The Australian political system is well-known to be highly corrupt, a problem exacerbated by the covid-era policy failures. Where could a reform movement start? We argue that the state bureaucracy, currently highly politicised and intertwined with external special interests via revolving doors and other ‘Games of Mates’, can be re-harnessed to the goal of advancing the public interest by creating a parallel democratic structure to augment our present electoral and political institutions. The task of this new structure would be to appoint the top level of the government bureaucracy and other state-aligned organisations through the use of decision-making citizen juries. We also offer a second proposal that aims to democratise media production itself. Our proposals aim to create both a more independent media sector and a more pro-social public sector capable of withstanding the temptations created by high inequality and deep corruption within the political class. We sketch our proposals and show how they unite the positive elements of competition, nationalism, and independence to craft a more democratic and robust foundation on which to build Australia’s future.

Introduction

In this chapter, we take it as proven that both major political parties in Australia are thoroughly corrupt in the sense that they serve their own and minority interests, rather than the public interest. This corruption is not in plain sight, as that would be too easy for the public to discover, but most frequently takes the form of favour exchange between politicians and businessmen quietly working together over time for their mutual benefit and to the impoverishment of the man on the street. Writing of this Game of Mates played by politicians and others (whom they call James) using their power to advance themselves at the expense of everyday Australians, Cameron Murray and Paul Frijters (2022) write:

Cases of individual theft and fraud are relatively easy to discover. It would be far too easy to combat this behaviour from a few ‘bad eggs’, who can be removed from their position of power. Such behaviour can easily be identified as corruption and be punished as such.

But with a group of loyal Mates who also involve themselves in making the rules and exercising discretion over who gets the grey gifts they control, James is able to conduct the Game with ease and out of sight. James need not favour himself directly. Rather, James favours his Mates, who later return the favour to him and others in their ‘club’. Together, James and his Mates create an informal group by trading direct or indirect reciprocal favours, which over time evolves into a social structure that bears a remarkable resemblance to a mafia.

We take it as given that this corruption in the political sphere has seeped into the top of the public sector, the major corporations, and the media. These institutions are all now oriented towards worsening inequality via monopolisation of their respective ‘markets’ and in other ways ensuring the absence of true competition, thereby impoverishing and enslaving the vast majority of the Australian people. What we now observe in Australia is a mix of fascism (i.e., a power-obsessed elite presiding over a merger of state and corporate bodies) and feudalism (i.e., the mental and physical domination of the majority by a small minority). 

In this chapter, we take seriously the question of what types of reforms could work to put the public interest back into contention within Australia’s powerful institutions. Our answer to this question starts by recognising that the problem is sufficiently large and complex that the only feasible solutions are either revolution, which we hope Australia can avoid, or a carefully designed adjustment to a vulnerable, crucial, and manipulable element in the present system. As such an element, our first proposal targets the top layer of the public sector, taking the optimistic view that Australia’s public sector leadership cadre can be rescued and made to return to a pro-social orientation. In our second proposal, we discuss how the information commons can be democratised.

The reform ideas we discuss in this chapter centre on the concept of citizen juries, which are public-service organisations that can be used to break the link between party politics and bureaucratic decisions. We make the case for how our ideas would increase the representation of market forces and factors in our system of governance and conclude by discussing other benefits that we foresee.

Beyond saving? The corruption in Australian politics and bureaucracy

In what ways have Australian institutions been hijacked to serve special interests, and in what ways is the country still a democracy?

Australia is still a democracy in the sense that there is compulsory voting and new political parties can compete in elections. Elections matter, since significant power is concentrated in the hands of the majority in Commonwealth and State Parliaments. New parties must fight to grow in an extremely hostile and politically biased climate, facing uphill battles such as the public funding of established parties that serves as a barrier to entry for others, but still, new parties can compete. Anti-democratic hurdles simply mean that democratic renewal is far more difficult than it is supposed to be, a point illustrated by the recent failure of the growing number of ‘freedom-friendly minor parties,’ promoting the restoration of freedom after two years of the most destructive peacetime policy-making in Australia’s history, to win a single seat in the May 2022 Australian federal elections. Still, renewal is not impossible, particularly not in local politics where opposition groups can more easily organise.

In what ways is Australia shown to have a thoroughly corrupted political and economic class? In the ways detailed in Murray and Frijters’ 2017 book about Australian corruption, Game of Mates: a very small minority is now used to doing favours for each other across public and private boundaries, in terms of favourable legislation, revolving doors, dismantled anti-corruption bodies, elite-compliant courts, party-aligned media whose business model is to sell access to the public, careerist political parties that internally reward loyalty to special interests, and systems of education and cultural production controlled and directed towards the interests of the elite minority. During the covid period we observed a further strengthening of the vast network of grey gifts between the government and big business that were already strongly in operation before covid, a phenomenon also evident overseas, as discussed further in our 2021 book, The Great Covid Panic. 

As noted in Game of Mates and its 2022 sequel, Rigged – which includes an analysis of the covid period – the endemic corruption of the main political parties involves an alliance with large corporations whose prime target in their involvement in politics is to ensure the absence of true competition. Crises, including but not limited to the covid crisis, are exploited by this alliance to further monopolisation and increase barriers to entry. An example is provided by the 2007-2009 Great Financial Crisis, in which the big Australian banks scored against the competing foreign and loan banks that had been making inroads into the mortgage market business. This win resulted from preferential guarantees handed out by the government to the big banks. How this unfolded was that in the financial panic of late 2008, the government first announced a blanket guarantee of domestic bank accounts, with perhaps some costs for accounts over AU$1 million. While it later announced that foreign banks and mortgage loan banks would also get access to the government guarantee, the damage had already been done, as investors had already pulled out of those banks. The nature of the game in this instance was that politicians facing the GFC crisis rushed to look after those in their club – i.e., their mates at the big banks – and then later made a cosmetic adjustment to make their decision look less unfair than it was. As another prime example in the realm of finance, the Australian superannuation industry in general is largely made up of mandated monopolies and preferential rules embedded into opaque regulations and contracts.

The grim reality is that neither of the two political parties is better than the other. A major capitulation towards foreign-owned special interests happened on the watch of Labor in 2010 when Julia Gillard agreed to legislation that benefited several hundred mining companies that had been the target of the previous PM’s super-profits tax proposal, created a tax scheme that yielded only meagre revenues and bound the Commonwealth government to prevent the taxation of mining companies by state governments. The superannuation scam, in which high yearly overheads enrich a small cabal of union directors and employers at the expense of workers, was Labor legislation and has been continuously championed for expansion by former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating. The Liberals, for their part, have given out billions during the covid years to companies that did not need it, subsidised elite-renewing private schools, ignored the findings of bank misbehaviour by the Hayne Commission, organised several public-private partnership deals that disregarded the public interest and bypassed the checks and balances of the Departments of Transport (as documented in Murray and Frijters 2022), and so on. We regard it as self-evident that the Australian political and economic system today blends fascism and feudalism and grows like a fungus on the increasingly hollowed-out tree of formerly democratic institutions.

While it may seem inevitable that Australia’s bid for democracy will end in a coup by political and economic elites that reverses the country rapidly into formalised fascist tyranny, we still see the possibility of renewal. Our hopes are founded on several observations.

First, the damage done at the behest of Australia’s elites to the health and productive base of the country during the covid era makes the country as a whole weaker, and this is not in the interests of the military or other pro-Australia forces, including patriotic citizens. Second, large companies, state governments, and other factions are each other’s rivals just as often as they find it in their interests to collaborate, making it very unlikely that all or even a majority of such forces can agree on and effectively implement a coup. Third, Australia’s local populations remain relatively cohesive – our local communities have not been destroyed – and they are accustomed to having some say in local politics. Finally, the inherent mismanagement and impoverishment endemic to a more autocratic and monocultural system naturally engenders a countermovement. The central question in our view is thus when (not whether) there will be a reform movement strong enough to overcome the incumbent loose coalitions of corrupt actors. As freethinking intellectuals, we see it as our role to provide blueprints for what to aim for in such a reform movement.

Citizen juries as an alternative

One core systemic barrier to Australian institutions’ ability to serve the public is that both politicians and outside wealthy interests can corrupt the public sector. Elected politicians can politicise the top of the public sector by simply appointing corporate interests as heads of particular public-sector roles, for example. For their part, corporate interests can infiltrate the public sector by offering lucrative careers to top public servants or their families. Both such means of anti-competitive public-sector capture by elites are now entirely normal, and the second is itself enough to ensure that concentrated wealth will corrupt the public sector even if politics were to be completely ‘cleaned up’.

How then can the leaders of the public sector be brought back on the side of the public, and in a way that makes it hard for political and economic elites to re-capture? What institutions could be established to manage the appointments of people to roles at the top of the public sector that skirt the power of elected politicians or special interests – institutions that will further have some regard for their own longevity, without becoming a major problem of their own?

What we suggest in answer to this question is a new sortition-based democratic arm of government that can be sewn onto the body of Australian politics. The core job of this new arm would be to appoint the entire top layer of the public sector and of any organisations that are strongly financially dependent on the state or that have a public orientation. The subgroup of citizens making any given appointment decision would be a citizen jury. The outcome of the deliberation of each citizen jury would be to fill one role, with potentially dozens or even hundreds of juries operating simultaneously each year as the operationalisation of this new arm of government. An existing institution that could be charged with establishing and becoming the organising hub of these citizen juries is the current set of Electoral Commissions. These bodies have the infrastructure required – lists of citizens and volunteers around the country – to be able ideologically and practically to own and implement the citizen jury system.

Imagine that our proposal became reality and that 10 years from now in Australia, there is a citizen-jury system for appointments to the entire upper layer of the public sector. Politicians would still be in charge of policy and budgets, but juries would appoint all the top people working in the public sector. The system would apply to all large entities receiving significant state funding, meaning all of the following and more: universities, large hospitals, government departments, state media, arts councils, statistical agencies, and the judiciary.

We sketch below what the operation of a citizen jury would look like for, say, appointing the director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

20 random adult citizens are selected from the household register. These 20 are given a budget and a time frame to appoint a new director of the ABC, who would be appointed for 5 years. This is a civic duty for which they are compensated and get time off work. They meet in person, just like juries in criminal cases.

No ‘minders’ tell the jury how to do their job. The jury composition is kept secret until the decision is handed down. The jury’s sole task is to come up with a name, a brief justification for why they have chosen the appointed candidate, and an explanation of expenses made. There is no set of requirements handed to the jury by existing politicians or bureaucrats, with the only input to their deliberations being a simple description of the set of tasks required of the person to be appointed to the role. The jury makes its procedures, finds its outside advice, and decides for itself what matters. Its members deliberate on such questions as ‘what do we expect from a state broadcaster?’ ‘What kind of person could do this?’ ‘Where should we look for suitable candidates?’ and ‘How are we going to decide?’

These juries would have basic administrative support such as email, a website, accommodation, and so on. A specific institution like the Electoral Commission, run by people themselves appointed by citizen jury, would organise the juries and would look for improvements and champion the system.

Once erected, this citizen jury system could quickly take over all appointments to the top layer of the public sector, and within a short period, it could succeed in replacing the incumbent corrupted elite with people selected by a jury (noting that incumbents could apply for consideration). The jury system would also be responsible for appointing stand-bys in case a nominated person is ill, jailed, or refuses a job offer. Alumni of this system – i.e., former jury members who developed particular expertise in deliberation and how to efficiently sift through candidates – would be available to assist new juries if needed.

The intended benefits of this system are both short-term and long-term. The immediate short-term benefit is that the influence upon internal public-sector resource allocation of existing politicians and large wealth is broken. The reliance on the general public to make leadership decisions should also be expected to result in the appointment of leaders who are more pro-public than the present crop of Australian leaders because both their current job and their likely future jobs (i.e., other top positions within the public sector) would depend on the choices of random juries made up of that public. 

The intended longer-term benefits of the citizen jury system flow partly via a more activated and constantly engaged citizenry that is taken seriously. The system promotes a more informed and self-aware citizenry that would in turn serve as more of a bulwark than today’s Australian citizenry against future corruption and autocracy. Furthermore, the diversity of the population would more fully and automatically be reflected in the many leaders appointed, which would increase the number of viewpoints within the public sector, thus increasing its collective intelligence.

Another intended long-term benefit is the counterbalance to politicians provided by a layer of leaders in the public sector who have an independent democratic mandate. These leaders should be expected to keep to the law and hold politicians to account much more than is presently done. Also, as a group, those appointed by juries would develop immense expertise about how Australia’s web of regulations and laws benefit insiders and special interests. This knowledge would help them to dismantle those unfair benefits. What is today impossible for any small group to understand and undo should be possible for this whole layer as a collective.

Would it be better to have a referendum-based system? The problem with referenda is that they do not beget public-oriented decision-makers, so while the voice of citizens may be heard on one particular issue, the underlying corrupting mechanisms remain in place, hidden under the seemingly democratic institution of referenda. Also, modern state bureaucracies are incredibly complex, with regulations that run into hundreds of thousands of pages. Referenda are not set up for ensuring the public interest is maintained in that kind of complex environment. Better, we argue, to appoint insiders who are public-oriented to oversee and direct that web of regulations as their main job, rather than to ask the public to make a handful of referenda decisions that will translate only poorly into complex regulation that truly serves the public.

Another natural response to Australia’s predicament would be to call for massive wealth redistribution and the jailing of former elites, making this the object of a reform movement. One reason not to prefer this option is that aiming for such an outcome might engender civil war and massive capital flight. Another is that one probably needs to retain some of the current elites to have a successful reform movement, in which case the main reforms must address the longer-term problems without immediately threatening all vested interests.

The media question

There is a second reform imperative: namely, how to produce a pro-public media sector. The core task of the fourth estate as the guardians against political hubris and abuse of power has not been achieved in recent decades, across the Western world. A deep reason for this failure is that the internet has undermined the advertising-based revenue model the media used to have, with many top media companies being unable to pay for high-quality investigative reporting, and therefore opting instead to employ lower-paid journalists who are happy to parrot whatever interest-group-aligned think tanks send to them. Connected to this problem is that vested interests can buy direct access to the public from media conglomerates. Keeping unfavourable stories out of the public gaze, and running negative stories on opponents, have become valuable commodities for which there are now implicit markets of NGOs and professional influencer firms.

Part of this market operates inside the large multi-sector conglomerates that now run media empires, with Rupert Murdoch’s empire a good case in point. Murdoch makes a loss on newspapers and news-oriented TV channels, while making a large profit on commercial sports channels, merely using the ‘news’ arm of the business to put pressure on governments to give his company special deals. This is an example of how the media have become in essence an extortion racket, reflecting the economic reality that the ability to influence public opinion now has far more commercial value than the ability to rake in advertising.

What is to be done? A successful reform effort must first recognise that the media landscape, not physical battlefields, is the place where modern warfare occurs. The wars of the 21^st century are and will continue to be largely media wars, pitting countries, corporations, ideologies, regions, cities, and reform movements against each other. Social media has in recent years weaponised social networks in which people trust each other. The business model of a large social media company is to hijack interpersonal trust, turning it into a weapon when some selected viewpoint is made to seem socially dominant through the quiet censorship of unwanted opinions expressed between people. When he is made to think that people only share certain opinions amongst their peers, the social media user is given the impression that those opinions – the ‘acceptable’ ones, from the point of view of the media company – are the new social norm. Through this subtle but powerful means of control, large social media companies have hacked into the social consciousness of populations and the inherent deep need of humans to want to follow what is acceptable in their perceived group.

Working forward from the realities that the media have become a forum for mass warfare, that populations are currently abused by the media, and that any profit-oriented media company will sell its ability to influence opinions to the highest bidder, the logical solution is some kind of population-wide competitive production of media. By this, we do not mean national media, though national media with leaders appointed via citizen jury is not a bad place to start, but more broadly a system built by and of a population regularly engaged in the direct production and sifting through of news and information. If media is the new arena in which wars are waged, then the population must arm itself and be involved in those wars. In short, we would need a kind of national media conscription army, with the population trained in media combat, and in which the army draws on the population’s combined knowledge, mobilising this powerful force for the benefit of the whole.

What could this look like? Many options can be created for different countries and cultures, bearing in mind a few key principles. First, one should not want or expect to generate a single truth or a single opinion for the country as a whole. On the contrary, as one might judge the health of a marketplace by the availability of alternative products, a measure of the success of a new media system would be the perennial airing of many different perspectives so that the population as a whole has the opportunity to be exposed to and reflect on this diversity. In a healthy system, each set of opinions is well-grounded, well-articulated, and produced well, drawing on the knowledge and skills of those involved in constructing it. This could be accomplished by implementing a short period of national training in media and media manipulation techniques, much like physical conscription armies are trained in the use of weapons, followed by one or more periods of ‘active media duty’ as part of one of many smaller media units. The units could be state-specific, religion-specific, sector-specific, ideology-specific, or in any other way ‘group’-specific. Their identities and articulated positions should be expected to reflect the views of the existing population, developing as those views change. One way to facilitate the organic emergence of these groups is to apply the same principle as is used with calling referenda in Switzerland: to build from the signatures and time commitments collected from registered voters.

A second principle is to avoid pressing everyone into a similar role. As in any production process or marketplace, different individuals have different sets of knowledge and are best used in different ways. One person might best spend her months of media duty writing articles about chess competitions, while someone else would be best placed formulating quality signals that are placed on all articles and research projects about, say, Latin America. One might best produce funny fly-fishing videos and another in-depth reporting on problems with chemical plants. At a fundamental conceptual level, the aim is to release a kind of market mechanism to direct people to their most useful role inside these media institutions, which requires the formation of price signals and some notion of both preferences and externalities. Just how to set this up best is not a trivial exercise, and can involve combinations of market thinking and novel democratic designs. We leave the design specifics, the inevitable trial and error, and the ultimate reward of helping change the country into a less corrupt and more truly democratic place to others and our future selves.

Conclusion

Australia today is beleaguered with endemic political corruption and has been weakened economically, socially, psychologically, and physically after 3 years of abuse at the hands of corrupt elites, only the latest and most tragic bookend to decades of receding democracy. We propose a restorative reformation program that draws on the power of the people to break the corrosive connection between political and economic power, on the one hand, and direct control over both resource allocation and information flows, on the other. Our proposals for citizen juries and a program of citizen media service are intended to democratise core institutions such as the bureaucracy and the media, liberating them from the elites who have kidnapped them, and thereby raising the voice of the people in making key decisions and unleashing the power of diversity and competition between ‘truths’ in news production. By targeting more competition, the independence of institutions from money, and the creation of a useful form of national service through which to channel people’s love for their country, Australia can ‘build back better’.

Gigi Foster is a Professor with the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales. Paul Frijters is a prominent research economist and has published over 150 papers in fields including unemployment policy, discrimination and economic development.