More participation isn't enough: strengthening Australia's democratic culture

In October 2025, Dem36 had the privilege of co-hosting the South Australian stage of an OECD information-gathering mission for its Country Review on Strengthening Civic Space to Support Citizen Participation in Australia. Members of the Dem36 committee joined other civil society representatives in a roundtable discussion about citizen participation and Australia's civic space.

When the OECD subsequently circulated its draft report for feedback, there was much in it to welcome.

The report described an extensive Australian participation ecosystem: consultation processes, advisory bodies, legislative requirements, digital engagement platforms, deliberative processes and other mechanisms through which governments seek to involve citizens in public decision-making. It also highlighted important challenges to civic participation, including hate, threats to freedom of peaceful assembly, the environment in which civil society organisations operate, and civic education.

But reading the report prompted a broader question: what if having more opportunities to participate is not the same thing as having a healthy democratic culture?

Australia does not lack opportunities to participate

Across governments, opportunities for citizens to have their say have proliferated.

We survey. We consult. We invite submissions. We establish advisory groups. We conduct workshops. We put information online. Increasingly, governments are also experimenting with co-design, participatory budgeting, citizens' juries, assemblies and other deliberative approaches.

Much of this is positive. Governments should make it easier for people to participate in decisions that affect them. And yet, from the perspective of local government, another story is visible at the same time.

Councils are dealing with declining trust, hostility towards elected representatives, abuse directed at staff, misinformation, conspiracy theories and increasingly adversarial interactions between citizens and public institutions. In South Australia, where local government voting is voluntary, participation in council elections remains relatively low.

So we have an intriguing democratic paradox. We may have more mechanisms for participation than ever before while simultaneously experiencing greater distrust of the institutions inviting people to participate. That suggests the relationship between participation and trust is more complicated than simply: more participation = more trust.

Perhaps the question is not only how much people participate, but what kind of participation our democratic system produces.

Not all participation is equally democratic

It is tempting to regard citizen participation as inherently good. But participation can take very different forms.

There is a substantial difference between people deliberating over difficult trade-offs and a social media pile-on. Between collaborative problem-solving and coordinated outrage. Between challenging a government with evidence and argument and circulating misinformation about its motives. All are forms of political participation in the broadest sense. They do not necessarily contribute equally to democratic life. That distinction matters because the objective of democracy cannot simply be to maximise the volume of public input.

Democracy also requires us to live with people who disagree with us, consider competing interests, evaluate evidence, recognise trade-offs and ultimately accept that legitimate democratic processes will sometimes produce decisions we personally dislike. In other words, democracy requires capability, not simply opportunity.

Then there is the problem of who turns up

Anyone who has worked in community engagement will recognise another difficulty. The people who participate are rarely a representative cross-section of the community. Indeed, traditional engagement processes can disproportionately attract people who are highly motivated, strongly opposed, well organised, directly affected or already politically engaged. Meanwhile, a much larger proportion of the community remains silent.

That does not make the views of active participants illegitimate. But nor does participation automatically make those views representative, which creates a difficult problem for decision-makers. If 100 people vehemently oppose something and 10,000 say nothing, what exactly has the consultation told us? Sometimes the opposition will reveal a serious problem that government has overlooked. Sometimes it represents genuine community sentiment. Sometimes it reflects the preferences of a highly mobilised minority. Knowing which is which is extraordinarily difficult.

This is one reason deliberative democratic methods are so interesting. Random or stratified selection, access to balanced information, facilitated discussion and time to consider competing perspectives attempt to address some of the weaknesses inherent in conventional consultation. They do something else too: they change the nature of the task given to citizens. Instead of simply gauging the relative popularity of something, deliberative processes can ask and answer more complex questions in more nuanced ways. Those are profoundly different democratic processes and outcomes.

Local government sits on the democratic front line

These issues are particularly visible in local government because councils are close to people's everyday lives. The person answering the phone, assessing a development application, maintaining a street, responding to a complaint or enforcing a council policy is far more accessible than most state or federal institutions. That proximity is one of local democracy's great strengths.

Increasingly, however, it also means councils absorb anger originating far beyond the issue immediately in front of them. Staff who did not make a policy can become the target of anger about it. Councillors can face sustained pressure to make exceptions for particularly vocal individuals or groups. Social media can transform a relatively ordinary disagreement over a local decision into an adversarial contest over government legitimacy. The old problem of the "squeaky wheel" has acquired an amplifier.

None of this suggests that democracy should be quieter or less contested. Scrutiny, protest and vigorous disagreement are essential to it. The challenge is maintaining the norms that allow disagreement to remain democratic: a willingness to engage with evidence, to listen to opposing views, to distinguish criticism from abuse, and to accept that participating in a decision does not guarantee getting the outcome we want. Democratic culture is tested not by whether we disagree, but by how we behave when we do. The challenge, then, is not to reduce disagreement but to build our collective capacity to navigate it. That is a much bigger task than any individual council or institution can undertake alone, and it raises an important question about the role of civic education.

Civic education therefore needs to be about more than civics

This is where the OECD's emphasis on civic education becomes particularly important.

Traditionally, civic education tends to focus on knowledge: how parliament works, the responsibilities of different levels of government, how elections operate and the rights and responsibilities of citizens. That knowledge matters. But perhaps the democratic capabilities we most urgently need extend beyond knowing how our institutions work. They include:

• critical thinking and media literacy

• evaluating evidence and sources

• respectful disagreement

• recognising complexity and trade-offs

• listening to people with different experiences and beliefs

• distinguishing individual preference from the broader public interest

• understanding how misinformation operates

• engaging constructively when we do not get the outcome we wanted.

These are not merely competencies for "community engagement". They are competencies for democratic citizenship. And in an information environment increasingly characterised by enormous volumes of content, algorithmic amplification, fragmented media and competing claims to truth, their importance is only likely to grow.

Perhaps we need democratic infrastructure as well as participation infrastructure

This leads to another interesting question arising from the OECD review.

Australia has spent considerable effort building participation infrastructure: the mechanisms through which governments ask citizens what they think. Perhaps the next challenge is strengthening our democratic infrastructure: the institutions, capabilities and norms that help citizens work through difficult questions together.

That distinction may also change how we think about innovations such as citizens' assemblies, deliberative panels, participatory budgeting and other forms of deliberative democracy. We often describe these as engagement methods. But perhaps that undersells them. Deliberative democracy (in whatever guise) is not simply a better way for government to consult the public. At its most ambitious, it represents something more significant: infrastructure through which ordinary citizens can participate directly in the work of democratic judgement and public governance. That raises much larger questions.

What role should citizens have between elections? When should elected representatives seek community preferences, and when should citizens themselves be asked to grapple with evidence and trade-offs? How might representative and deliberative institutions complement each other? And what democratic institutions might we design if we started not with the question "How do we get people to engage?" but with "How should citizens participate in governing?"

Those questions extend beyond the scope of the OECD review but they may be where the conversation ultimately needs to go.

Because the democratic challenge facing Australia may not simply be getting more people to participate. It may be creating the conditions in which we can participate well.

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