One of 5 experts from around Australia asked to reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of democratic governance, taking the prompt of Churchill's famously backhanded observation that "democracy is the worst form of government, apart from all others that have been tried".
My contribution:
“No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise,” Churchill told the House of Commons in 1947, before delivering his famous line.
Democracy is not meant to rest on blind faith. It makes room for wariness, disappointment and ambivalence. Once we accept its built-in flaws and its tendency to decay from within, a lot of the anxious commentary about “eroding public trust” starts to look misplaced.
For a start, people are mostly losing trust in the governments of the day, not in democracy itself – 95% of Australians say living in a democracy is important to them. And a certain level of scepticism toward whoever currently holds temporary power is not a crisis; it’s a safeguard.
That kind of circumspection is what a living democracy depends on. Slowing down and asking how our democratic institutions are working in practice can put real limits on those who currently benefit from the status quo.
If sceptical or mistrusting citizens are not democracy’s transgressors, but its canaries in the coal mine – warning us that current democratic institutions need recalibrating – the real question is how well are we listening to the dissatisfied.
Those who benefit from the current rules have weak incentives to acknowledge the flaws, let alone rewrite them.