Winston Churchill famously said that democracy was the worst form of government - except for all the others that have been tried. In western countries like Australia the universal good of democracy is simply assumed. But are we assuming too much?
"Democracy Is Not For Everyone" was the challenging proposition debated at the most recent IQ Squared event, held as part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. The first debater for the affirmative team was Carmen Lawrence, which, given her experience at democracy's coalface, is rather ironic.
Bio
M.K. Bhadrakumar
Ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar is the former Indian Ambassador to Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Russia, amongst other countries.
He is a specialist in Afghanistan and Pakistan affairs, and writes on energy and security issues for publications including The Hindu and Asia Online.
Greg Craven
Professor Greg Craven is Vice-Chancellor of the Australian Catholic University. He is an expert in public law, having published numerous articles and books on the subject.
He is a leading opinion writer and columnist for The Australian Financial Review.
John Keane
John Keans is the author of The Life & Death of Democracy.
Carmen Lawrence
Professor Carmen Lawrence is a former Premier of Western Australia. She then served as a Federal Labor politician and became Minister for Health and Human Services in the Keating Government.
She is currently Professorial Fellow at the University of Western Australia.
Simon Longstaff
Dr Simon Longstaff is Executive Director of St James Ethics Centre. Simon spent five years studying and working as a member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Having won scholarships to study at Cambridge, he read for the degrees of Master of Philosophy and Doctor of Philosophy. He was inaugural President of The Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics and is a Director of a number of companies. He is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum and a member of the International Advisory Committee of the Foreign Policy Association, based in New York.
Amina Rasul
Amina Rasul is Director of the Philippine Council on Islam & Democracy.
Michael Wesley
Michael Wesley is the Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy. Previously he was Professor of International Relations and Director of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Hong Kong and Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China.
Prior to this, he was the Assistant Director-General for Transnational Issues at the Office of National Assessments, and a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of New South Wales.
Between 2007 and 2009, Dr. Wesley was the Editor of the Australian Journal of International Affairs and a Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security (CEPS). He has served on the Australian Research Council's College of Experts and the Queensland Art Gallery's Board of Trustees. In April 2008, he was Co-Chair (with Foreign Minister Stephen Smith) of one of the ten issue streams at the Australian government's 2020 Summit and gave the keynote speech at the Summit.
His most recent books are Energy Security in Asia(Routledge, 2007); The Howard Paradox: Australian Diplomacy in Asia 1996-2006 (ABC Books, 2007); and (with Allan Gyngell) Making Australian Foreign Policy, 2nd edition, (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Form of government in which supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodic free elections. In a direct democracy, the public participates in government directly (as in some ancient Greek city-states, some New England town meetings, and some cantons in modern Switzerland). Most democracies today are representative. The concept of representative democracy arose largely from ideas and institutions that developed during the European Middle Ages and the Enlightenment and in the American and French Revolutions. Democracy has come to imply universal suffrage, competition for office, freedom of speech and the press, and the rule of law. See alsorepublic.
Global democracy has a king and nobles: Satan and 'its' demons; and may all you their loyal human subjects, slaves and soldiers have a blissful orgy in hell forever and ever. Amen.
On the role of the Individually-controlled / Commons-dedicated Account!
Democracy, or more likely in actual application, the many forms of representation whether via election, sortition or other method arose as a response to authoritarianism.
Authoritarianism was a very imperfect solution for the disconnection between the social network and the social organism that arose with the birth of agriculture and a need for methods for human organization which had not needed as hunter/gatherers.
Representative systems involve the introduction of horizontal distributed networks to counter-balance those hierarchical networks, which while functional for clarity and decisiveness will inevitably concentrate power while insulating it from consequences and promoting stagnation(oligarchy).
This was facilitated by an inability of technology to compensate for these conditions (an inability to restore the proximity of the Dunbar's Number sized social network we had as hunter/gatherers and its relationship to the individual's position, status, wealth & role in the group decision process).
The point here is that technology is now changing that imbalance in proximity... and is making progress, but still lagging in enhancing influence capability for the individual.
This is an extreme summary of a somewhat larger vision but here are a few links if interested:
I believe the unfortunately unavoidable disconnection between the social network and the social organism which arose with the birth of agriculture (unavoidable at the time due to scale and technological limitations) remains the most unrecognized problem civilization faces.
I love how whenever they talk of people owning democracy, they only speak of 'corporations' they never talk of all the other special interests (public sector unions...).
democracy is too vulnerable to corprate, or other interests. without protections, democracy can't do it's job. then again, if you want uneducated people to have equal say, then we get crappy elected officials. it all comes down to trust, can you trust people to vote for quality candidates, can you trust officials to not be corrupt?
I think this debate chiefly came to be more about Australia's political life than democracy in general. I was worried to the last second when the result was revealed. I thought, are there such an anti democratic movement in Australia?
Democracy has to constantly be evolved. Sweden where I come was called and called itself a democracy e.g. in the 1940's but we should not consider many of the rules and laws from then as democratic today. It's evolving.
member. 
