Social media gives us a choice between curiosity and cruelty

 

We do not have to solve world peace to start practising it

Yesterday, I put a post on our community Facebook page for a friend who had to find a new home for her little dog, Teddy.

She asked me to post it because she was petrified people would abuse her. That fear tells us something about social media before the comments even begin.

The truth was more complicated and it was also private. My friend had waited nine months to find accommodation. When they finally found somewhere to live, their circumstances meant she could not take Teddy with them. The landlord had not refused him. They were not looking for an excuse to give him away. They were making a painful decision after running out of other options.

We cannot ask children to practise peace if we do not model it

None of that was in the Facebook post because nobody should have to publish the details of their private life to avoid being abused by strangers. People could have asked a question before deciding they knew the story.

Some did. They wanted information that could help Teddy find the right family:

  • Is Teddy comfortable with children?
  • Does he get along with other animals?
  • Is he house trained?
  • Is he leash trained?
  • Is the yard fenced?
  • Can a prospective family meet Teddy and his owner?
  • Would a rescue organisation be able to help with the process?

One family said they were looking to adopt a dog and would like to meet him. Another person offered information about rescue organisations. Others tagged people who might be interested.

These comments moved the conversation forward. They gathered information, offered practical help and kept the focus on finding the right home for Teddy.

Then came the assumptions:

  • The landlord cannot refuse a pet.
  • The owner does not understand the rental laws.
  • This must be an excuse to get rid of the dog.
  • The owner should have found somewhere that accepted Teddy.
  • I could not legally rehome somebody else’s dog.

The landlord had not refused Teddy. My friend was not asking me to rehome him. I had posted on their behalf because I belonged to the Facebook group and I cared enough about them and Teddy to cop any abuse. It was also a chance to prove my community was compassionate.

People had created an entire story from information they did not have.

The cruellest comment suggested my friend was using her rental accommodation as an excuse to get rid of a beautiful dog. That person knew nothing about her circumstances, how long she had waited for accommodation or the decisions she had faced. She filled every gap with the worst possible explanation.

A few days earlier, I had spent 95 minutes with almost 100 young people at the Cowra World Peace Day Youth Forum. We practised curiosity, creativity, collaboration and communication.

I showed them a picture of a cat, a mouse and a flea. Each saw the same situation differently. The cat, the mouse and the flea had different information, different concerns and a different view of what was happening.

Then they met Pickles. The students could not discover Pickles’ story by guessing. They had to ask questions, listen to the answers and use each answer to decide what to ask next.

I also showed them someone pushing into a tuckshop line. At first, the person looked rude and entitled. Then the students learned she was collecting a first-aid kit for someone who had been injured.

The picture had not changed. The information had.

The Facebook discussion about Teddy became the same lesson played out among adults.

Some people saw a gap in the information and asked a question. Others saw the same gap and inserted an accusation.

The people who asked questions helped. They learned more about Teddy, offered advice, found possible families and identified safer ways to manage the adoption. The people who made assumptions added distress to someone already going through a painful time.

Every conversation is a chance to practise peace

Curiosity would not have required a long conversation. One question could have changed everything:

“Can you tell us more about the circumstances?”

That question leaves room for an answer. An accusation closes the door before the person has spoken.

I keep wondering what those young people in Cowra will do the next time they see something that looks wrong. Will they decide they already know the whole story? Or will they remember the cat, the mouse and the flea, Pickles and the person pushing into the tuckshop line?

Will they ask another question before they judge?

After reading the comments about Teddy, I hope they do.

The lessons Pauline Hanson wants cut are the ones children ask for

Pauline Hanson called Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples “the most primitive race on Earth”. She said they had achieved nothing in 60,000 years and described teaching Indigenous history as a “complete waste of time”.

She made the comments on a podcast in September 2025. They surfaced this month. Her target was the school curriculum. She complained that children were learning about Aboriginal culture and language and asked what Aboriginal people had contributed.

I have spent 20 years in those classrooms. I founded Kreative Koalas, a program that ran across New South Wales. Primary school students studied the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, chose a challenge facing their community, designed an action project and painted their solution on giant koalas.

Those koalas remain in school foyers and gardens across the state. Many carry Aboriginal designs and stories chosen by the students.

Before that, I founded Young Farming Champions and sent young people working in agriculture into schools to talk about the country that feeds us.

I have watched what happens when young people take a big idea and act on it.

Hanson is right about one thing. The curriculum is crowded. Teachers have spent years dealing with trying to cover more content than a school year can hold. Every new demand consumes time that must come from somewhere else.

Cutting Aboriginal history, sustainability and Australia’s engagement with Asia will not solve that problem. It will remove the content that helps children understand where they live and the world they will enter.

The Australian Curriculum contains three cross-curriculum priorities: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Histories and Cultures, Sustainability, and Asia and Australia’s Engagement with Asia. They are taught through existing learning areas rather than as three extra subjects.

Under the earlier curriculum, teachers often found these priorities through curriculum tags and optional elaborations. The teachers I worked with wanted to teach all three and ran out of hours.

Version 9 strengthened their connection to specific content descriptions and made the links clearer. Teachers had greater authority to teach what many had been trying to fit in for years.

That is the change Hanson objects to.

A Year 4 class learning how Aboriginal people used fire to manage this continent leaves knowing more about the ground beneath its school.

A Year 8 class tracing trade routes through Asia leaves understanding Australia’s neighbourhood. We share a maritime border with Indonesia. Our students will trade with Asia, work with Asia and travel through Asia.

Sustainability is the century they will inherit. They will spend their adult lives dealing with its consequences.

These priorities exist because Australian children require more than a collection of dates and facts. They require the knowledge to understand their country, their region and their future.

I watched classes across New South Wales debate which Global Goal their community should tackle, then develop projects and act. They asked direct questions about Country, culture, food, water, waste and climate because those subjects connected the classroom to the world outside it.

Within a day of the comments resurfacing, Hanson said she would apologise “if people were offended”. She claimed she had been describing Aboriginal people at the time of European settlement.

Hanson blamed the offence on those who heard her rather than the words she chose.

I have watched nine-year-olds paint 60,000 years of care for Country onto a giant koala, then stand before their school and explain it.

The children showed the curiosity, knowledge and respect missing from her argument.

Something terrible happened here on the 5th August 1944

Going home to Cowra reminded me how completely I had lived inside a bubble.

I grew up at Pack’s Grant, a 572-acre farm beside the Cowra prisoner-of-war camp. I knew the camp was there. I knew about the breakout. I also knew about the holes in the weatherboards at the back of our house and in the shearing shed, which we understood to be bullet holes.

The woolshed at Pack’s Grant – had bullet holes from the Cowra PoW breakout

What I had never fully appreciated was that the history of the Cowra breakout had run directly past our back verandah. That changed when I sat down for lunch with Tom Rowston at the Happy Days cafe.

Tom Rowston had some pieces of gold information for me over lunch at the Happy Days cafe 

Tom was 93 and approaching his 94th birthday. His family had been in business in Cowra since 1924, owning car yards and other enterprises around the town. He remained fiercely proud of Cowra, its council, hospital, water supply, businesses and people.

When we met, Tom looked at me and knew exactly where I belonged. “You come from Pack’s Grant. You’re tall and skinny like your father.”

It was an extraordinary welcome home. Tom went to school with Harold Read, whose family owned Pack’s Grant before mine. They were mates, and Tom had stayed at the Read family home when he was a schoolboy.

Then he began talking about the night of the Cowra breakout.
“When the Japanese broke out, they came down and they ran past that house all night.”

The breakout began in the early hours of 5 August 1944, when more than 1,000 Japanese prisoners attempted to escape from the camp. Many headed east, apparently believing the ocean lay beyond the hills. My home Pack’s Grant stood in their path.

“Must have been pretty frightening living there,” I said. “Didn’t worry him at all,” Tom replied. Harold had told him that the men “made a lot of noise and kept us awake”.

That was how Harold Read apparently remembered a night which became one of the most recognised events in Cowra’s history. Men were running past the family home in darkness, yet the detail passed down to Tom was the noise they made and the sleep they interrupted.

Fourteen years after the breakout, Pack’s Grant changed hands. My grandparents purchased the farm for their two sons, my father, John Lindsay, and my uncle, David Lindsay. The plan was for the brothers to farm it together, although the partnership did not last long.

The letter confirming the purchase was addressed to my father. Dated 15 July 1958, it came from Cowra stock and station agents Norman C. Bellamy Pty Limited. It recorded the agreement to buy the 572-acre property from Mr Read for £45 an acre, with a 10 per cent deposit. My father moved our family to Pack’s Grant. David Lindsay built an academic career in agriculture and became Dean of Agriculture at the University of Western Australia. He is now Emeritus Professor David Lindsay.

The sale included the floor coverings, an electric stove, two hot-water systems, electric light fittings, three electric motors, an air compressor, two windmills and the shearing plant. The livestock were negotiated separately. The family bought 717 sheep, including 20 Dorset Horn stud ewes, along with 17 cattle.

Our family photographs from 1958 record what came next. They show the woolshed and yards, sheep, pigs, horses, haymaking and the broad hills surrounding Cowra.

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Note the black-and-white Holstein dairy cows. They had travelled with us from the dairy farm in Dapto to become the house cow at Pack’s Grant. Against a landscape of sheep and beef cattle, she looks like a small declaration of where our family had come from.

For me, Pack’s Grant was home. The woolshed was a woolshed. The holes were holes. The former prisoner-of-war camp was nearby, but its history belonged to another time. Returning to Cowra closed the distance between those things.

A conversation over lunch connected me to Harold Read, the boy who grew up in our house and heard the Japanese prisoners passing it during the night. An old letter captured the moment one family handed the farm to another. The photographs recorded the landscape as my family found it in 1958. I went home to Cowra and discovered that the story I had travelled there to find had been waiting at home all along.

Every insult aimed at One Nation is an own goal

Bogan. Cooker. Racist. Woke. Lefty. Latte sipper.

We throw these words around as though they explain people. Mostly, they put people in a box and give us permission to stop listening.

The words change depending on who is speaking.

We may believe these words make our case. They usually do the opposite.

I saw that when I spent five days handing out how-to-vote cards for the Community Independent candidate in Farrer. For much of that time, I stood beside the One Nation volunteers.

We talked, shared pastries and took turns doing the coffee run. I learnt their names and heard about their families, farms and communities.

I asked what had led them to One Nation. They talked about water, hospitals, services disappearing and decisions being made in cities by people who would never live with the results. Many had voted for the Coalition for decades and felt the party had stopped listening.

One Nation gave that disappointment somewhere to go. These people were talking about water buybacks, hospital visits and children leaving town. They were neither stupid nor aggressive. They had reasons for voting as they did.

One Nation tells people that educated elites look down on them. Call its voters stupid, backward or racist and you have helped One Nation prove its point.

It works both ways. Question a One Nation policy and you may be called woke before you have finished the sentence. Apparently, even a seventy-year-old dairy farmer can become an inner-city latte sipper without leaving the farm.

Once we put someone in a box, we stop being curious. We stop asking what happened, what changed and what might change again.

Labels end conversations. Questions start them.

If we want people to reconsider what they believe, insulting them is a very strange place to begin.

Dolly did it and other modern defences


When I was growing up one of Mary-Anne Fahey’s characters in The Comedy Company was a mischievous three-year-old named Jophesine.

Whenever she was accused of doing something wrong, Jophesine had her defence ready.

“I didn’t do it. Dolly did it.”

It was funny because she was three. Less amusing is the realisation that absolving ourselves of responsibility now appears to be a key driver of everyday life.

We have developed more sophisticated language than Jophesine, of course. We blame the system, the market, the government, the previous government, consumer demand, inadequate funding, misleading advertising, our parents or the person who failed to stop us.

Dolly has acquired an impressive number of job titles.

A recent opinion article in The New York Times tells the story of Bryce Martinez, who was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes and fatty liver disease at 16.

Martinez had developed obesity early in childhood. He grew up eating much of what the American food system made affordable and convenient. Sugary cereals, school lunches of pizza and burgers, ready-made meals, juice pouches, chips and ice cream were part of his everyday diet.

At 18, he sued 11 major food manufacturers. He argued that their ultra-processed products had been engineered to encourage overconsumption, marketed to children and had caused his illnesses.

The case was dismissed because the judge found insufficient evidence connecting particular products with Martinez’s illnesses. His lawyers intend to appeal, and similar cases are being brought against food companies across the United States.

The article argues that litigation may succeed where governments have failed. It compares these cases with the decades of legal action against tobacco companies that eventually exposed what the industry knew about addiction, cancer and marketing to children.

It is a powerful comparison. Food manufacturers have enormous resources and an extraordinary understanding of flavour, brain chemistry, advertising and consumer behaviour. If companies have deliberately designed products to override appetite signals and then marketed those products to children, they should be held accountable.

Martinez had very limited agency. He did not buy the groceries, formulate the products, design the school menu, write the advertising or regulate food additives. His parents worked full-time and relied on food that was affordable, available and quick to prepare.

Food companies, schools and governments therefore hold a greater share of responsibility, especially where products were deliberately engineered and marketed to encourage overconsumption.

Greater responsibility, however, is not exclusive responsibility.

The article presents responsibility as though it must belong either to the individual or to the food companies. Once it is transferred entirely to the company, everyone else in the chain can quietly leave the room.

The child can blame the parents. The parents can blame the manufacturer. The manufacturer can blame consumer demand. Retailers can blame price pressures. Schools can blame their budgets. Governments can blame insufficient evidence.

Then we can all go home satisfied that Dolly did it.

Type 2 diabetes also resists a single explanation. Diet and physical activity can contribute significantly, but so can genetics, age, ethnicity, family history and social and economic circumstances. Finding one contributor does not remove every other person or institution from the picture.

Agriculture has its own version of the Jophesine defence.

Farmers regularly tell governments and the community, “You can trust us to do the right thing.”

Then governments introduce laws covering firearms, land clearing, animal welfare, chemical use or environmental protection, and agriculture argues that the entire sector is being punished for the behaviour of a minority.

Sometimes that criticism is justified. Poorly designed regulation can burden responsible farmers without addressing the behaviour that prompted it.

But agriculture also has to confront the question beneath the regulation. What happens when enough people fail to exercise the responsibility they say should be left with them? At what point does legislation become the consequence of our collective failure to govern ourselves?

We cannot ask to be trusted and then insist that every failure belongs to somebody else.

The same question reaches well beyond food and farming. We can hold corporations accountable without pretending consumers have no agency. We can recognise the constraints facing parents without treating every decision as inevitable. We can regulate harmful behaviour without assuming legislation removes our responsibility to make better choices.

Responsibility is not a parcel passed along the chain until it reaches the person with the deepest pockets. Several people and institutions can hold it at the same time, in different proportions according to their power, knowledge and choices.

Perhaps the real test is not, “Who can I blame?”

It is, “Given the power and choices I had, what part of this belonged to me?”

 

Devastated Cathy Wilcox fangirl is grieving because she is leaving

I am an unabashed Cathy Wilcox fan girl, so I was devastated to hear that she is leaving The Sydney Morning Herald after 37 years.
Earlier this year, I wrote my first ever letter to the editor of the Herald. Cathy spotted it and shared it on Twitter with the words, “As ever the letter writers bring the wisdom.” I wasn’t on Twitter, but someone sent me a screenshot.  It is something I will always treasure.
Her departure comes after a bruising period. The Australian Press Council ruled against Cathy over her “Grass roots” cartoon about calls for a royal commission into antisemitism, finding that the imagery could evoke an antisemitic trope. The Herald apologised for the hurt caused.
Cathy later spoke about what she feared that decision could mean for political cartooning. Her concern was that editors, faced with something provocative or controversial, may increasingly decide it is “simply not worth the trouble” to publish it.
Political cartoonists question power and expose contradictions. Sometimes people will disagree strongly with them. That argument is part of public debate. Cathy’s concern is what happens when editors become so wary of the consequences that the cartoon never gets published and the argument never begins.
After 37 years at the Herald, Cathy leaves an extraordinary body of work behind, and one very grateful fan girl with a screenshot she will treasure forever. See the blog post I wrote about her acknowledgment of my letter here

Before we explain One Nation voters, perhaps we should listen to them

 

Yesterday I wrote about the extraordinary enthusiasm political parties have for studying unhappy voters rather than themselves. This morning the Sydney Morning Herald delivered me an article about researchers studying 1,000 One Nation voters. Sometimes the universe is unnecessarily helpful.

In my living history interviews with people in their late 80s and early 90s across my local government area, I often ask what has changed in their lifetime. I am hoping for the broad sweep, social change, physical change, how the place has changed around them.

The most common answer I get is: too many people.

They are talking about people moving into the area from somewhere else in Australia. Sydney gets mentioned a lot. Immigration does not.

So when I read Paul Sakkal’s article in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning on what 1,000 One Nation voters say is driving them, I smiled.

The headline finding is immigration. Of the One Nation supporters who believe Australia is heading in the wrong direction, 39 per cent name immigration as one of the reasons. Fifty-seven per cent fear Australia’s culture and identity are changing too quickly. Forty per cent point to pressure on housing and infrastructure.

Then you read what people actually say.

One supporter says the issue is arithmetic. You cannot bring in that many people without building the houses. Another says the issue is who comes and whether they want to become part of what is already here.

Suddenly “immigration” is being asked to explain quite a lot.

We do love a complicated explanation. Apparently understanding something counts for less if it doesn’t require a consultant.

The research into One Nation voters comes with focus groups, voter segments, demographic differences, loyal supporters, newer supporters and analysis of what might persuade people to change their vote. All useful.

But perhaps people are also saying exactly what they mean.

There are more people than there used to be, and they do not like some of the consequences.

People do not experience population growth as a percentage. They experience another housing development, another traffic jam, another doctor’s books closed to new patients, another paddock covered in houses and another place that takes longer to get to.

Ask someone in their late 80s in my LGA what has changed and I may hear “too many people”.

Ask a One Nation voter what is wrong with Australia and I may hear “too much immigration”.

Before deciding those are entirely different conversations, it might be useful to ask what each person is actually describing.

The Scanlon Foundation’s long-running social cohesion research adds an important clue. In 2024, 49 per cent of Australians thought immigration was too high. Yet 85 per cent said multiculturalism had been good for Australia, 82 per cent said migrants were good for the economy and 83 per cent rejected excluding immigrants on the basis of race, ethnicity or religion.

The 2025 research is equally interesting.

Among Australians who thought immigration was too high, 58 per cent nominated the economy or housing as the country’s biggest problem. Only 9 per cent nominated immigration itself.

That does not make concerns about race, culture or identity disappear. The One Nation research itself shows a difference between newer supporters worried about migration numbers and parts of Hanson’s traditional base who are more concerned about the background of migrants.

But it does suggest that “too much immigration” can sometimes be shorthand for something much broader.

Too many people for the houses.

Too many people for the roads.

Too many people for the services.

Too much change, too quickly.

In my interviews, the people causing all this pressure can be Australians who moved down the highway. Scale the same experience up from a town to a country and suddenly the new arrivals have passports.

This takes us straight back to the leadership question I wrote about yesterday.

Political parties confronted with dissatisfied voters have an extraordinary appetite for studying the voters. Who are they? What do they want? What are they angry about? What message will bring them back?

Now we have research into 1,000 One Nation voters.

To its credit, the research reaches an important conclusion: One Nation’s rise is as much a story of Liberal failure as One Nation success.

That is more interesting than another voter profile.

Because the real question may be what happens when population grows faster than people’s confidence that governments can manage the consequences.

Housing, roads, hospitals, schools and infrastructure are experienced locally. So is change. People notice the paddock disappearing long before they read the population statistics.

Then politics arrives with an answer. Immigration.

That is a powerful word because it can turn a collection of complicated experiences into one problem with one number attached to it.

Politics loves a number. Numbers can be cut. Systems are messier.

So before politicians hear “immigration” and start competing over who can promise the lower migration target, it might be worth listening a little longer.

What are people actually describing? Because sometimes when someone in their late 80s tells me the problem is “too many people”, the people causing all the trouble came from Wollongong.

Pauline Hanson did not invent that feeling.

She may simply have become very good at telling people what to call it.

Agriculture wanted better storytellers. Then we blew up the model that made them

 

I am about to spend World Peace Day talking to a group of 10 to 15 year olds about curiosity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration. Which is slightly confronting when you start looking around at how adults behave.

Before the workshop, the students will answer a short survey. They will answer the same questions afterwards. I am interested to see what changes, and I am also realistic enough to know they are unlikely to walk out several hours later transformed into world-class collaborators who calmly interrogate every assumption before breakfast.

That is because people do not change overnight. Oddly, we seem to forget this every time we organise a workshop.

How many times have you spent a day learning some marvellous new way of doing things, walked out thinking, “This is excellent” put the folder somewhere safe and carried on exactly as before? I have.

We have somehow developed a culture where learning is treated as an event. Book the facilitator, find the room, provide lunch, learn collaboration, home by four. Job done.

I learnt the limitations of that model the long way around.

When I came back into agriculture, people decided I did not look like the stereotype of someone they expected to see representing the industry. Apparently that was useful, so I was pushed out the front and into the media.

This was all very new to me, and I was not remotely comfortable with it, so I demanded training. Then more training. Then more training.

It took me about 15 years to feel comfortable.

The other day I gave a presentation and a number of people told me it was the best presentation they had ever seen.

They should have been at my first one.

It had 127 slides.

I wish I were exaggerating.

That experience changed the way I thought about developing other people. When I started the Young Farming Champions program, I wanted people to have what I had eventually learned I needed, time, repetition, feedback and somewhere safe to keep practising.

The Young Farming Champions model was built around ongoing development. Once you joined, you could remain part of the network for as long as you wanted, continuing to build your skills over time. During COVID, we ran workshops every month, so people could say, “I want to feel more comfortable doing this,” and we could focus on exactly that. We brought in outstanding Australian and international experts, then gave people repeated opportunities to practise, get feedback and keep improving.

That is how confidence grows.

Then agricultural bodies looked at what we were doing and decided they wanted something similar. The young people were already there. The Action4Agriculture team was already training them. What changed was the desire to have the program sit inside their own organisation.

This is where I became increasingly frustrated with the way institutions behave. We talk endlessly about collaboration, but the system often rewards the person who can point to something and say, “That was my idea. I built that. That was my result.”

Once that becomes the prize, curiosity becomes inconvenient.

Nobody asks, “Why is this working?” or “What could we add to what is already here?” The question becomes, “How do we create our own version?”

And that is how duplication starts to look like achievement.

The result can be beautifully efficient.

Train them on Saturday.

Face of the industry by Monday.

It is a wonderfully efficient system, provided human beings work like software updates.

Recently I have been spending time with collaboration specialist Stuart Waters, and he has been subtly  dismantling several things I thought I knew. One of them is my GPS model.

I have used it for years. Goal. Problem. Solution. Where are we trying to go? What is getting in the way? What is the solution? Perfectly sensible.

Except Stuart pointed out something rather inconvenient.

If we knew the solution, we probably would not have the problem.

With complex problems, the solution is rarely sitting there politely waiting for someone clever enough to notice it. Stuart talks instead about steps, experiments, things we can try, learn from and adjust.

So perhaps GPS survives. Goal. Problem. Steps.

I rather like that. It removes the requirement to stride into every complicated situation carrying The Answer.

It also exposes another habit we have. We are often in an extraordinary hurry to solve the problem before we have worked out what the problem actually is. Something goes wrong and we deal with the bit we can see.

People are not collaborating. Students are dropping rubbish. A community is not engaging. A candidate loses an election.

Right. Fix that.

Except those things may be symptoms. The interesting questions sit underneath. Why is this happening? What assumptions are we making? Who knows something we don’t? Who sees the situation differently?

And the question I am finding increasingly important in some other work I am doing is this.

Have we actually spoken to the people most affected?

It is astonishing how often the answer appears to be no. Reports get written, programs get designed, conclusions get reached and entire narratives develop. Meanwhile, somebody sitting right in the middle of the experience is thinking, “You could have asked me.”

And then I am preparing to stand in front of children and put this on a screen.

Stay curious. Ask before you assume. Understand the problem before you solve it. Listen to learn. Share the thinking. Try something small. Learn what happens. Keep going.

The children are not the only people who could use the reminder.

I am also going to ask them something I have found unexpectedly difficult myself.

Who do you know who does this? Who stays curious when everyone else has already decided? Who asks another question? Who listens because they genuinely want to know the answer? Who can say, “I don’t know”? Who can discover something new and change their mind without behaving as though they have suffered a humiliating defeat?

I can think of a few people. Stuart is one.

What I notice when I talk to him is that having expertise has not made him less curious. Quite the opposite. He keeps asking questions. What is the actual dilemma? Who else sees this differently? What could we try? What might we learn?

Perhaps that is what expertise should look like.

Knowing enough to know that you probably don’t know everything.

There is another uncomfortable question sitting underneath my student workshop. We spend a great deal of time telling young people they will need curiosity, critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaboration to navigate the future.

Who are they watching do it now?

Because one workshop will not do it. Not for them. Not for us.

A workshop might introduce an idea. It might give us language for something we had never noticed before. It might even make us uncomfortable enough to rethink something.

Then comes Monday.

That is when the learning starts.

When democracy means more than Council making the decisions

In a previous post I wrote about  the difference between community consultation and community engagement. They are not the same thing, no matter how often the words get swapped around.

Community consultation and community engagement are not the same thing, no matter how often the words get swapped around.

Kiama Council has adopted the IAP2 Public Participation Spectrum as its model for community engagement. It is a useful spectrum because it makes one thing very clear. How much say are you actually giving people?

IAP2 level What Council does What it means for the community
Inform Provides information We will tell you what is happening
Consult Asks for feedback We will ask what you think
Involve Works with the community as options develop We will work through it with you
Collaborate Partners with the community in developing solutions We will develop the answer together
Empower Places the final decision with the community You make the decision

IAP2 is about the role the community gets to play before a decision is made, and who decides what that role will be.

IAP2 is not a campaign to abolish elected representatives and hand every Council decision to a show of hands in Hindmarsh Park. It is about the role the community gets to play before a decision is made, and who decides what that role will be.

Kiama Council says it has adopted the IAP2 Public Participation Spectrum. Well, sort of. It has adopted a Kiama Council version of it, particularly at the pointy end. How much say are you actually prepared to give people?

Council explains its approach to Empower in its own community engagement document. In effect, you elected us, so we’ll handle the democracy from here.

Kiama Council is currently recruiting a new Manager Communications, Engagement & Customer Service. I am looking forward to seeing who gets the job.

I am not interested in whether they can run a survey, organise a drop-in session or put something on Your Say Kiama. Those are tools. I want to know what they think community engagement is.

Do they see IAP2 as a way to tell residents what Council is doing and collect feedback, or as a framework for giving the community a genuine role in defining problems, developing options and influencing decisions?

The community deserves to know who gets invited in, when they get invited in, what they can change and what Council promises to do with what it hears.

The appointment will tell us plenty. Good community engagement starts with deciding how much say you are prepared to give the community.