community decision making Archives - Clover Hill Diaries

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.

What should democracy between elections should look like.

Too often, community engagement has become an extraction process.

You give your time, knowledge, experience and trust. The organisation takes what it wants, writes its report and moves on. You are left feeling used, no better informed, less trusting and far less likely to take part next time.

I have seen it across almost everything I have been involved in. In agriculture, I have lost count of the times I have been asked to contribute to a strategy, explain what is happening on the ground, share what communities know and help identify what might succeed. The organisation takes the information, writes the report and moves on.

The same thing happens in our community. My local council is not unusual. This way of consulting people has become normalised across governments and organisations. People are asked to give their time, knowledge and trust, often after the important choices have already been made.

Governments have helped create the trust crisis they now claim to be worried about, and we can see the consequences in very different parts of Australian politics.

People who feel repeatedly ignored can reach the point where they no longer want to repair the system. They want to punish it. They want someone who will tear it down, humiliate the people running it and make those they blame pay.

That is when the knight on the white horse appears, promising to ignore the rules, sweep institutions aside, name an enemy and act with the force others have lacked. These figures are not being trusted to govern. They are being chosen to blow things up.

Others take the opposite path. They believe they have the capacity to enter the system and change it from within. Both responses tell us something about the distance that has opened between people and those elected to represent them.

Hannah Ferguson’s decision to stand as an independent against Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in Grayndler is one of the clearest examples. She has built a large audience through Cheek Media by talking about politics with younger Australians. She is no longer content to comment on the political system from the sidelines. She is putting her own name on the ballot and taking on the Prime Minister in his own seat.

Her candidacy rests on a blunt argument. The major parties have stopped listening to the people they represent.

The predictable response will be that she cannot win Grayndler. That is the safest possible way for the political establishment to dismiss what her candidacy is telling them.

The question is not whether Hannah Ferguson can defeat Anthony Albanese. The question is why a young woman with a large audience, a successful media platform and years of political commentary has decided that talking about the failure of representation is no longer enough.

The major parties can dismiss her chances. They would be foolish to dismiss the reason she is standing.

Paul Stepczak’s LinkedIn post adds another layer to this argument. He names something I care deeply about, what happens when organisations take people’s time, knowledge and trust, then give little back.

People attend workshops, complete surveys, arrange childcare, share lived experience and explain what a proposal will mean for them. The organisation gains the information. It can use those stories and insights to strengthen a strategy, prepare a report, support a funding application or show that consultation took place. The people who contributed are often left wondering what happened next.

Paul asks three questions that should be part of every engagement process:

How do we show people we listened?
What can we act on now?
How will people know their contribution made a difference?

They are simple questions. They are also rarely answered well.

Too often, the process is designed around what is easiest for the organisation. A survey is opened. A few pop-up sessions are scheduled. A closing date is set. Submissions are counted. A report is prepared. The community is then told it had an opportunity to participate.

That is a very low bar for democracy.

Kiama Council’s draft engagement strategy gives us a local example of how thin that engagement can become. Council runs a few pop-up sessions. Some were cancelled because staff were unavailable. Residents are then directed to Have Your Say, where several major strategies can be open for comment at the same time and due on the same day.

That is a considerable ask of people. They are expected to find the documents, read them, understand the implications and prepare useful responses, often across several complex subjects at once.

People are not a source of free information to be tapped whenever an organisation wants evidence. They bring knowledge of place, history, relationships and daily life. They know where a policy will collide with reality, who may be left out, which promises have been made before and which solutions have already been tried.

They also know what they are giving when they share personal experience.

That contribution should change something. It should help define the problem, test the assumptions behind the proposal and reveal consequences that may not be visible from inside the organisation. It should help develop the options before one answer has already become the preferred answer. People should also be told what happened because they took part.

That does not mean every suggestion will be accepted. Councillors are elected to make decisions. They also have a responsibility to explain what they heard, what changed, what did not change and why.

A thank you at the end of a consultation period is not enough. A summary saying most respondents supported or opposed a proposal is not enough. People should be able to see where their knowledge entered the decision, whether the question changed, whether a risk was recognised, whether an option was added or whether a proposal was altered.

Paul is right to ask what people gain from engagement. They should gain knowledge too. They should walk away understanding more about the decision, the evidence, the competing pressures and their community. They should be able to see where their contribution made a difference and feel confident that giving their time was worthwhile.

That is an exchange. What we often have instead is extraction.

The organisation asks. The community gives. The organisation decides what to keep. The community waits.

Kiama Council has an opportunity to change that. It can avoid placing several major strategies on exhibition at once, give residents enough time to read and respond, make sure scheduled sessions go ahead, involve people before the options are narrowed and report back in a way that shows exactly what changed.

Most importantly, it can stop treating engagement as a stage that happens after the proposal has been written.

Community engagement should leave people knowing they were genuinely part of the process. They should walk away better informed about their community, able to see where their contribution went and confident enough to take part again.

This is what democracy between elections should look like.

How my valley became Mosman or Toorak with a blowhole, one sale at a time

I have spent a lifetime at farm kitchen tables, and in every conversation the problem is someone else’s to fix. The council’s. Canberra’s. The person who never rang back. So we elect a politician every three years, and we wait.

Look at what that actually asks of them. I hand over my problem. My road, my rates, my paddock. So does my neighbour, and his neighbour, and every voter in the electorate. The politician ends up holding thirty thousand separate problems, most of them pulling against each other, and no honest hope of fixing them all. Politics becomes a queue of grievances, and campaigning becomes promising to move you up the queue. The politician can only promise, disappoint, and be replaced by a rival who promises louder. The loudest dog in the yard wins, every time. We built this machine, and then we blame the politician when it does what it was always going to do.

And while we queue, the big calls get made without us. Here’s how it works in my valley. A dairy farm comes up for sale. A Sydney buyer pays more than any farmer could ever earn back from milk, because he’s not buying a farm, he’s buying a view for six weekends a year. The farm next door is now worth city money too, so when that farmer retires, no young farming family can afford it either. Sale by sale, working farms become holiday homes that stand dark most of the year.

And it doesn’t stop at the farm gate. Every sale drags the price of an ordinary house up with it. Kiama is now the most expensive place to buy a home in regional New South Wales, dearer than Byron Bay. The nurse at the hospital can’t buy here. The teacher can’t. The kids who grew up here can’t. There is no affordable housing here, and no social housing. The school loses children, the shops lose staff, and the town that made the views worth buying slowly stops being a town. It becomes a postcode with scenery. Mosman with a blowhole.

Nobody chose this. There was no meeting about where it was all heading, no vote, no moment anyone could point at and object to. Each sale was legal and each seller had every right. But add it all up and my district has been rezoned by the market, one sale at a time, and nobody ever asked us what the best outcome would be for the farms, the buyers, the nurses the kids or the community. I watch it from my own front gate.

So here is the problem: we hand our say to a politician with thirty thousand problems in the queue, and the calls that change our districts get made elsewhere, by the market, the local council, the state government. What’s left for the rest of us is Facebook, one keyboard at a time. Each of us finds our tribe there, and the tribe does what tribes do: agrees with itself, louder every year. Plenty of conversations. Never one table.

And here is the goal: communities with the knowledge, confidence and skills to find the best outcome for everyone affected.

One rural community in north-east Victoria worked out how to get everyone to the same table, and it’s still going strong five elections later. In my next post I’ll tell you what they did. Then I want to work on the question that follows with you: how do we do it in every district in Australia?

What communities lose when lived experience is ignored.

Psychology shows we feel loss twice as strongly as gain. So when lived experience is not deliberately carried forward, change stalls. Familiar patterns win. Old mistakes return dressed up as new debates.

Communities like to think they are good at remembering. They are not.

They remember dates, names, anniversaries. They remember who was on which committee and who fell out with whom. What they forget is how decisions were made, what it cost to get agreement, and who carried the weight when things went wrong.

My previous post dealt with recognition, the moment people lean forward and see themselves. This one deals with what communities lose when that recognition never makes it into decisions.

Because loss hurts twice as much as gain feels good, change faces a headwind.

When lived experience is not deliberately held and shared, communities lose ground. Quietly at first. Then all at once.

They lose their memory. People leave. Staff retire. Volunteers burn out. Small business owners move on. What walks out the door with them is the why, not the what. New leaders arrive and inherit problems stripped of context. Old decisions are waved away as historic, which often means inconvenient. The same arguments return with fresh language and everyone wonders why nothing changes.

They lose coordination when pressure hits. When stress arrives, and it always does, groups retreat into silos. Councils consult late. Agencies defend their patch. Community organisations scramble beside each other rather than together. Without a shared memory of how cooperation has worked before, decision making turns reactive. Effort duplicates. Public disagreement escalates and trust thins.

They lose credibility with their own people. Residents can smell process a mile off. They know when engagement is theatre. When people are asked to comment after options have already settled, they disengage. Meetings empty. Submissions dry up. Goodwill drains away. Once lost, it is slow and costly to rebuild.

They lose the ability to shape what comes next. When lived experience is absent, others step in. External advisers arrive with neat models that flatten local complexity. Decisions drift away from those who live with the consequences. Communities stop setting the direction and start reacting to it.

They lose time they do not have. Each round of relearning wastes energy. Complexity grows. Resources tighten. Mistakes become more expensive. The risk is not standing still. It is staying busy while falling behind.

They lose people. Capable contributors step back when they see the same conversations replayed with no accumulation of learning. Volunteers burn out. Staff leave. Younger people look elsewhere. Systems that cannot learn from themselves struggle to keep anyone who can.

They lose a closing window. There are still people around who remember when cooperation shifted outcomes and compromise mattered. That knowledge disappears quietly. Once gone, it cannot be rebuilt from reports or minutes.

This pattern has become embedded in corporate culture because modern organisations reward visible movement over accumulated understanding. New leaders arrive under pressure to signal change, legacy knowledge is treated as baggage rather than ballast, and past decisions are reduced to slide headings stripped of context. Speed, novelty, and personal imprint carry more status than continuity.

At the same time, high turnover, restructures, and consultant driven frameworks fracture memory by design, knowledge is modularised, handovers are thin, and learning is assumed to live in systems rather than people. Loss aversion does the rest. Protecting reputation, control, and momentum feels safer than reopening how decisions were made or acknowledging what went wrong. The result is a culture that looks busy and future facing, while quietly discarding the very experience that could prevent repetition and failure.

This is not about nostalgia or heritage.

It is about whether communities choose to keep the knowledge they have already paid for, or keep relearning the same lessons at a higher price each time.

There is still time to hold lived experience where decisions are made, and stop paying twice for forgetting.

Psychology shows we feel loss about twice as strongly as gain. So when lived experience is not deliberately carried forward, change stalls. Familiar patterns win. Old mistakes return dressed up as new debates.