Restoring habitats, protecting native birds, eradicating pests, and managing national parks: these are just some of things the Department of Conservation (DOC) does every day. But who would have thought that DOC has also been at the forefront of efforts to restore the promise of e-democracy? From the early days of the World Wide Web,…
No one blinked in the mainstream media when the Government announced that there would not be a Citizens’ Assembly in the lead up to New Zealand’s recreational cannabis referendum in 2020. This despite well-known problems with referenda and the success of initiatives such as the Irish Citizens’ Assembly and Oregon’s Citizen Initiative Review Commission as…
We have a ‘crisis of listening’ and it’s adversely affecting organisations of all types. These are key findings of major international research in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom by Jim Macnamarra [1,2]. Do these findings hold here in New Zealand? Do they hold for cooperatives as much as they do for other…
Imagine an online discussion about tax that was open to the public and hosted on a news website. What would it be like? I see something barking, almost rabid, … there’d be those who see government as bad, tax as theft from the successful. And there’d be others with a diametrically opposed view – governments…