Community, democracy, power
Neighbourhood street party
Photo: Warren Wong (Unsplash)
“Our communities are places of music, fun and playfulness, kindness and generosity… neighbours talk to each other and children play in the streets.” – Pillar Six: A Country of Flourishing Communities, Vision for an Australia reMADE
It’s a Sunday night. The ground is wet and the clouds are blocking out the stars. There’s the wild ‘Boing, boing, screech! Boing!” of pogo sticks being recklessly bounced among a rowdy game of tips involving kids of all ages. A couple of the quieter children are doing chalk drawings by torchlight.
It’s our annual mid-winter street party and I have kid envy. I want to be one of the gang hooning around our street and through other people’s gardens in the dark. Safe and secure and wild and free. I join in for a while and shriek in mock horror when two of the smaller children cling to my legs telling me they are redback spiders with light swords.
I feel so outrageously lucky to get to be a part of this community. We’ve done this for a couple of years now and everyone knows their job. Julie and I check dates with a few people and letterbox drop invites. Kate does the flowers for the table. Fire pits appear, and everyone turns up with something to share.
During the night I’m part of multiple conversations about how we can get together and do more things. We talk about the possibilities of community batteries for disaster resilience (yes, we are a nerdy street), shared art projects, our fears for the fire season and whether we’ll get caught in a fiery bottle neck on the road. We talk about wildlife in our backyards, the bandicoots, the bettongs and the surprise devil sighting. We’re told by one of the kids that we’re not allowed to record our impromptu street band until we’re ‘perfect’. And we weave together connection, trust, dreams, plans and fun.
I’ve been thinking about community resilience, community ownership and grassroots action a lot recently – and how they connect to the challenges of bigger structural change, such as tackling inequality or ensuring a safe climate.
South Hobart Sustainable Community Vision for 2030 meeting
Photo: Bob Burton
The day before our street party I facilitated a suburb-wide meeting on behalf of our local sustainability group. The event was to get people in the neighbourhood talking about their 2030 vision for the area and kickstart some projects. I was delighted when, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, about 100 people showed up eager to give their time and full of ideas for a flourishing community future.
On the same day, I knew that just several kilometres down the road, another 500 people were gathering at Hobart Town Hall to protest a proposed tailings dam in the extraordinary takayna/Tarkine area. The proposed dam would require over 285 hectares (~350 football pitches) of land to be cleared, and greatly increases the risks of toxic spills and environmental damage to a staggeringly diverse and special cool-climate rainforest environment.
So many people coming together, on just one day, in one small corner of the planet to connect and to contribute their time and energy to the building the world they want.
I love this stuff, it feels great. But is it enough? Is it possible to make community work more strategically connected to power, democracy and the systems we want to change?
Doing work in community that is meaningful and connected is obviously a passion of mine that shows itself in particular ways. But I don’t think I’m at all alone in this.
Over 2020/21 I’ve been facilitating conversations with people from all walks of life (including some who are active in the community like me, and some who are not) about what is important to them and their communities: what kinds of things both tangible (schools, hospitals, sewerage systems) and intangible (privacy, a healthy democracy, a safe climate, time with loved ones) should be available to everyone? What kinds of things ensure, if not a good life, at least access to one? We’ve been calling these things forms of public good. I’ve talked with all sorts of people across the country and have trained nearly 30 additional facilitators to run their own group conversations. Every month or so we come together as facilitators to share insights, similarities and differences.
And gosh there are some fascinating perspectives and ideas emerging. The same six basic needs seem to be listed by nearly every group: secure housing, healthcare, education, jobs, access to nature and reliable internet. The needs are obvious, but it’s worth reiterating them lest we begin to take them for granted. And this list was nearly always followed by some form of expressed longing for strong, meaningful and inclusive community. People want to belong, and they want to actively build and contribute to belonging for others.
Why? One answer that keeps coming up, besides the obvious human need for connection (so keenly felt during lockdowns and restrictions), is that people have low faith in government to solve our collective problems.
In every conversation on the public good someone will say a version of “we’ve just got to get on with it and work around the government”. I get told that community consultation is a sham, that governments change so often that even if they do something good it just gets undone at the next election, and that too much red-tape and regulation is getting in the way. I’ve heard multiple times that there is no set of cohesive values or purpose driving government action and that the parliamentarians in power are really only doing it for their own personal gain.
This mistrust of government isn’t just something I’ve noticed; it’s clear in other studies and echoes a trend across the world. For example the Edelman Trust Barometer has been tracking low trust rates in government for years (although 2020, when active government intervention to protect us from the pandemic in Australia saw faith in government and other institutions temporarily rise ). In 2020, research by the group Next 25 found that when it comes to the everyday, unsexy, long-term work of building the public good, faith in government is still fairly low.
It is, of course, a self-fulfilling prophecy: if we’re not being listened to and respected by our ‘leaders’ we’re going to look elsewhere. And this gets dangerous. As we step back and allow the idea of government as useless and non-functional we create a sense of increasing mistrust, particularly in stressful covid times. Just look at what has happened recently with the ‘freedom rallies’. Government is enforcing mask wearing and lockdown orders but at the same time failing to listen to what people need in order to feed their families, pay their mortgages and keep their businesses afloat. It’s little wonder that conspiracy theories gain traction and QAnon appeals (to some). It’s complex of course, but lack of faith in government is due to both real and manufactured deficiencies (we’ve written more about this in our paper on privatisation).
I get that people are frustrated by government. I can see why, in the face of seemingly insurmountable problems at a national level, it makes sense that we’d collectively want to focus on what we think we can control. And so we lean towards mutual aid networks, community gardens and advocating for local bike paths.
Doing work at a local scale is important and empowering. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing directly the impact of your community library, the walking school bus you set up, or the street party full of cheerful redback spiders with light swords. That satisfying sense of contribution is why people volunteer for their local cricket club, turn up to weed bushland and host open garden weekends. And it is real and valuable work.
While I love the energy for local work and think it is absolutely essential for communities to come together to do it, I’m worried that working around government and institutionalised forms of power plays straight into the hands of those seeking to undermine the role of government and enhance the role of the private sector.
Community singing, Salamanca, Hobart.
Photo: Nico Smit (Unsplash)
While I love the energy for local work and think it is absolutely essential for communities to come together to do it, I’m worried that working around government and institutionalised forms of power plays straight into the hands of those seeking to undermine the role of government and enhance the role of the private sector. I worry that it begins to concentrate resources in local geographies. I worry that it fractures our shared identity, collective purpose and national story.
And I worry that good as they feel, these local activities won’t build the systems we need on the scale we need them if we’re to address climate change and growing inequality.
We need to look to community solutions with the old ‘yes AND’ in mind.
For example, my suburb is rich in community assets. My experience is that we have high levels of trust, housing security, secure jobs, strong social connections and excellent local infrastructure. We have one of the highest concentrations of scientists in the country and we’re good at dealing with bureaucracy. All of this means that we have high levels of social capital, what Eva Cox in her 1995 Boyer Lecture explains as being “a collective term for the ties that bind.”
Where I live, we know each other’s names, and it can be hard to pop into the local corner store without bumping into someone you know.
‘Always look up’ - remember that no one wins alone and make sure that local actions connect to, wherever possible, a bigger political power.
Photo: Na Inho (Unsplash)
I love my community and I love what we get to do together. But I’d hate for us, in our street parties and our visioning workshops, to focus only on what benefits our immediate networks. Because let's face it, in an age of climate change and pandemics there really is no way to insulate ourselves from the rest of the country or the world. We really do need to be acting locally and thinking globally. No amount of localism, no matter how wonderful and engaging, will save our climate, end the pandemic or deal with deeply entrenched systems of inequality.
This doesn’t mean things shouldn’t be done locally, or that seeds of big change don’t start with neighbours getting together. When I spoke with environmental campaigner Cam Walker from Friends of the Earth about their successful campaign to ban fracking in Victoria’s constitution, he was eager to emphasise that while the work was driven by local communities connecting with each other in their own ways, they were reminded to ‘always look up’.
This refrain of ‘always look up’ meant two things: it meant remembering that no one wins alone and if one community rejected fracking at the expense of another it wasn’t really a victory. And it meant making sure that local action connected up, wherever possible, to bigger political power.
The ‘Voices for’ movement of community-minded independents, which started in the electorate of Indi, also centres values, place, relationships and the importance of the bigger picture. It too started with a very small group of people who had an idea and thought they’d bring more people together to talk about it — and they’ve gone on to make history. No one knew at those very first meetings what an impact they would have.
Not every project will have the obvious impact that these two have had, but every project can be imbued with generosity, inclusion and pathways to power.
So, the question then becomes, how do we work at a community level in a way that strengthens the bigger, more universal public good – rather than disconnecting us further into siloed, and ultimately ineffective, enclaves?
The most effective examples of community stepping up are when people connect their local work to systems and institutions of power so that these institutions too are changed.
How can we make sure this is a ‘yes and’?
Solutions:
Photo: Wonderlane (Unspash)
Fortunately, I’m not just hearing cynicism about government in these public good conversations, but the desire to genuinely grab hold of our democracy and pull it closer somehow. I’m hearing that people want to participate and contribute beyond casting their ballots and eating their democracy sausages on Election Day. That they are looking for a link between community engagement and political power: between retreating to the simple delights of party pies with neighbours, and actively influencing social and environmental outcomes.
And there’s no shortage of ideas floating around. I hear high levels of enthusiasm for different forms of deliberative democracy: from citizens’ juries to parliaments run on sortition, to the inclusion of community members on boards, policy decisions, budgets and more. Indeed there are countless examples from around the world of where this has worked in some form or other (check out Participedia.net for some interesting case studies) and people are excited about them.
There have been several attempts at deliberative democracy-type engagement across Australia recently. In 2015, South Australia ran a participatory process around the nuclear fuel cycle that included citizens juries, town hall meetings and and online surveys. The Bass Coast Council in Victoria is currently seeking input into its Community Vision 2041, and a group of passionate Commonwealth public servants are working on a framework for better enabling citizen engagement and participation in policy development.
So yes, let’s continue to experiment, encourage and learn from these forays into deliberative democracy as we continue to do great work locally. It’s both-and, not either-or.
Local community work remains important, essential, democratic muscle-building work that often leads to fantastic outcomes for people and place. I always think that communities themselves are essential infrastructure. And as we build them, let's try to ‘look up’ and connect our work, wherever we can, to the bigger picture of the public good. As we advocate for local solutions and local benefits, let's also seek wins that are good for everyone, and look for ways to connect with power and hold it accountable. Yes that takes resources, but here’s the interesting thing. We know that communities with high trust, social connection, time, etc are more likely to be able to collaborate and connect in the name of the public good. We also know that collaborating and connecting is itself a pathway to high trust and social connection…
So the most important thing is to start where we are, and keep our eyes open for the ‘yes AND’, for the pathway to power. We don’t have to know what this looks like when we start, but we do need to remember to look for it and build it into our way of working.
The snowy top of kunanyi (Mt Wellington).
Photo: Ryan Chondro (Unsplash)
In my local area this might mean campaigning against a privatised cable car on kunanyi/Mt Wellington – not just because of the traffic or noise or inconvenience it might bring to my immediate area, but because protecting shared wild spaces from privatisation is a public good for everyone. Or it could mean bulk buying domestic solar panels to a degree where domestic renewable energy becomes viable across the whole of nipaluna/Hobart. Or perhaps it’s advocating for funding to support community-led transition plans in the mining-dependent areas of Tasmania, and offering a willingness to share wealth and expertise as requested.
Or thinking more politically, it might include understanding what expertise we have in this community and bringing it together to lobby government at council, state and federal levels to commit to strong action on climate change. It might mean establishing a series of Kitchen Table Conversations to learn what’s important to the local community and then building momentum to run independent or party-affiliated candidates. It might mean committing as a suburb to divest from fossil fuels and asking an ethical bank to use our shifted money to support social or environmental projects elsewhere in the state. Local work that is joyful and connected doesn’t mean that the work that is done together has to stay geographically located.
As we build local connections and projects that bring us personal joy and satisfaction, we can ask questions like:
Can this project have influence beyond our local community?
What extra, if anything, do we need to do to ensure this?
Does this work hold power accountable or does it leave a vacuum?
Does this project concentrate wealth or does it share it?
Are we leaving a vacuum for others with different values to fill?
What if instead of backing away from government we fought hard to insert ourselves more deeply into it?
Ultimately the creation of the public good is about how we start to see ourselves as a collective. How we shift from ‘me’ to ‘we’. How we use the power that we have in ways that get us closer to the world we want.
The stories I told of the street party, the community visioning and the public meeting about the proposed tailings dam are all examples of people coming together outside of the formal political process for the public good. Each example shows a shift from the individual to the collective is possible through place, collective dreaming and shared challenges. And we’ll see where they go.
Protect the Tarkine, Hobart Town Hall Meeting
Photo: Karen Brown
My street hasn’t yet acted on a community battery, but we have got a WhatsApp group for emergencies. Meanwhile my suburb has no fewer than 15 different project working groups that people have offered to lead on – from bulk buys to advocacy around planning, food forests and edible streets, disaster preparedness and traditional land management practices. And the statewide campaign to stop the toxic waste dam in takayna/Tarkine continues to build momentum as cricket teams, grandparents and farmers join the cause.
Each of these projects is about belonging and identifying with place, and the land and the people in it. They are about knowing and understanding our agency to act on the things we care about and coming together simply to get to know each other, start the conversation about what is important, and collaborate on action based on values we know we share. They help us develop democratic muscles and they have the potential to make real and significant impacts on the wider world.
And of course they are also about the joy that serves no other purpose than its own existence. The dancing, the mock horror at spiders with light swords, the loud chattering of enthusiasm for new projects in the school, the satisfaction at a town hall packed with people: these things are themselves examples of the essential public good of connection, belonging, fun and play. These moments are the moments that give purpose to the work that we do.
Recommended further reading and resources:
Introducing the public good (our initial thinking on the public good published in early 2020)
Unravelling privatisation (how our public good has been intentionally privatised)
Criteria for Transformation (theoretical frameworks for thinking through big transformative change)
The Recovery Begins Now (the background theory to the Criteria for Transformation)
Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell (fascinating insights into the way crisis brings us together)
Rutger Bregman’s Humankind a hopeful history (reminding us that we are wired for love and connection)
DR MILLIE ROONEY
Millie is the National Coordinator for Australia reMADE. Millie has a qualitative research background and has spoken in-depth with hundreds of Australian's about their lives, communities and dreams. She has worked in and around universities for over a decade building student capacity and enthusiasm for tackling wicked problems. Millie is also a carer for her family and community and is passionate about acknowledging this work as a valid, valuable and legitimate use of her time.
