Politicians and communities can work together to strengthen democracy, one of the guiding principles behind the People's House, a range of tools developed by democracyCo to help combat polarisation and democratic decline. As part of this initiative, they worked with Bennelong MP Jerome Laxale to bring constituents' considered views on the impact of moving away from fossil fuels on cost of living.

On Monday 10 February 2025, we selected 45 people for the Bennelong in One Room community forum, which met over during March 2025, including two online and on face-to-face sessions, to discuss the question:

How will moving away from coal, gas and oil impact on our cost of living and lives? What should be done about it?

Working with facilitators democracyCo, we recruited these 45 people following a two-stage process, in conformity with the OECD's good practice principles for deliberative processes for public decision making.

Stage 1

18,000 mail invitations were sent to constituents in the parliamentary division of Bennelong, on Monday 27 January. These addresses were randomly selected from the Australia Post database. Each of these addresses received a letter in the post inviting residents to sign up as potential members of the Bennelong in One Room community forum.

For this process, we experimented with using a more visual invitation that had less information, but was brighter and more accessible. Half of the invitations were the experimental invites, and the other half contained a letter, FAQ and the following invite card:

The invitations were open for two weeks. Unfortunately, we had a very low response rate, so opened it up to any interested members of the community. Overall we had 75 responses, of which 48 had received an invitation. Just under half of these 48 responses (23) received a visual invite. While the reasons behind a low response rate are often complex, we have identified a few: proximity to the Federal election; lack of remuneration; and unforeseen delays in the postal service.

Stage 2

As part of the sign-up procedure, all potential participants were required to share some information about themselves. We asked them to share their address, their date of birth, their gender identity, their ancestry, voting behaviour, and their highest level of education.

We then used this information to perform a democratic lottery. Given the low response rate, we selected 50 participants from the pool of potential members in such a way that we have a representative sample (so, for instance, the age profile of the forum is broadly similar to the age profile of the population of the constituency of Bennelong as a whole). Details of the specific algorithm we use, including information about the fairness of the algorithm, can be found here. During the process of confirming participants, people dropped out. While some of these were replaced, to maintain the representative nature of the panel, we reduced the size of the panel to 45 people.

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 10.6% of the population of Bennelong is aged between 18 and 24. 
• Column 2 (Respondents): These pie charts summarise the information that was provided to us by the 75 people who signed up as potential participants for the Bennelong in One Room forum. There is some skewing in statistics here compared with our target: for instance, only 5.3% of respondents were aged between 18 and 24.
• Column 3 (Originally selected): These pie charts summarise information about the 50 members initially invited to be part of the forum. Notice that, thanks to our use of a sortition algorithm, the pie charts in this column are closer 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.
  
• Column 4 (Final participants): This final column shows the information relating to the 45 people who confirmed their participation. When people dropped out, we used the sortition algorithm to replace them with others who shared similar characteristics.
  

What happened next?

Before the Bennelong in One Room forum, MP Jerome Laxale committed to:

• making representations to the Federal Parliament about the Forum’s work;

• advocating for the community through the Federal Labor Party 

• writing to the relevant Minister/s to advise them of the views of the electorate and

• where appropriate working with the community to address this issue. 

He also committed to reporting back to participants 6 months after the election (happening in May 2025) about the action he has taken on this issue. 

He also committed to publishing the Forum’s advice on his website in full and unchanged and write to all known candidates for the seat of Bennelong to provide them with the Forum’s final report.

democracyCo committed to providing the outcomes of this work to the successful candidate, if Jerome was not re-elected, and to seeking a meeting with them to enable representatives from the Forum to fully brief their new elected Member about the views of the group and the process.