By Charles Jago

Looking at politics in the world’s democracies today, most voters find it difficult to effectively communicate with their political representatives. The issues seem to be decided largely by the major parties and the press, often without addressing significant concerns of the public. An example in Australia is the “refugee policy” on people arriving in boats to claim asylum. The government’s treatment of asylum seekers has not achieved strong support across the electorate despite receiving a huge amount of airtime and attention. The government highlights the need for control of borders while others highlight problems in protecting human rights of asylum seekers. Other countries also have their own hot issues marked by conflict with outcomes which could be substantially improved by negotiation and consensus if governments were willing to do so.

Governments operate this way far too often. Policies are often difficult to determine due to vague policy statements, policy by press release and poor documentation. Politicians, parties and the press can conveniently obscure their actual policies and ignore local viewpoints while telling the public what they think is important. It makes it easier for them if we accept their agenda. This allows them to avoid talking about the inconvenient issues relevant to people, or alternatively to mention those issues but evade people’s main concerns.

Underlying these schisms is the fact that politicians are generally rewarded for supporting established norms and interests, even when they know that important issues remain unresolved. It takes a substantial effort to produce outcomes that reflect broadly based solutions, through greater political participation. Increasingly, new efforts to widen participation make substantial usage of technology and the Internet.

As part of this trend, the Real Questions website provides a cohesive platform for people to ask questions of political leaders, and maintains a record of what the public wants to know. The point here is political accountability. Anyone can write a letter or ask a question of a politician on social media sites but Real Questions provides a system which allows people to create and support good questions in order to receive serious answers. This system aims to highlight areas that people most want to know about. Each question is addressed to an individual politician and is tagged by the author according to its topic.

The “talk page” on the site allows people to interact through ratings and comments which can enable development of better questions by users on the site. Users review their own and other questions on the site, showing support for the best questions. In an ideal situation, this kind of interaction would work best in a face to face environment with a facilitator. It’s actually hard to do this on a web page, which is why we have built features to facilitate interaction toward better questions.

The system sends those best questions which receive a certain level of support through to the nominated politician for a response. Politicians can then log in and answer them. Initial conversations with politicians indicate that many will respond to questions where they can communicate their point of view to a significant number of people in a single response.

The site also includes a scorecard page that keeps track of the number of questions asked of each politician, their responsiveness in answering them, and the satisfaction of users with the responses. At this stage, it is specifically adapted to dealing with questions for Australian politicians, but could be adapted for other countries or other types of contexts. Currently, the site includes politicians from the Commonwealth, NSW, Victoria, Queensland, ACT, South Australia and Western Australia. In future we plan to broaden the scope to cover all elected politicians in Australia, with Tasmania and Northern Territory coming soon and local government progressively added state by state this year.

Real Questions is an independent non-profit organisation registered in Australia as a company limited by guarantee, staffed 100 per cent by volunteers. Real Questions is ultimately a questioning and answering system run on open source code which is accessible online. Our main focus now is to build a community around the site to ask great questions. By great we mean questions that contribute to real dialogue. Once many people begin to support a question, it becomes harder for a politician to ignore.

We invite you to have a look at the site and get involved. For Australians, we want your questions, and we especially want you to help choose the best questions. For those around the globe, we encourage enquiries from people interested in implementing Real Questions in their own national setting.

Charles Jago, along with David Jago, is one of the founders of Real Questions (https://realquestions.net.au/).