A highly engaging day-long conference was held in Sydney on Tuesday 23 August at Novotel Parramatta exploring strategies and generating solutions towards building a democratically resilient society with the participation of Multicultural communities.
The conference brought together over 100 delegates consisting of academics, diverse community leaders, service providers and non-profit organisations as well as Commonwealth and NSW government representatives.
The facilitated discussions in a collaborative atmosphere diligently designed by the newDemocracy practitioners provided the audience with tools and tips for how to effectively utilise democratic participation in order to prevent the spread and influence of populist ideologies, conspiracy theories, misinformation and distrust in our society.
The conference successfully provided sharing of experiences of diverse community, academic and professional expertise on democracy-community relationship, sharing successful examples of democratic participation together with the interaction of relevant stakeholders.
The program was facilitated by Scott Newton, an expert in the use of deliberative, user-centred and participatory decision-making to drive groups to actionable solutions. The C0-Facilitater was Iain Walker, Executive Director of the newDemocracy Foundation (nDF) in Australia.
The conference was organised by Islamic Sciences & Research Academy (ISRA), Charles Sturt University (CSU) with funding from the NSW government.
The program started with the welcome by the conference convener, Dr Derya Iner from ISRA, CSU followed by Welcome to Country by indigenous Australian, Professor Sue Green.
First Panel
The first panel in the morning heard community stories from four representative speakers showcasing the community challenges, responses and resilience through their lived experiences:
- Professor Sue Green, Course Director Wiradjuri Language, Culture and Heritage, CSU, Indigenous community
- Rita Markwell, Advisor AMAN, Muslim community
- Darren Bark, CEO, NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, Jewish community
- Benjamin OH, Asian Australian Alliance, Chinese community
Second panel.
The second morning panel consisted of democracy experts explaining in what their years of research & publications suggested about strengthening democracy through communities that required strengthening communities to ensure effectively operating democracy for good causes, not making democracies a tool for the spread of disinformation, distrust and populist divisive ideologies:
- Prof Mark Evans, CSU: “The state of Australian democracy: ‘Culture of contentment’ or the ‘end of complacency’?”
- Prof Tim Soutphommasane, University of Sydney: “The intersection between human rights, disadvantaged communities and resilient democracy.”
- Dr Peter Balint, UNSW Canberra: “Learning democratic resilience: Public Sphere responses to extremism.”
- Dr Derya Iner, CISAC, CSU: “Research-based community activism to save democracy from elitism and nativism.”
There was a Q&A session titled Vision for democracy” enabling attendees to question academic experts on how we might strengthen our democracy as well as a couple of small group table activities Sharing examples of democracy successfully building community resilience and serving their needs.
Small groups were reorganised after lunch to find solutions from civil society to generate and test initial ideas for further strengthening democracy followed by a final session with reports from small groups for the conference participants to refine and prioritise final ideas for further strengthening democracy as well as understand how each stakeholder could help contribute to the top ideas for further strengthening democracy.
Concluding remarks on the proceedings of the conference were presented by Prof Mark Evans while a vote of thanks was given by Pia van de Zandt.
A formal report on the conference will be presented to the Minister for Multiculturalism and the Premier of NSW in the near future.
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