Melbourne People's Panel · Story

Melbourne randomly selected 43 residents and business owners and asked them how to spend five billion dollars over ten years. The council adopted ten of their eleven recommendations — proving that the barrier to citizen participation in complex governance is not complexity, but the absence of a well-designed process.

In 2014, Melbourne's city government faced a familiar problem: it needed to plan a decade's worth of spending — roughly five billion dollars — and the standard public consultation process was broken. Council meetings drew the same handful of vocal residents. Online surveys captured shallow preferences. The people who would actually be affected by budget decisions — commuters, small business owners, renters, students, retirees — were nowhere in the room. So Melbourne tried something new. Working with the newDemocracy Foundation, the council randomly selected 43 residents and business owners from across the city and asked them a question usually reserved for technocrats: how should Melbourne spend its money over the next ten years?The People's Panel met over six weekends. Members received briefings from city officials, reviewed financial data, debated priorities in small groups, and drafted recommendations. The composition was deliberately balanced: a 50-50 split between residents and business owners, reflecting the fact that businesses pay 70 percent of commercial rates but residents bear the lived consequences of spending choices. The panel produced eleven recommendations covering everything from infrastructure investment to community services. The council adopted ten of them. No cherry-picking, no softening the language, no burying the findings in a report that no one reads. The Lord Mayor received the recommendations directly from panelists at a public meeting of the Future Melbourne Committee.What made Melbourne's experiment significant was not just the quality of the recommendations — though they were widely praised — but the shift in legitimacy. A group of 43 randomly selected people, none of them elected, none of them experts, had produced a ten-year financial plan that the council trusted enough to implement. The People's Panel demonstrated that the barrier to citizen participation in complex governance is not complexity itself — it's the absence of a well-designed process. When you give ordinary people time, information, and good facilitation, they don't simplify the problem. They meet it where it is.