Symptoms are apathy, disinterest and déjà vu

Ok, so I’m being a bit dramatic and, after a four-week break, maybe I have forgotten what it is like all the time, but you get my point – we’ve been asked to share our thoughts with government quite a lot during the past eight months.

From the future of our health service to States reform, the minimum wage and tourism strategy, there has always been something.

Of course, on the one hand it is great that we, the voting public, are allowed to get involved, have our say and, hopefully, make a difference. But as I have said before, St Peter Deputy Kristina Moore wasn’t far wrong when she said that Islanders may be suffering from a nasty bout of ‘consultation fatigue’.

Its symptoms include apathy, disinterest and serious déjà vu and there isn’t much in the way of treatment bar a lot of rest or a strong dose of inspiration.

Sadly, it appears that the latter is, once again, seriously lacking. Take the latest addition to our public consultations – the one launched this past week by a sub-committee of the Privileges and Procedures Committee established to review machinery of government.

The review, which is entirely separate to the ongoing work of the Electoral Commission, is looking at how government works in practice once States Members have taken their seats and hopes to alleviate some of the problems that have been encountered since the introduction of ministerial government.

Sounds like a good idea, right? Yes, of course. What’s even better is that it aims to bring together all the little ideas, complaints and proposals about how government actually functions that keep popping up.

But at a time when the public are already beyond bored with ‘having their say’, what it really needed was a bit of out-of-the-box thinking to get people involved.

Sadly, however, they appear to have come up with what is, without a doubt, the worst public consultation we’ve seen for a while.

They have asked people to respond to ten questions about the Island’s machinery of government. These include things like ‘should the executive continue to be forced to seek consensus by being outnumbered in the States?’, ‘who should departmental chief officers be reporting to?’ and ‘how effectively are the Council of Ministers, Scrutiny Panels and backbench States Members communicating?’

Not only are many of them questions that the public can’t really answer effectively, but they are far too complex, long winded and detailed. I am not saying that the public won’t be able to understand them but rather that only those with a personal political agenda or serious interest in the internal political workings of the States will be bothered to respond.

The sub-committee know all of these things – or why else have they released a ‘report’ to accompany the questions explaining the background, issues and main points that underlie them?

Any public consultation that requires supporting documentation of this kind is never going to be a great success and here is the latest example of how those ‘in the know’ have overcomplicated things.

Another example of how our consultation system just isn’t working was the latest public hearing of the Electoral Commission when Chief Minister Ian Gorst gave evidence. It was just a ‘show’ for the public and nothing of any real meaning or importance was discussed. Members of the public afterwards also commented that no one had even introduced themselves at the start of the hearing – a communication failure of the most simple kind.

During the past few months I have dedicated many column inches to the current system of public consultation, and rightly so. Because it is important – consultations are expensive, time-consuming and a key instrument in the democratic process. At the moment the system isn’t working but no one seems to be doing anything about it.

Instead, we carry on as if it will right itself or, worse, as if it doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t really work but we will keep doing it anyway because we feel like we should.

That is the wrong way to look at it. As the machinery of government consultation shows, things are, potentially, getting worse.

The people organising these things have it in them to do better – the likes of Deputy Montfort Tadier, Senator Alan Maclean, Deputies John Young and Tracey Vallois and others on the machinery of government panel are clever people who care about what they are doing but, for whatever reason, this time they have got it wrong.

It may be the system itself, resources, or just a problem with the way our politicians are currently thinking but whatever it is, something isn’t working.

And that needs to be investigated. Public consultation, anyone?