OLO already does this OZ Wide but is very Polarized Politically . I wonder if John Hatton is about addressing this issue ?
If it is about Polarization of the Political Landscape I hope he succeeds . I would like to sign my name on my contributions to OLO but then I would have to put up with unpleasant phone calls etc in the early hours of the morning , it's a no no sadly.
Politics is a pretty ugly game at the best of times but never before 2010 revalations has our Country been so divided , it's a divisive idea to engage in Politics , it's the Year of Fanaticism , we are all going to Die John Hatton ! So what's the Point !!

community democracy could be extended by abolishing both local and state government, the population in australia is far too small for the amount of bureaucrats standing inbetween the community and the decisions....this may seem odd..isn't local government the seat of community democracy? well in theory..but in practice all you get is regulations and more regulations and arrogant idiots elected on the speed hump issue making decisions about all aspects of a community and its everyday life. imho.

We need to reverse the trend towards rampant and selfish individualism that is fostered by the anti-democratic capitalist system

Well said E.Sykes, we are indeed over-governed and 'mis-managed' by battalions of self-serving bureaucrats and 'people's representatives' whose REAL interests include careerism and the accumulation - under a de-regulated, that is, "free" market - of limitless private wealth or Capital, and the power and privileges such wealth commands. The great majority of us are, after all, mere wage slaves under a Capitalist System that divides our communities and society into the haves and the have-nots.

As most of our 'people's representatives' - past and present - are millionaires and our 'executive', policy shaping and enforcing bureaucrats on salaries and other generous benefits that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, it is naive in the extreme to expect them to be sympathetic to the worsening plight of Working Class and Lower Middle Class Australians, not to mention those already part of the underclass.

Ms Tranter's bourgeois delusion that "The other fundamental requirement for a strong culture of community democracy is governments which disseminate accurate information, which encourage uninhibited discussion and which listen to and act on what citizens say." is just that. The only 'stakeholders' or 'players'they listen to are corporate executives from huge, monopolistic local and foreign corporations, banks and dominant financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank, and billionaire owners of "wealth creating" media conglomerates, property developers, arms manufacturers and the like.

I really liked this essay - and I feel the author has something really important to say here - great work! :))

I wrote on a similar theme a few years back - with regard to public space and its relation to civic engagement.

see: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=6600

Perhaps with more direct relevance, I also wrote about civics education in my blog.

see:

http://leftfocus.blogspot.com/2009/03/re-invigorating-civics-and-citizenship.html

I hope if there's anyone who's sincerely interested in these issues that they might find something useful in my past contributions as well...

sincerely,

Tristan

I think that this article is good as far as it goes.

However, at the broader level, democracy has been almost completely broken for the last 30 years and unless fixed, we will all be powerless to stop the further alienation of which Kellie Tranter writes.

To quote myself:

Bob Hawke actually boasted about his ... failure to democratically consult ... when he claimed that he had enforced "elite as opposed to popular views on immigration."

Over the last 3 decades at least, "elite as opposed to popular views" have been imposed in regard to many other important policy decisions. Examples ... include the removal of tariff barriers to prevent the export of Australian jobs to slave wage economies; the removal of barriers which prevented foreign companies from buying our mineral wealth; the removal of barriers to foreign investors being able to buy up Australian real estate; the deregulation of our finance sector; the privatisation of our retirement income ..., the privatisation of government-owned businesses including Telstra, QANTAS and the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories; and the corporatisation or privatisation of vital resources: water and power utilities, and of infrastructure normally owned and paid for by taxpayers, such as roads and public transport.

There have also been numerous disposals of public parkland, such as 20 hectare Royal Park in Melbourne, and the massive rezoning to urban of "Green Wedges" ... We have also lost publicly owned state banks, insurance companies, and local, state and national services, including road-making, land-development, public housing construction, the prison system and monopolies on marketing agricultural product - such as in the privatisation of the wheat board. The public is the poorer.

We have also seen the imposition of the National Competition Policy on all levels of Government, the forcible amalgamation of local governments, the removal of the rights of local governments ... to oppose local housing and other developments,6 the imposition of costly environmentally destructive projects against the wishes of the local communities, the destruction of farmland and bushland to allow the construction of mines, the threatened imposition of a Chinese-style Internet firewall, etc. (http://candobetter.org/node/1718)