On 28 January 2025, we selected 120 participants for AMPLIFY National Housing AMPLIFICATION, a ground-breaking national deliberative process bringing Australians from across the continent together in Sydney for a weekend of deliberation from Friday 21 to Sunday 23 February 2025. They were asked:

How can Australians get a fair go at housing now and into the future?

We recruited the participants over 11 demographic categories, making it one of the most complicated selections that we have completed. The process included our usual two-stage recruitment, but this process was supplemented by an open call for registrations, which helped to ensure we hit demographic targets.

Stage One

AMPLIFY publicised the open recruitment process in late 2024, a process which garnered around 600 responses, while in early January 2025, we sent out 36,000 invitation packages. These were sent out to addresses picked by lottery from the Australia Post database. The invitation package included the following invite card, along with a letter and FAQ.

Each person who participated was given an honorarium of $450. Registrations through both the open process and the invite-only process closed on Monday 27 January, and a total of 920 people had signed up.

Stage Two

We asked participants to share some information, both demographic and attitudinal, that allowed us to select a representative sample of Australians. For this process, they shared gender, date of birth, citizenship, highest level of education, housing tenure and if they are of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent. We also asked for their address, and chose a representative group by both State/ Territory and whether they lived in a major city, regional area or remote area. Attitudinally, we asked how people had voted in the last Federal election. As Australia has compulsory voting, this question generally allows us to ensure a politically representative group of people.

We used this information to run a democratic lottery, selecting 120 people from the original pool so that we have a representative sample. The algorithm is open source, and has been found to be as fair as possible. 

The way to understand these pie charts is as follows:

• Column 1 (Target): These pie charts give information about the population of Australia as a whole, using various publicly available statistics (via Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Election Commission). As an example, in the second row, you can see that 10.8% of the population of Australia is aged between 18 and 24. 
• Column 2 (Respondents): These pie charts summarise the information that was provided to us by the 920 people who signed up as potential participants for the AMPLIFICATION. There is some skewing in statistics here compared with our target: for instance, only 2% of respondents identified as having voted for either the Pauline Hanson One Nation or United Australia parties (PHON/ UAP), compared to 9.1% of the population as a whole.
• Column 3 (Originally selected): These pie charts summarise information about the 120 members initially invited to be part of the panel. Notice that, thanks to our use of a sortition algorithm, the pie charts in this column are very similar to the target charts in the first column. As part of our recruitment process all of these people were contacted by telephone to confirm that they were still willing and able to participate. Not all people, however, were able to confirm their participation, and some dropped out. This column is as close as possible to the target demographics in the first column, for example in comparison to the respondents, the percentage of PHON/UAP voters is closer to the Australian population at 8.3% (10 people).
• Column 4 (Final participants): This final column shows the information relating to the 120 people who confirmed their participation. When people dropped out, we used the sortition algorithm to replace them with others who shared similar characteristics. This column, like column 3, is similar to the first column, but with some differences. In this case, we contacted everyone who identified as voting PHON or UAP, and were not able to hit the demographic target, so ended up with only 6.7% of the people (8 people) in the room. Nonetheless, this number is a much higher percentage than would have been in the room without the second stage of selection, creating a mini-public that is closer to the Australian people than the overall pool of respondents.

What happened next?

The recommendations and future activities of the AMPLIFICATION are published here.