicholas: fund the assembly and "organize collisions" between today's politics and another way of doing it.
  • Godfrey: people feeling "a sense of frustration with the system" are offered "a flashing red button that they can hit", and pressing it only reinforces the system. What's missing is organisations that give people something else to do. He was frank about how hard that is. From his own time as a union leader, he said real change means shifting power from leaders like him to rank-and-file delegates, and that's "an incredibly threatening proposition".
  • Anitra: "It's a trap to think that the political realm is where… the decisions are being made. The biggest decisions… are being made by capitalists."

Parliament, the workplace, or capital? The panel didn't settle it.

Where to start a standing assembly

"When we do the first standing citizen assembly in whichever form it is… should it be more broad strokes?" — Audience question

The last question picked up Nicholas's proposal and asked how to start one. Should Australia's first standing assembly shadow parliament as it is now, or be "a vision setting citizens' assembly" asking what Australia should look like in 80 years? The questioner pointed to Taiwan's experiments and to the CPC's long-range goal of an "ecological civilization" in China. They also asked "what would be the smaller citizens' assemblies that we would need to run before we get to like the federal level?"

Nicholas's answer was to go federal straight away and let the assembly set its own agenda:

"I'm not arguing for starting small. I'm saying we go to a standing citizen, federal citizen assembly. You ask what should it focus on, I'm going to ask the Citizen Assembly." — Nicholas Gruen

He'd seed it with one idea from economics, opportunity cost ("immortalized in the words of the Spice Girls. Tell me what you want, what you really, really want"), because an assembly can't focus on everything. He was careful not to knock people who work at smaller scales ("I don't want to be critical of those people", as he put it earlier in the night), but he sees starting small as a trap: "the opiate of activists everywhere". He calls his approach "radical incrementalism": one body with a different institutional logic, dropped into the system "like a bit of ink in a bit of water". His example was Michigan, where a ballot initiative handed electoral boundaries to a commission of randomly drawn citizens.9

Closing: the frog in the well

Basil Varghese, 888's patron, closed with a childhood memory from Kerala. His grandfather showed him a happy frog at the bottom of the family well, and told him his task in life was "to climb out of the well… and that frog will see the whole sky."

"Tonight we have had four people coming out of their wells and creating and croaking, and now hopefully creating great song." — Basil Varghese

Nicholas made the case for citizens' juries at a 2017 DOD event and on DOD's podcast in 2020. This time he went a step further: stop asking and run one. With a Victorian election two months away, the open question is who pays for the first one.

What you can do

With the Victorian election on 28 November, here are ways to follow up on what the panel said. Most come from the follow-up newsletter 888 and DOD sent to attendees.

  • Learn how a citizens' jury actually works. MosaicLab's deliberative democracy resource hub and Nicole's co-written Facilitating Deliberation cover the process she described, from random invitation to the group's own report. For the international view, newDemocracy's handbook on citizens' assemblies is new in a second edition (see In the news below).
  • See the idea in action. Nicholas recommended the film Goodbye Politicians, Hello Democracy, about legislatures of citizens chosen by lottery. His video series at The Shared Centre outlines the deep drivers of political dysfunction and the alternative institutions he proposes.
  • Ask your candidates. A Victorian parliamentary inquiry has already recommended a citizens' assembly to decide Upper House electoral reform. Ask every candidate in your electorate whether they'd support one, whoever you vote for.
  • Read up on horizontal organising. Horizontalism: A degrowth strategy, by Vincent Liegey, Anitra Nelson and Terry Leahy, sets out the approach Anitra described on the night. Godfrey's Substack, The Solidarity Wedge, covers labour-movement strategy and building worker power.
  • Organise where you already are. Godfrey's point was that people need organisations that give them something to do. A co-op like CoPower, a union, or a local group is somewhere to start.

In the news

The attendee newsletter also flagged these recent developments. They're what's on our radar right now:

How this recap was made

The recording was transcribed automatically. The event's recorder then checked the transcript against the audio, with Claude flagging likely mishearings and misattributed lines to listen for. The recorder resolved names, speaker turns and book titles, and together they confirmed the sources for them. The fuller breakdown of the evening covers every answer and audience question in full. It also has a fact-check list for speakers' claims. Quotes here are from the checked transcript, lightly trimmed (… marks a cut).

Sources & further reading

  1. "In 2007 the United Nations General Assembly resolved to observe 15 September as the International Day of Democracy — with the purpose of promoting and upholding the principles of democracy — and invited all member states and organizations to commemorate the day in an appropriate manner that contributes to raising public awareness." International Day of Democracy ✓ Verified, Wikipedia. ↩

  2. "A state general election is scheduled to be held on 28 November 2026 to elect members of the 61st Parliament of Victoria." 2026 Victorian state election ✓ Verified, Wikipedia. ↩

  3. "It's time to reawaken the better angels of our nature" The Shared Centre, Nicholas Gruen. ↩

  4. "Nicole Hunter and Keith Greaves as they take you behind the scenes of a public deliberation" Facilitating Deliberation: A Practical Guide, MosaicLab. ↩

  5. "We want you to learn to be free." Kallistos Ware, How to Study Theology, Scribd copy, where Ware says this was his answer to his Oxford students. Read in a browser on 2026-09-26; Scribd serves no document text to scripts, so this quote can only be checked by hand. ↩

  6. "The newDemocracy Foundation would like to thank the United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF) and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for taking a leadership role and helping to champion a focus on innovation." Democracy Beyond Elections: A Handbook on Citizens' Assemblies, 2nd Edition, newDemocracy Foundation. ↩

  7. "The report contains 28 recommendations and a clear message" Will Victoria's community consultation inquiry shift real practice?, Nicole Hunter, MosaicLab, 3 July 2026. ↩

  8. "we’re joined by Lisa Witter and Josh Lerner, two leading democratic innovators" "Should we celebrate democracy today — or reimagine it for tomorrow?", Folio Collective. ↩

  9. "They wrote a proposal for a ballot initiative which would create a 13-member redistricting commission consisting of four Republicans, four Democrats, and five voters with no party affiliation, all to be selected through a random drawing of registered voters, supervised by the Michigan Secretary of State." Katie Fahey, Wikipedia. ↩