Miriam, thanks for your comments.
The basic principles, I suggest, are:
1. resist the pressure that will be exerted to make it almost impossible to initiate a Referendum.
2.Resist the pressure that will be exerted to make it nearly impossible for a proposition to be accepted.
At this stage and to keep it as simple as possible, I would suggest using Federal Lower House electorates as a basic unit, then:
1. To get a proposition accepted for a Referendum, there would need to be a simple majority - 50.1% - in favour in a simple majority of electorates.
2. For a Referendum Proposition to become a Binding Proposition, there should be, again, a simple majority in favour in a simple majority of electorates.
3. Any citizen may initiate a proposal by registering with the AEC.
4. For a proposal to go to a vote, there must be a petition by, say, 5% of electors in each electorate.
My reasoning for this is that, at least at this stage, we are discussing a Commonwealth Government situation and we vote in Federal Elections as individuals not as residents of States - gets around any jurisdictional problems.
There has been very little community discussion on these ideas but I do stress that the more complication is introduced into the system the greater the chance of manipulation which will always reduce the effectiveness.
Sorry about the addenda but I realised that I had left the job less than half done.

Miriam,
there are many things to be said and argued over; however, there is one thing that would be, relatively, simple to implement - not necessarily easy - and that is the "Citizen's Binding Referendum". This could provide a way for the population to, again relatively, quickly rectify major mistakes of governments. This will, of course, be strenuously resisted by career politicians - all we have these days - who fondly believe that they are there to run the country. They are, in fact, elected to do two quite different jobs; first, to define what sort of country we will all have to live in; and second, ensure that the people who should be doing the job of running the country - the public service - do the job they are paid to do.

Gary - environmental threats impose personal risk

Hello Miriam, the matters you intend to raise are very good. They offer challenge to sharing a better future. I offer a two suggestions on behalf of community groups I am part of. The first is a call for a national audit of development plans. The call is proposed to To strengthen local communities, professional organisations, the planning education discipline and local Governance. We desparately need introduce planning integrity and establish & reference quality profiles to implement successful community integration with change. Why? There are no quality standards existing in the State adversarial development systems; the winner takes all. State and the National Governments struggle to engage expert reference and community relevance in accepting both large and small development change imposed by business development and expansion. Citizens Juries are a step in the right direction. Auditing development plans could well grow the use of citizens juries. Opportunity could exist to engage professional organisations and community groups to submit the relevance of integration that is ignored within the present system. Present consultation is lip service. We need to develop and utilise reference to social, health, environment and economic data to validate the effects of change. To introduce confidence to planning where there is presently guesswork and move on solutions. Such a review could engage national knowledge-rich organisations such as the National Environment Health Council, the NH&MRC, ARC, CSIRO, The Climate Change Discipline at Adelaide University, and the Centre for Urban Habitats at UniSA. There is opportuntiy to engage national programs such as Better Cities already involved in evaluation of community needs.

The other matter relates a need to contain noise in our communities. Like the plague in the 17th century, noise is imposing enormous casualty and community cost before we identify the risk and act to contain it. Access Economics reported that in Australia, the health effects of hearing loss cost $11.75Billion in 2005. This sort of uneconomic growth is reason take action, to be responsible and contain noise. Noise Watch Australia, a community group I am part of, say that the clear challenge is for a regulatory system that is not corrupt, and delivers policy targets that also identify business value for the companies subject to regulation. It is a matter that can be tackled head-on by the engaging environment and resource efficiency plans through previously proven European EcoMapping systems. A working group is proposed by all State authorities. We believe the working group should encompass expert authorities that previously contributed to the enHealth report on the health effects of noise. It should include community representatives who have an understanding of regulatory inaction. The working group should be part of a national drive to contain noise as a social aggressor, at least as bad as binge drinking. Our call to Prime Minister Rudd is that we need a Social Justice Commission encompassing so much of what falls through the cracks in the piecemeal approach taken by States. Our suggestion is for the Commission to engage existing resources to audit noise regulation, and ask the community on what is occurring out there. This suggestion must surely have a positive reception by those noise authorities struggling in isolation.

Forgive the length of this Miriam. So much to be said. You are right where the action is. Thank you for that. Please be in touch if you would like further information. cheers, Gary

TOWARDS EFFECTIVE DECENTRALISATION AND POPULATING OF AUSTRALIA - TWO-TIER GOVERNMENT A PREREQUISITE

A growing problem for Australian federalism is the centralisation of government at the state level, centred on the state capitals and their sprawling outer suburbs. All efforts in the 20th century to decentralise and avoid the excessive urbanisation of this vast continent have failed. The Summit should address itself to this issue as the cities are becoming over-populated and are increasingly experiencing pollution and traffic density problems. On the other hand depopulation or stagnation occurs in most non-metropolitan areas.

Many reformers favour the creation of a two-tier system of elected government with strong local government units. Smaller, administrative regions indirectly elected by groups of local councils could replace the present states. Special separate (Greater) City Administrations could be established. The existence of numerous local councils in metropolitan areas is a massive hindrance to effective and efficient city government. This would reduce direct popular elections to two levels: the national and local levels (city and local government in the country areas)

In rural areas particularly regions could be grafted onto the local government tier. Already an extensive system of voluntary regional council organisations (and regional development boards) exists which could be a base to start from. The savings of such measures, which includes abolishing the state governments, have been estimated to be in the order of many billions of dollars (at least $30 billion p.a., Drummond, M. 1998/2002/2008) depending on what model of regional administration is adopted. Whatever two-tier model is pursued the potential for more effective decentralisation, and then initiated by the national government, can only be a bonus for both city and regional areas.

A recent tour through regional NSW, South Australia and Queensland has convinced this writer that massive advantages can be achieved if young families move to one of the often very attractive country towns of Australia of which there at least 50 of over 15,000 inhabitants. The advantages are not only clean air but also lower living expenses, with employment opportunities, facilities and services quite nearby one's residence, and generally excellent schooling. The security of and safety in smaller towns is also better than that in metropolitan areas. A sense of community, often lacking in the big metropoles, is usually experienced quite quickly.

Certainly, such a policy cannot be left to the market place to initiate. People need to be actively encouraged by means of subsidies, inexpensive housing and rental assistance, lower taxes etc. Business need to be encouraged to decentralise and government itself has to move to regional areas. This requires substantial and continual government intervention. Politically and administratively such regional areas need to be given autonomy as much as possible. Here the EU subsidiarity principle needs to be applied, constitutionally recognised and entrenched. An inquiry should be instigated to find out why previous decentralisation efforts in Australia failed so that the same mistakes are not made again.

Thus, also for this reason (amongst many others), the long anticipated decline of federalism (as early as 1902!), federalism should now be acknowledged. The states have failed to effectively decentralise Australia. Should we wait for further half-baked efforts or abolish them and make decentralisation a high priority concern for the national government? The choice cannot be difficult.

Klaas Woldring

Topic 2: The Economy - Industrial Relations and Workplace Democracy

Amazingly, this aspect of Australia's economy is not at all mentioned in the Future Direction of the Economy backgrounder. Given that it was the major issue in the recent federal election I want to contribute some ideas on broad-based employee share ownership plans as well as employee workplace democracy. I understand that such a direction for the Rudd Government and the ACTU is greatly favoured by Greg Combet but that the ACTU's factional forces shied away from adopting relevant policies to support that.

The view that Australia is an egalitarian society is contradicted by its adversarial IR system. It's built around "bosses versus workers, and workers versus bosses". Originating from the British IR culture and reinforced by class ideology, as well as by the associated two-party tradition, the gulf between capital and labour has always been huge, tempered only by the 1904 Arbitration and Conciliation Act and the concept of a fair wage (1907). Pusey (1991) and Beilharz (1994), among others, have argued that the social and bureaucratic limitations for workplace democracy to emerge in Australia, at least still in the 1980s, were apparently insurmountable. Perhaps for that reason many of the sensible recommendations in the ACTU's Australia Reconstructed (1987) report soon went into the "too hard basket".

The report was produced following an Overseas Mission to Western Europe in 1986, representing the ACTU and the Trade Development Council. The group visited five countries, Sweden, Norway, West Germany, Austria and the UK. The first four had an extensive history of industrial democracy, in particular workplace democracy. Similar developments took place in e.g. The Netherlands, Spain, Belgium and Denmark. The network of workplace committees, works (enterprise) councils, supervisory boards and employee directors, embedded in the European industrial legislation from the 1950s onwards, fell on deaf ears. Mr. Hawke's view was that the industrial relations culture in Australia would not allow a legislative program for industrial democracy and he suggested that this could only be achieved on a voluntary basis. However, there were in fact a number of such "best practice" examples in Australia - sadly these were also ignored. He may have been right that both the employers and the unions were culturally too far removed from such a dramatic change but I suggest that it is high time to look in this direction again. Given that the ALP's IR policy is far from inspiring a sea change would be appropriate.

The Howard Government has also missed opportunities which could have enhanced employee democracy and phased out the highly counterproductive, dysfunctional, archaic and costly adversarial IR culture. In a surprise move, it commissioned the Nelson Inquiry into Employee Share Ownership (ESO), which reported in 2000 ( Shared Endeavours), providing 45 modest recommendations. It praised ESO throughout and recommended its promotion as well as a laudable set of targets, from a low 5% in 1999 (mainly managerial and executive) to 11% by 2009 (and broad-based).

However, there was nothing in the WorkChoice legislation to promote ESO. If it was the intention to enact "Stand-alone" ESO legislation, that did not happen. ESO has been quite successful and widespread in the US, and now gains ground in Europe as well, following the two Pepper Reports of 1991 and 1996. I am not referring here to executive options schemes which only serve to augment their often obscene salary packages even more, but broad-based ESOPS that cover a large percentage of the staff in any given business.

Given that employees spend eight hours of their day adding value to the business they work for is it not just democratic that they have a stake in it? In addition, why should they not have a voice in what kind of decisions are made? Are they not adults? Or are they still supposed to only exercise their democratic rights in the political realm basically by voting for two look-alike major parties every so many years? Democracy surely cannot stop at the gate of the factory or office. It is meaningless. The Europeans have insisted on exercising these kind of rights in the workplace ever since WWII, and in the case of Sweden earlier. However, in Australia the isolation and lack of interaction with the European countries prevented cross fertilisation of other ideas. Thus, the dominance of the adversarial British IR culture, even though moderated by the arbitration and conciliation system, prevailed.

Several Australian academics have recently again reiterated the need for Partnership at Work in a 2003 publication by that name by Gollan and Patmore. They argue that "rights to work" must include the right to own shares in the business as well as the right to participate in decision-making. The evidence shows clearly that this combination is indeed good for productivity, staff commitment and loyalty, employee satisfaction and profitability. It also enhances transparency and reduces the need for strike action. In all countries where the practice of participation exists unions are involved and, especially in the Scandinavian countries as well as the UK, businesses with high levels of participation and/or ESO also have high union density. The argument that such practices undermine union power or reduce union significance is simply incorrect. The evidence suggests otherwise.

Australia is a full generation behind Europe and the US in both workplace democracy and employee share ownership, a huge gap that should and can be bridged. Not to raise this issue at the Summit would be to miss another opportunity to break this vicious IR circle. The ACTU delegation may have an opportunity to fast forward the IR clock at the Australia 2020 Summit.