Email, 23rd Jan 2016
I would like some clarity on a couple of your stated objectives.. One being your goal of giving industry (or experts as you refer to them) free reign to write policy.. Clearly Industry and corporations dictating policy is a major destructive element globally and in our society.... Secondly your statement @the best explained (or sold) policy being implemented over or despite the number of voices.???? Sounds very contradictory to the theme of empowering people.. Yes we need change desperately , but handing more control to Industry to dictate even more , clearly doesn't work for people.. I would love an explanation
We don't want to give anyone free reign over policy, rather we would like specialists and interested parties to have the smallest barrier possible to improving policy.
Clearly Industry and corporations dictating policy is a major destructive element globally and in our society
Yes, it currently is. However, industry is also one of the largest groups to gain from good policy. To pick a non-contentious example: financial businesses have a huge compliance burden in validating every client (Know Your Customer regulations). I'm aware of several efforts from several fronts to solve this problem (knowing your clients aren't terrorists while reducing the cost and liability of holding private data) involving banks to insurance companies and even small forex exchanges. If they could independently come up with better legislation and had the potential to put it forward, that saves the country, and the economy, millions or billions of dollars a year (current compliance costs are in the range of $2 Billion if I'm not mistaken, just in Australia alone). If the industry did put something forward that was good, and we reject it only because it came from industry, then we'd only be shooting ourselves in the foot.
So the question is how then do we encourage that sort of development of policy? In such a way to ensure nobody really has much of a problem with it (which is the case with most legislation, we'll get to the other stuff in a moment). I think the answer is in letting boring (good) policy through. When good policy is suggested it must have a good explanation behind it. When that's the case there will be few parties that strongly disagree, thus in a vote sharing market there will be low demand for the votes, and thus it's very easy to acquire said votes, helping the legislation pass. There is, of course, the rest of parliament to contend with in the early days.
However, if the policy is bad then there will be people out there that don't want it to pass (particularly because it will fail / have bad side effects / etc). In some cases bad legislation would stop here. In other cases it will pass and quickly be noted that it's bad. Flux then focuses on undoing that mistake as quickly as possible; or an improvement. This relates back to the idea that people will argue till the end of days about theoretical matters, but when real progress happens it's hard to ignore. Before rocketry there was a huge debate in the scientific community where one side claimed rockets couldn't possibly work in space. As soon as it happened it ended the debate. Flux hopes to help bring this sort of quality into politics.
Secondly your statement @the best explained (or sold) policy being implemented over or despite the number of voices? Sounds very contradictory to the theme of empowering people
In some cases it's the only way to empower people. Take a situation with 100 people, 1 or 2 experts, and 98 people who are specialists in other things, but not in this case. Perhaps our experts suggest a policy, and given direct democracy the other 98% might vote no. However, in an ecosystem where those other 98% want to do their own thing more than participating in this one policy, they might swap their votes between issues, and thus our 1 or 2 experts can acquire enough votes to help their legislation pass. If it is bad legislation everyone else will start to take notice, however, if it's good then everyone keeps doing what they're doing and we get better legislation. In order to provide real democratic potential to every person we need to allow them to do things like this, otherwise all the good ideas from our experts get lost, the experts become tired and bitter, and we don't improve as a country.
Yes we need change desperately , but handing more control to Industry to dictate even more , clearly doesn't work for people
Remember that every bit of legislation that comes before Flux / Parliament will have votes distributed to every participant. So nobody has anything close to the ability to dictate policy by default (unlike the Westminster system). This means that when something unjust is suggested it is very simple to stop it.
Keep in mind, when thinking about this, that Flux only works as an ecosystem. It doesn't work for one or two issues, it works for hundreds, and we live in a country lucky enough to have hundreds of problems with hundreds and thousands of groups already set up to tackle these issues. Flux is a big step up because it allows us to bridge the real world and Parliament, giving real democratic reach to the people who already care enough to do something about it.
Hope this helps clarify,
Cheers,
Max
Leader, Flux
PS. We're going to release some videos after registration that go into more detail on exactly these sorts of concerns.