My path through the Citizens Jury
experience has been a bit of a tortuous one. For starts it was Grant who put our household into the pool
of potential jurors but it was me and not him who got picked. I could, and in hindsight probably
should have declined the invitation to participate. I find being in groups stressful and am decidedly naïve
about the workings of political organizations. Added to this is the fact that
we are largely not full time residents of Eurobodalla Shire and spend most of
our time in Sydney being grandparents etc.. Although I was assured by our facilitators that I wasn’t a
fraud and had a right to belong on account of being a ratepayer the sneaky
sense of not being the real thing has never quite left me.
I decided to make up for my personal deficit by doing a day’s
interviewing in Moruya, asking our question “Are your taxes being spent wisely
and if not what should change?” to the variety of people I met in the course of
my several personal missions – getting my hair cut, having a hamburger and bits
and pieces of shopping. I felt
good about having done this and resolved to bring up the issues they raised eg
a young girl said “If it rains in Moruya on the weekend there is absolutely
nothing to do.” A mother said “The swimming pool hours need to be longer on
Saturdays” and another woman strongly objected to fireworks saying laser shows
should replace them. I felt I’d
gained a certain authenticity by having these little chats and could make a
useful contribution next meeting.
We’d been asked as “homework” to write down
ten topics that we thought needed discussion, together with our stance on them. We were to do this so our papers could
be chopped up, leading me to think we would be examining piles of written input
on separate topics and perhaps reporting back on them. In the event this never
happened and I was a bit aggrieved that my persuasive prose died on the page.
One of the rules that was explained to us in the first
meeting was that we were not to come up with “wish lists” and all suggested
extra expenditure by council was to be accompanied by possible cutbacks or
“efficiencies”. On tackling my
“homework” I found it was easy to suggest changes but virtually impossible to
suggest cutbacks despite the fact that we had been provided with a Briefing
Book full of figures as well as a line by line breakdown of what council spent
and where they spent it. I, for
one had not the faintest idea what it cost to collect rubbish or maintain
buildings and it would take an intensive period of study to find out. So what could I do? I decided to make modest suggestions
culled from my interviews and add a some ideas (wishes I suppose) drawn from
things happening in other places – the Seattle Urban Death project which is
exploring composting human remains as opposed to cremation or burial – a
transport fleet of minibuses financed by annual membership fees like in the
Estonian town Tallinn – also a
state of the art Aboriginal arts and culture centre like the one in Ceduna. However the more specific I got the
more I realized I was straying from the “No wish list” rule. Specifics cost money and can be dismissed
just like that. “Not possible, no money.” The safer way seemed to be to go with
abstractions. The word “increased”
got a lot of work and didn’t require a price tag. “Increased consultation with the aboriginal community”,
“Preserve our pristine environment by increased used of sustainable
practices”etc.
Slowly it dawned on me that we, who had
allegedly been called upon to process information and indeed ask for any
information we needed to create a directive document, were actually being
processed ourselves and forced like sausages into a string of harmless
abstractions that would bear our name.
It was all very pleasant on one level, like a never ending dinner party
with interesting speakers and nice food in the breaks but nevertheless I began
to feel disempowered and demeaned and worst of all, unable to do a good job.
Despite an overt ethos of openness and
freedom from direction the jury process has turned out to be rather authoritarian. We are told what to do and timed as we
do it. To some extent this is of
course necessary. There are clever strategies for getting us to talk to
everyone and not just stick with fellow thinkers. There are good ways of group
discussions being amalgamated into an enriched whole. I admire all this and
acknowledge the necessity of following a tested method of achieving the New
Democracy goal of getting community input.
However the process is on some level infantilizing. For example I would have liked to be
given a brief rundown on the methodology and the history of the ND organization
and how it has come to be funded. Instead we got a promise of an exciting time
and a homily on what we as adults know already, that like blind people feeling
an elephant (a very old and hackneyed story) we would see things in different
ways and should be accepting of differences. Do we really need to be told how to behave?
I was surprised how even after five
meetings and much mixing we were cautious with each other, like passengers on a
24 hour flight who don’t want to discover too much about the perfect stranger an
arm’s width next to them because it is a long haul, and differences are better
not discovered. As luck would have
it the ABC program “The Minefield” was on as I drove home from Tuross
Heads. The topic was how it was
that statistics and experts almost all predicted the US election results so
wrongly. The point was made that
truth has many faces and trying to mine it through statistics was a dangerous
game. The concept of
“epistemological humility” was presented which seems to mean not simply
accepting that each of us has a different reality but being open to each
other’s. To use the wretched
elephant story all those blind folk should shuffle round the elephant a few
times before making their pronouncements.
However to have anything like epistemological humility we really need to
know each other and for some reason this has been difficult. I however did have one moment when I
think I experienced this humility.
There are quite a few older men in the group who tend to stick together
unless forced apart by our facilitators’ manoevres. They make me a bit nervous. They say little but seem quite intense. Anyway I gaily put up the suggestion
given to me by the bookshop lady in Moruya that laser displays should replace
fireworks and suddenly one of these men almost flinched. In a few simple words he conveyed the
joy of watching the fireworks with his grandchildren. I felt with him the loss that banning fireworks would
mean. I didn’t exactly change my
mind but my understanding of the issue was deepened. My analogy of fireworks being like the old fashioned and
health threatening practice of smoking suddenly seemed a bit cheap. Reluctant and introverted as he was
he’d been generous enough to show a bit of himself and I certainly won’t
dismiss him as a “deplorable” (to borrow from Hilary Clinton) again. In a forum of this kind a trust needs to be fostered
so all of us can be known to each other.
The lock step of discussion followed by butcher paper listings somehow
doesn’t quite cut it.
There is one more meeting to go and who
knows something more than a bunch of abstractions may come together as a
report. I do hope so as the
enterprise has been expensive for the council and time consuming for us and in
my case rather stressful.
And I now know that if ever I see a group
of blind people in a room patting an elephant to hotfoot it out of there sharpish!
PS The last meeting was peculiarly
distressing and convinced me that the whole process was misconceived.
