170. Changing What’s Possible: Tim Hollo on stories of living democracy & the power of community

That road closed yesterday along with Fitzroy crossing , which had its enormous bridge collapse earlier this year from the force of unprecedented flooding , but more on that later . Today It's the final instalment from my recent time over east . I've been so looking forward to sharing this with you .

In fact , in some ways it's a great primer for the conversations I've been having in the north west and well , for that matter , everywhere .

My guest today is so thoroughly recasting our notions of what's possible through stories of what's actually happening right now across a host of different contexts and with countless possibilities to go on with , that are successfully creating the democratic systems and cultures we need for widespread regeneration .

Tim Hollo is Executive Director of the Green Institute, Founder of Green Music Australia, has recorded into it globally with the Four FourP lay String Quartet w as Director of Communications for Christine Milne when she was leader of the Australian Greens , later ran for Federal Parliament himself, spear headed a campaign to keep Canberra free from billboard advertising , set up

various community groups , including the first Buy Nothing group in Canberra , and a little open access library across the road from his place , and he's just written a book that is the culmination of all this work in many ways . I t's called Living Democracy: A n ecological manifesto for the end of the world as we know it .

I first came across Tim years ago when a mate sent me some of his writing . I was part of a community music project at the time too , on themes of regeneration , so Tim's founding of Green Music Australia also stood out .

Tim and I met a few years later and have kept in touch since , so when the book came out , we resolved to get together when I was next in his hometown of Canberra to talk about it . Before we start , though , it's great thanks to Jade Lloyd and John Martin this week for becoming treasured subscribers of the podcast .

It's how this independent , ad , free , listener supported podcast happens , so if you're also finding value in this , please consider joining Jade and John and a great community of supporting listeners .

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And thanks again . Okay , let's join Tim for a walk and talk atop Little Black Mountain , overlooking Canberra . Tim , thanks for joining me and thanks for bringing me up here and thanks for turning on the positively balmy weather . Tim: Spectacular , isn't it ? Thanks for having me . AJ: Do you want to bring the listeners into exactly where we are ?

I live on one side of it , the Australian National University is on the other side and , yeah , just , we're surrounded by eucalypts and grasses and acacias and birds and a little bit of traffic noise . Far away You can see that , the Brindabellas , the mountains that ring Canberra's south and west , just behind us .

And yeah , and it's a fabulous , blue , clear Canberra autumn day . It's turned it on for us .

My older is 19 and my younger is about to turn 17 and it was my younger who also started to get really concerned about the future . They both have been . They're both very conscious of the world around them , but my younger got involved in the school strike movement at the age of 13 , really deeply engaged .

And , yeah , they helped organize a bunch of the strikes and MCed one of the biggest rally that we've seen in Canberra for many , many , many years . There were 15,000 people , which , in a city of 400,000 , is huge and on the streets for the big rally at the end of 2019 .

And what was really one of the things that really came out of that for me was that we had this huge rally and then the prime minister at the time , scott Morrison , said well , you guys just bugger off , go back to school . And everybody dissipated and nothing really happened .

And I was chatting to the kids not just my own , but the broader community , other strikers and others of their friends who are out there who are kind of going . What just happened ?

And so we started having these really interesting and important conversations about how do we make change , how does this scale of change that we need happen , and it's obviously stuff that I've been thinking about already for a long time , but starting to articulate that in conversations with the kids was really helpful in kind of working out what I wanted this book to

be and to be about . And it's really the subtitle of the book , so it's called Living Democracy .

The subtitle is an ecological manifesto for the end of the world as we know it , And it really comes out of this idea that it's very easy for us , for young people , but so many of my generation and older as well , who feel like this is the end of the world .

It's very easy to get sucked into this doomism And what I really wanted to do was say it doesn't have to be the end of the world . It does have to be the end of the world as we know it . We need really deep , transformative change if we're going to come through the period that we've brought on ourselves .

But where's that sitting for you ?

And , as you mentioned , i spent six years as a staffer for Senator Christine Milne in the federal parliament , and I've run for parliament .

I'm heavily involved in the Greens and believe in the Greens as a political movement for change , but I also do not believe that the existing political and parliamentary system has the capacity to deliver anything like the change that we need . And so , yeah , there is this tension which I feel we need to really articulate better and talk about a lot more .

That's one of the things that I'm trying to do a lot , not just in the Greens as a movement , but in the broader environmental movement and social movement . I'm involved in the union movement as well . I think we really need to be much better at articulating that .

It needs to be a tension , a creative tension , that we think about and that we talk about That when we are working for change within the current system .

These systems evolve in such a way that they become about perpetuating themselves more than they are about being a vehicle for change , and so we need to really highlight and articulate that we need to transform the systems and we need to work within them , and that's not easy . So it is a contradiction .

But it's not a contradiction , it's a tension , and it only becomes a constructive , creative tension when we articulate it . That's the thing for me that it's very easy from within this system to kind of get the little wins along the way and really celebrate those wins without also kind of going .

This is not enough , and it's not enough for a very good reason because the system wants to perpetuate itself . It's a system of coercive power , of dominating power , of bureaucratic power , of systems which constrain what can be achieved . One of the really important lessons for me is I used to get so frustrated , particularly when I was working in politics .

I used to get so frustrated when people would come at me with this line politics is the art of the possible . The first person it's been attributed to was Otto von Bismarck , who was a Weimar Republic German statesman , who was very clearly and deliberately using that term to hold back change . Didn't he achieve it ?

He sure did absolutely Well , he achieved it for a time .

. So , yeah , i used to get really frustrated by this when people came at me with politics as the art of the possible and you guys are out there so far ahead , we can't even see your tail lights , you're not talking about things that are possible , and I was saying , well , come off it , politics can't be about that .

But it took me a while , as I was kind of sitting down and thinking over years , to recognise actually , hang on a second , it is . It's true , politics is the art of the possible . The problem is when we accept what is possible and we don't seek to change what is possible .

And this , to me , is the fundamental thing about any movement for change which sees its goals as transformative is . We need to understand that what we need to do is to literally change what is politically possible , and that means changing the systems of power . That means grappling with what power means .

It means grappling with how social systems and cultural systems and institutional systems work together and seeking to shift them at that very , very deep level , such that it changes what is possible .

So let's cover up on a few And let's start perhaps even with relatively local and right on the nub of the contradiction that's not a contradiction that we were just talking about with the Boises for Indi and that community independence movement that has partially transformed our parliament in the last bit over 12 months and arguably , or could be , on a trajectory to

more Certainly , there's a lot of work being done that people won't be hearing about because there's not an election , but it's going on . So that's one of your stories , though Perhaps talk to how that hits the mark for you and , interestingly , given it bridges the domains .

a member like Sophie Mirabella , who was the long-term , really hard right liberal member for that seat , because , you know , the political system was structured in such a way these people are always going to be winning those seats .

Well , a bunch of folks in the community said , well , hang on , that doesn't really represent what we think this community believes actually , and what they started with was not actually a political campaign to oust Sophie Mirabella . What they started with was a series of kitchen table conversations .

They went around the community and they held these kitchen table conversations where they got people to just think and talk together about what it is that their community values , what it is that they think their community has going for them , and they built up this set of agreed shared values , which were things like integrity and politics and commonality and sharing ,

and the values that you get wherever people in community come together to talk about what they want , you know , genuine commitment to the common good and to a healthy future and to supporting each other and looking after each other and a politics that reflects that .

And so they got these together , these shared values , out of this series of kitchen table conversations , and they shared that back to the community And they built this amazing network of people who said , oh , we want to talk about that too . And more and more of these conversations happened .

And then they took this kind of platform in a sense to Sophie Mirabella and said do you know , this is what your community actually wants . And Sophie Mirabella looked at it , turned up her nose and said that's not the community I believe that we have here .

I'm not interested in that , not interested in things like climate action and a national integrity commission and all these kinds of pink-o-crazy , greeny things . And so they came out of that meeting going well , if she's not going to move , we kind of have to run against her , don't we ?

And so it sort of accidentally morphed into an electoral project And they then went back to the community and the community selected one of their members , kathy McGowan , to run as an independent on this platform .

They got organized , they ran and they won , and Kathy McGowan has now been succeeded by Helen Haynes , and they're two of the most outspokenly progressive members that we've had in our political parliament for a very long time , representing what everyone had said was a deep blue conservative seat . That couldn't be done .

So they've managed to continue and grow and build by making sure that their MP was not just kind of elected and then told to go away and do their job , but their MP was constantly embedded in the community , working with the community to get the community engaged on issues , to determine what the MP should be doing in parliament .

One of the beautiful things that they do , which I think is so important , is they rotate community members through the MP's office And some of the Greens are very good at doing that too .

Actually , the old parties have this very professionalized attitude to parliamentary staffing And often you get people coming through student politics into parliamentary staffing , into a parliamentarian's job , and the Greens do it better .

Often you get part-time positions so you share it more and people kind of rotate through them faster and you get people involved in grassroots campaigning in there . The Indi folk are incredibly strong on rotating volunteers from the community through the parliamentary positions , staff positions , into the offices so that there's that deep , deep connection with the community .

That's what turns it from a , from a political process which is about trying to get instrumentalist change on particular issues into one which is a transformative process , trying to actually change the way we do politics .

Right , because I remember explicitly , in these forms of community organising and running for office , eventually it was to not it was to stay high , you know , it was to not engage in the muckraking which came , the rubbish we received in Curtin in the mail , but they just dug a deeper hole for themselves .

The big party in that case , and Kate Cheney won in our seat .

So we're talking about a way of being and then governance systems , that this is the point of them And , for that matter , ultimately , you know economies , all the systems we live by , that we're seeking ways to bring the best out , structures that bring the best of us , out of us And not the worst , and arguably we've got more of the reverse at the moment ,

which is why we end up where we end up . But that doesn't have to be that way , and there's a bit of evidence .

You've drawn the parallel , then , to what you've learned about First Nations governance , certainly in this country , and a particular story which sort of played this out in Tennant Creek in the Northern Territory , and I like to bring that in here because it's another one of those places like Alice Springs at the moment , but I can tell you in the Kimberley , where

I'm heading next as well , where the narrative is one of Indigenous youth are off the charts now . It's now almost a war zone with youth crime and so forth . But we know that these stories exist in all of these places as well . But do you want to talk to the Tennant Creek case a bit ?

Treat them as the enemy Yeah treat them as the enemy , but don't say it Right . And why would we be anyway surprised that people who've been treated as the enemy , with structural and physical violence for so long , would turn to violence themselves ? So there's that deep , deep history . That kind of sits behind it .

But what is so extraordinary for me is that , despite that history , what we see from First Nations communities around Australia and around the world in so many ways is nevertheless such incredibly powerful clinging to the wisdom that they have always had And trying to bring that into their systems .

So where the western colonialist , imperialist , genocidal approach to crime in Aboriginal communities is to bring in heavily armed police and throw people into the lock up with no care for who they are And dehumanising them to such an extent that it becomes horrifically easy for First Nations people to be killed either by action or inaction of the police , what the First

Nations community folks do in response is say we can interrupt this before it happens by showing care . And it's not about turning a blind eye to antisocial behaviour , because that's what it's often painted as by this policing approach is to say that you have to police this , you've got to punish people for antisocial behaviour , what the First Nations .

You know circle-sentencing and yarning kind of approaching goes to is saying no , this isn't turning a blind eye , this is about bringing these people back to a community of care , to a community of interdependence and mutualism .

So for instance you know this , the Tenant Creek example is a beautiful intertwining of violence , interruption models and community barefoot patrols and a community yarning and circle-sentencing approach .

So where , if you've got a young person a young man usually is turned to drink , as so often happens because they've been excluded from mainstream society and mainstream economies so much they turn to drink .

The drink then turns them to violence And they might be going home into a situation where people know that this is a potentially dangerous violent situation for that young man's partner , children , where the police would come in , grab that guy , possibly violently , throw him into the back of a paddy wagon , throw him into a cell , make the situation worse , exclude

that person and traumatise them even further , such that this cycle gets worse . Instead , a barefoot patrol can come along , as they're often known night patrols , barefoot patrols , community patrols . Gently , take that guy to a dry house overnight , maybe take the family to a safe house overnight .

So I brim up in the morning , bring him before the community and the community comes together and they talk to each other , with each other , in front of this young man , and they talk about the implications of drug and alcohol abuse . They talk about the implications of the violence in the community , they share stories and they call this young fella to account .

And it's about the community then offering support to this person to say we will help you hold yourself to account , because that's how change happens . It doesn't happen by forcing you to somehow do something . It happens by us all coming together as a community and saying we will help you hold yourself to a better standard .

So where the Western exclusive , binary approach is punish , exclude , traumatise even further tends to deepen the cycle of destruction and violence . This is an approach which flips that and says you might need to be excluded temporarily . We'll pop you in a dry house where we'll look over you .

We'll take your family away from you , potentially for a short time , put them into a safe house with some other aunties or someone over here , so we'll separate you . But the separation is about reintegrating . One of the terms for this is reintegrative shaming .

So it's about holding to account and the community coming together and saying this is how we will hold each other to account to make sure that you come back and that you come back better .

It's the very people who did it are in the room saying if we were still resourcing this , but it gets successful and the funding gets poor , if this was still a priority for us , we'd still be doing it and it would solve the problem . And the other half of the room is going we need to do something .

It was so apparent our inability to actually hear each other . But let's come back to that more deliberative , facilitated processes in a little bit . I also want to draw the thread out to where some police services are now grappling with this . You've documented some of this where they're taking it on board .

It's like their job's just bloody hard going where they're not appropriate , so that that's happening too and you've written about that .

And my attention was so peaked when you talked about the newer edges of where this is going for across the legal system as a whole is therapeutic justice , and it was peaked because I listened to a couple of women who actually run a yoga place and college wisdom yoga institute , i think it's called in the West , which is where my wife learned and a really strong

, powerful community around this . They have a podcast called Peaceful Embodiment .

One of these episodes was with a woman who'd been a home invasion and physical assault victim And the extraordinary story which I'll leave listeners to go and find if you want to the extraordinary story of her in that position going about a therapeutic justice process which did actually work between her and the aggressor , powerful developmental healing processes for both

of them . It gives a sense of the level to which we need to be held hold our own judgments , even in our own hurt . That's a great example , but a powerful thing .

I've learned a lot about this from my partner , in fact , who's a criminologist here at the moment , who does a lot of work in therapeutic jurisprudence And it really is about changing our expectations of what we think a justice system should be about , and it's really ironic that we use this word justice all the time when it doesn't deliver justice actually so rarely

. And it's

yeah . Some of the most powerful examples are assaults and , in fact , sexual assaults , where the existing justice system does such a poor job of dealing with these most traumatic , awful experiences for people .

And we've just seen such a highly public example of that with Brittany Higgins' horrific experiences as a parliamentary staffer , The first trial being aborted and the DPP saying , on behalf of Brittany Higgins , we don't want to run this trial again because it would be terrible for her mental health to go through this process . And we see this so often in .

You know , in 99% of sexual assault cases You don't get a just outcome for whatever reason , whether it's because the victim does not even come forward with a complaint , or whether it's because she's not believed by the police or by the other responsible parties or whether it's because it's so difficult to actually prove in our adversarial judicial system .

It does not give a just outcome , whereas there are so many extraordinary examples now of turning this around into a therapeutic process where , instead of seeking retribution and punishment and exclusion which tends to make things worse and doesn't really even give the victim closure or a better feeling , even when it does result in a conviction you actually work out

sensitive , really well managed and facilitated meetings whereby people can learn the impacts on each other of what has happened and hold each other to account and the community can come together to say we are going to hold you and ourselves to account for behaviour change here to make sure this doesn't happen again . That's justice .

She had to care about the blokes , jess Hill had to care about the blokes . It's all in you mentioned there too , in well facilitated processes . So I just want to draw that thread because we're going to get right to that little asterisk on all this , how it happens . But let's run briefly through some others , for example the Kurdish case , which is just for us .

For them they've just been going about it , for us it's a mind blow .

So the Kurdish people are one of the most have been historically one of the most persecuted and excluded peoples and , in particular , since the collapsing empires of the 19th century kind of partitioned the Middle East into these states and the Kurds were excluded from having a state and they ended up living across the northeast of Syria , the northwest of Iraq and the

southeast of Turkey and persecuted and excluded in all of those countries .

And the Kurdish people were fighting a Maoist revolutionary struggle for a very long time and , failing They were not winning this revolutionary struggle And their leader , who'd been imprisoned in Turkey , abdullah Öcalan , in prison , came across the writing of Murray Bookchin , who's an American anarchist theorist , who wrote about these ideas of municipalist confederalism , which

is grassroots , up community organising , where you just start to do things yourself And you know , in your local communities .

You do all of the work in the local communities in a deliberative , democratic process where everyone who wants to can take part in decision-making , and then you confederate these groups by having confederate councils of members of each group , kind of being nominated , temporarily nominated and can always be recalled to coordinate across them , not as a top-down rule , but

coordination . So all of the decision-making stays with the community . And Öcalan was reading about this and kind of went why don't we , instead of fighting violently for our own state , why don't we just start to build our own nation and do it ourselves ?

And he sent this writing back to the communities And they started to do it And it's been amazing , incredibly successful that here , in the ruins of the failed states , effectively of Syria and Iraq and a really problematic autocratic state of Turkey , they've just started to build their own nation from the grassroots up and people are seeing what they're doing and

wanting to join , such that , you know , they started with a handful of communities doing this .

Now , through people and communities electing to join , rather than through any process of conquest of any kind , they are now self-governing , a community , a multi-ethnic community of 2 million people in this area known as Öthe Autonomous Region of North and East Syria , also known as Rojava . They are self-governing .

They're doing everything They are organising the rubbish collections at a local level , they're filling in the potholes and managing the water and the electricity supply , they're working out the school curricula , and they do this all through this very gender-equal , feminist and environmentalist , grassroots governing approach where the communities organise themselves .

Each block , each village is self-organised . They ensure that they are facilitated . Each of these meetings are co-facilitated by two people , at least one of whom has to be a woman . They involve everyone , no matter your religion , no matter your ethnic background , no matter your gender , no matter your age .

You are entitled to come and take part in these decision-making processes . Very interesting . And then , yeah , they coordinate , and it's this three-tiered governance structure the local communities , confederations of seven or eight of those which coordinate across their areas , and then a confederation of confederations which coordinates across the entire area of Rojava .

But the tiers it's really important are not hierarchical And it is not like our governance system where we have a government , a federal government that is the most powerful , that tells the others what to do , the state governments , and then the state government has power over the local governments and the local governments have power over the local communities .

This is the opposite . All of the decision-making power stays with the local communities to do what they want to do , and the confederations are about coordination and about information sharing , and those confederations operate in the same democratic , deliberative way that each community does .

They are each facilitated by two people , at least one of whom has to be a woman , and they operate in consensus and anyone can be nominated and anyone can participate . And it is absolutely extraordinary , and because Here's the thing , because it's not top-down , because there's no head , it can't be killed . Yes , there's no head to chop off .

Yes , so , no matter what the brutal regimes in Syria and Turkey want to do , they can't kill it , jeez this .

They can't understand it because it can't be killed in that way And the mainstream parties thinking in those terms oh , we'll just rake the muck out and kill off these community-based independence . So there's a parallel there .

What's One of the fascinating little things about it is that they actually have been the beneficiaries of a bit of US protection through no-fly zones and things like that , because it's a bit of a my-enemies-enemy-is-my-friend situation for the US , because Rojava have been some of the most successful at holding back the expansion of ISIS .

So , yeah , it's fascinating that one of the most radical anti-imperialist kind of democratic-organising examples actually has been somewhat the beneficiary of the global hegemon of the USA , but they're doing it without ever telling anybody that they're doing it .

I mean , let's remember we're a federation so it wasn't entirely meant to be , but anyway that aside for the moment , but it became so very quickly , didn't it ? Yeah , But it doesn't have to be So . Let's reference Barcelona in this context . Talk to us about that case .

What's worse , like many of the smaller , less wealthy and powerful European countries , the centralised European government enforced austerity on Spain and forced their government to enforce austerity policies .

So where Australia weathered the crisis remarkably well because we actually supported people to be able to go about their lives better , Wasn't it a case in point of what we can do , what we ?

can do when you actually have a couple of people like Ken Henry kind of saying we need to do this , and I have my disputes with his views of the economy and the world , but that was tremendously successful . In Spain . They enforced austerity . They ended up with 25% unemployment . They had 50% youth unemployment across the country . It was absolute .

So , yeah , people were being forced out of their homes , that people couldn't afford to feed themselves and their families , skipping meals , couldn't afford medical care .

This vast protest movement evolved across Spain the movement of the squares , they called it , and huge protests on the streets doing a lot of really interesting kind of deep democracy , in fact , that they were doing on the streets as people were doing elsewhere around the world .

Sintama Square in Athens , the Occupy Movement in America All of these were about actually doing citizens' assemblies and things doing politics differently , and they had some success in various ways around the world and in Spain .

In Spain , one of the big things out of the movement of the squares was the establishment of the political party Podemos , which has won some seats and has had some influence , but it hasn't been transformative . What happened in Barcelona was , rather than focusing on the political first , they focused on the community first , and they started with mutual aid .

They started with community gardens , working with restaurateurs , working with local groups so that they could distribute food and meals to people who couldn't feed themselves .

They have a long history of cooperatives and so their cooperatives worked with their medical providers , so they had cooperative medical providers to you know , where people who could afford to could pay it forward so that those who needed it and couldn't afford the medical care could get it .

They had this incredibly powerful radical housing justice movement where people would actually come out and defend people who are being evicted from their homes and enable them to stay in their homes and say you know , it's not possible , what are you going to do here ?

You're not even going to let this apartment because nobody can afford it , so just let them stay .

So mutual aid was the core of what they were doing in Barcelona helping each other , helping the community to help itself , and each step of the way they were being pushed back by government government who saw its role as maintaining the power of markets , maintaining the power of corporations , the status quo , business owners , pushing them back .

And so , with municipal elections coming up and remember that in a lot of Europe municipal government is kind of equivalent to our state government here City government is really very powerful .

With municipal elections coming up these mutual aid groups , these people doing this work on the ground , came together in a similar way to kind of the voices for Indy approach , with kitchen table community conversations , with community hall conversations , and they developed a shared political platform which they called Barcelona in common . They adopted the platform .

they nominated Articola , one of the leaders of the squatters rights movement , as their mayoral candidate . they ran for election and they won the government of Barcelona .

And because they started with the community , because they started with mutual aid and the electoral politics was bolted on afterwards , is we need to do this actually , because otherwise they're going to stop us . They worked incredibly hard to not just kind of get into city hall and govern , but to devolve power out of city hall onto the streets .

every step of the way , they have been working really hard to enable communities to make their own decisions about local planning issues , about control of the water system . This is a really interesting example where other leftist movements want to nationalise things like water supply , for instance .

And that's not a solution in my opinion , because it's still centralised control . Whether it's centralised control by a profit maximising corporation or centralised control by a government which is still in the same economic system , it's really problematic .

What they did in Barcelona was take back ownership by the municipal government but devolve the decision making power to the local communities . They do that with transport , with planning , with housing , with water .

They've been working incredibly hard to transform the way they do government Not just the decisions the government is making , but the way they do government , and one of my favourite things about it is that they see this as a global movement for change .

So it's local , it's hyper-local , it's city-based and municipal , and they've been working really hard to connect with other communities and cities around the world . They've held these fearless cities congresses where they bring people together to share ideas and cross-fertilise and inspire each other to do things .

It's a municipalist globalism , a localist geopolitics , which is inverting the state-based geopolitics which causes war , which causes disputes , which stops us from getting shit done all the time , inverting that into a grassroots up , globalist municipalism .

Yeah , i figure I'm onto something if this happens , even though I'm late to the party in a way . And yet her work , which was showing a lot of this stuff ages ago , right , and was she ? she was a Nobel Prize winner .

So just getting it back in keeping with the other economies and the other ways of governing ourselves , getting them in right proportions and so forth in a way . But she pioneered a lot of this work and her global research , even back then , was saying this is how it works , but , like everywhere , her research was extensive .

economy . And Ostrom did a tremendous amount of incredibly deep research with communities , as you say , all around the world , in how local communities manage common pool resources .

And it's really important that the commons is one of those words which has been deliberately kind of misunderstood and misdefined Totally And most people will think about the commons if you think about it at all , we'll think about this frame , the tragedy of the commons , which was put forward by Garrett Harden , who was a white supremacist American geographer actually ,

who didn't really do any work into the commons and wrote this very influential essay called The Tragedy of the Commons , where he talked about how a group of people who , for whatever reason , don't talk to each other and don't want to cooperate , if they're all kind of trying to get the most resources out of this one piece of shared land , they'll destroy that

piece of land , and of course they will . But that's not a description of the commons , it's a description of capitalism .

And the fundamental point is that they're always discussing it , they're always working it , they're always working out the rules themselves that they agree to be bound by themselves .

And she put forward a set of guiding principles of how the commons can be managed effectively and are managed effectively and have been managed effectively for countless millennia until capitalist , imperialist , colonialist organising came along and started to destroy it . And it's all about communication .

It's all about the fact that the people who are going to be bound by the rules of how we share need to be the ones who actually make the rules themselves .

They're coordinated , and that you need good and well managed dispute resolution structures and that you need systems of sanctions where the group can come together to sanction those who are abusing the system in some way , but always these graduated sanctions that are always about reintegrating , not about permanently excluding . You need agreed boundaries .

This is one of the really important things as well , you need to know where the boundaries of your group lie , not in order to fight or exclude or other the people elsewhere , but in order to collectively manage beyond those boundaries .

So Ostrom's one of the beautiful conceptions is polycentrism , which is fundamental to Murray Bookchin and the municipal confederism and what they're doing It's where it all ties in .

Polycentrism is the idea that you actually for instance she talks about it most powerfully in terms of a river system that the best way to manage a river system is not from one centralised , hierarchical control from above , like we do with the Murray-Darling Basin here in Australia , for instance , but to the point of killing it , and we still haven't learned the

lesson on that .

Ostrom talks about how , if each local community manages their own piece of the river system and then they coordinate in a polycentric way across them , so that the local community comes together to determine how they work with the river and then each local community sends delegates to work together across the whole river system , they will manage it effectively , and there

are countless examples of local , indigenous and farming communities around the world managing river systems healthily for millennia .

You know the participatory city in London , and I guess if we needed another layer of evidence that places like ours , and even the most divided places of ours , could grapple with this stuff .

This group started in South London , in a poor area of South London which was not just poor but , as a consequence of that poverty , quite socially divided .

And there were , you know , there was rising racism in that community And what they , what they trialled there and then moved into East London , into the Burrow , barking and Dagenham was setting up these open spaces on high streets in empty storefronts because so many of them poor communities , just a space where people could come and chat and meet and talk about what

they would like to do . And then this group , participatory City , would help them to do that thing . And it was often things like a little cooking group where people could come together and cook together and share food and help each other learn , learn each other's recipes and things like that . Or or just a knitting club or a tool library .

They set up community gardens , that kind of thing , and this has been massively expanded now in Barking and Dagenham , where they've got quite a few of these these , these spots on high streets where really all that , all that the organisation Participatory City is doing is providing people with a space to come and offer what they would like or find someone else who's

thinking similarly and work together . And they offer the facilitation skills , they offer the space , they offer help to kind of navigate difficult interpersonal relationships or difficult relationships with local government so that they can get access to space .

But it's such gentle , soft touch And they are just sitting there enabling the community to do this stuff together . And the evidence is unbelievable The amount of of cohesion and connection , social cohesion that's building out of this , the , the reduction in racism in the community , the reduction in votes for the hard right parties at elections , even , you know .

And people finding agency together , finding communal agencies . So they'll come together and find a blank wall in a rundown city block where , where they'll , they'll paint a mural together and and you know that will .

That will create the connection in the community that's there while they're doing it , but it lasts , because every time these people walk past or drive past or ride past this mural , they get this , the return of this warmth , this feeling of connection that they got out of it So many of these examples . And it's just it's .

It's creating a different way of doing politics , a different way of doing the economy . It's creating abundance , shared abundance . Where capitalism is is enforcing scarcity on us all the time .

You know you got sharing groups going on here and repairing groups so that you know if you've got a toaster that doesn't work , you can bring in and somebody can help you learn how to to fix it And it it keeps it going for longer .

You can upcycle clothing that somebody else might want to wear And then you see that piece of clothing on the street that somebody else is wearing and you kind of just feel happy about seeing that . Yeah , it generates abundance , it generates social cohesion and it changes everything . It literally changes the world . It does Changes what's possible .

To come back to where we started .

The lens to do it is probably through a woman that you and I are both friends with , who you cited as the primary case in Australia , Amanda Carl . Talk to what's really stood out about her work .

So she works in as some of your long term listeners would definitely know because you've interviewed her in communities in transition out of fossil fuels . She goes into their communities , always at their invitation , and facilitates these conversations , their deliberative conversations , where you start with this asset based community development approach .

You start with a conversation around what is it that our community has going for it , what do we share , what are our common values and the things that we would like to see here , and then she talks to them about what other communities that are in a similar situation around Australia and around the world might be doing , and then she supports the community to

determine its own way forward , to come up with proposals that they then want to take to government or to start doing it themselves , to just , you know , to come together to set up a community renewable energy cooperative , for instance , and to just get on with things , and this is in communities which consistently vote for climate deniers , for proto-fascists .

You know communities which have very high one nation votes , very high votes for the right wing and used to be known as conservative but are now really pretty hard right wing parties and the extremely explicitly extreme right .

These same people , the very same people who vote in that way , will come together in a room that Amanda can facilitate and come up with proposals for a swift transition to renewable energy and community cooperatives . And you know this stuff that is easy to kind of ridicule as lefty , pinky , crazy stuff that only wealthy people in the inner city want to do .

And we know how to do things in a way that brings out our best , because we've done it , because it's what indigenous communities have tended to do since time immemorial . We see it in commons economies , in commons governance ways , in in cooperatives . We know how to do government and economy in a way that brings out our best .

Our system is built in such a way that it brings out our worst . It tells us that we are purely competitive , selfish , profit maximizing beings and that this is the only way we can ever interact , and it's not true ?

When you talked about the Stanford and Milgram experiments , for example , that have been well debunked And indeed people now have accessed the records , the broader records behind those experiments and seen the resistance people showed in the experiments to what they were being asked to do , that that wasn't put into the conclusions of the time , we are coming to grapple

slowly with the fact that we're not out to get each other .

We do have these tendencies in us too , and we can't pretend that we don't . What we need to do is work out how to manage them effectively , and that's what they do with you know . Come back to Tennant Creek . That's what it's all about .

It's about saying we understand that sometimes you just want to hit something , sometimes you want to go out and get smashed , and of course you do , because the world is out to get you . Frankly , yeah , shit happens .

What we need to do is work out how we as a community come together to help you come back from there and to work out how to , how to bring out the best in you and in us together , not assume the worst of you in such a way that it will encourage you to continue to play out being the worst that you could be .

You know , it's interesting , even in that context where we might not think the principles play out , that's a highly cooperative domain , right . Interesting to think . Alright , so you've talked about in your book , and of course it's the . It's the next logical thought that we need more of these processes , more of the people who can facilitate them .

Yeah , right , across the country and beyond . You know , for that matter , amanda will talk about how it's really a life's work she's done on herself . Yeah , what are your thoughts about how we literally physically go about having more people be able to facilitate processes like this , to do it ?

Yeah , i think yeah , one of the most important things that we can do is is train good facilitators , of course , and encourage people to learn how to how to facilitate good meetings and then go out and give people the experience of them

. This is one of the most amazing insights for me that I've talked to people about , but also seen myself in myself , but also watched it happen and kind of help facilitate . Some of these examples is people who are rightly , deeply , deeply cynical of politics , deeply cynical of our democratic systems .

If you give them the opportunity to take part in the citizens assembly or in a deliberative well-facilitated deliberatives , you know , discussion of some kind , the transformation is visible , it's tangible . It is amazing .

You just start to see people move from doubt in their eyes and a bit of cynicism and then they kind of will sit back and then they'll listen and then they'll contribute something and then they'll listen a bit more and then you know , within minutes , eyes are shining , people are scribbling notes on on paper and asking people to extend on what they just said and

then leaping up to go and talk to somebody else about . It is amazing the transformation that you see in people as individuals and in groups when you give them the opportunity to take part in something like this .

And yeah , i give a couple of examples in my book , including one which just will always be there in my , in my heart and my memory just down the hill here .

We held a meeting in federal budget week a few years ago and federal budget is , you know , it's the most exclusivist of of exclusive politics and it's making decisions which are changing people's lives on the ground .

So we held this meeting with the Green Institute in the Australian Unemployed Workers Union and a few other groups in a in a community hall down here in Canberra which we called their budget , our lives , and we had people talking to , to to the group about how the budget that had just been delivered was going to impact on their capacity to live , to feed

themselves , to clothe themselves , to house themselves .

And then I got up and and introduced that we were going to actually have a deliberative process and we're going to come together around tables with with butchers , papers and pens and and talk about what we can do ourselves in our own communities to support each other and then talk about how we can transform politics by doing that and just this shift that happened

from cynicism and and kind of yeah , disbelief within minutes into this buzzing space of people , just yeah , sharing and listening and contributing and asking each other to to , to , to work together on things , and asking each other to expand on ideas and and bouncing off each other . It was amazing . That , to me , is the thing .

If we can , if we can have enough people who are , who are trained to facilitate some of these meetings , that give it enough people the personal experience of what it's like to take part in a politics that is a living process , that is a living democratic process .

Give them that experience , create the space for people to replicate it all around the place and do a similar thing . You know , i talk about it in terms of sowing the seeds of change and then cultivating the healthy soils so that other seeds can grow around them .

As we do that , we'll start to actually withdraw our consent from the existing ways of politics because we don't believe in them already that , yeah , we're deeply cynical about them . We don't believe they're .

They're working well , and then we can build the systems of trust and the new institutions of trust by , by replicating and supporting each other , that we can replace those systems as they collapse .

That's how we get to transformation by doing it ourselves , with enough people who are well trained in facilitation to help the communities through it , and you believe , looking at all this that you've researched and seeing their relatively early days , in many instances , you think the momentum is growing fast absolutely , absolutely .

The challenge is that the existing system wants to stamp on it it's stubbornness the problem for it is that , as it doubles down , yeah , and it's yeah kind of I'm always wary of kind of kind of anthropomorphizing the system in a sense , and it's not but it is , it's useful in a way to kind of think of it in those terms , and Ostrom wrote a bit about this ,

and Hannah Arendt , who's another brilliant philosopher we haven't talked about , wrote a bit about this , and Bookchin and others . As a system of power starts to realize it's weakening , it turns to coercive power more , and that's very dangerous . But it also is a sign of weakness , and we're seeing that a lot at the moment .

One of the examples we're seeing here in Australia is the way governments are criminalizing the protest more and more . That's an example of the system turning to coercion to try to stop these green shoots from being able to grow .

But I believe that the more they do that , the more they turn to coercion , the more they'll expose the failure of their own system and the more people will turn to the alternatives and look for other ways of doing it at least , like we said before we turn press record .

Obviously I've come across a lot of those stories and you talk about Charles Massey who are called the read wobbler and in a way I think about that too with what I'm about to put to you , because they talk a lot about epigenetics these days , the new science of epigenetics and what we carry across generations and and the place of nutrition in that , and obviously

just community and everything we're talking about and how it's all tied in together . And to come full circle on our conversation , i think about your personal story that you talk about in depth in the book where your families come from in more recent times and what brings you to this country ultimately .

And I wonder how you and how this makes you feel then in the wash up of having gone through this process , of it's still in it , but yeah , but how it makes you feel from that starting point of having to have these tough conversations with your daughter and others and then reflecting and paying due homage to your parents and grandparents and what they went through

and where they've come from , how you draw the thread there and how you feel in that space . Right , there .

The trauma that we inherit as Jewish families from our , from our backgrounds is is immense in so many different ways and we're now beginning to understand through epigenetics quite how much of that is playing out , and I think about it in terms of my generation and the next generation a lot .

I had the immense privilege of being very , very close to my grandparents and learning a tremendous amount from them about their personal experiences of having been living in privilege in a pretty assimilated Jewish community in Europe , having that privilege ripped away in the most extreme and violent and horrific ways , seeing how systems of power in what were thought of

as these immensely civilized and cultured spaces could be responsible for doing the most appalling , appalling things , and then how people in the community and groups in the community could be responsible for doing the most remarkable things , saving people .

My grandmother was hidden , was helped to escape from the ghetto and was hidden in , you know , a dairy farm for the last 18 months of the war and the Holocaust . That helped to inform me enormously because of the conversations I was able to have with my grandparents . The next generation didn't have as much of that opportunity .

Many of them , many of that generation , had died or were very old by the time they were born .

What they inherited was the epigenetic trauma , and a huge number of the next generation my kids generation are struggling very , very much with , with the mental health impacts of that inherited trauma which we're coming to understand is epigenetically marked and we see that so much of obviously in First Nations communities of many , many generations of inherited trauma and

the markers of that socially , economically , culturally , politically , epigenetically . What the hell do we do about that ? well , to me , what we do about that is find the ways to come together .

It's the same , the answer is the same yeah , it is hey , what we see among so many of the younger generation of the great-grand children of Holocaust survivors is very high rates of ASD , very high rates of anxiety and depression , very high rates of difficulty in social integration .

And what we see in so much of the research now is that the best ways to manage that is to support people in every way , give them all of the , give them all of the backing for how to learn how to do social integration , how to learn how to work with people and cooperate , and all of these kind . The solutions are the same .

This is what I keep coming back to you the solutions to how we deal with the climate crisis . The solution is to how we deal with the economic crises . The solutions to how we work out how we're going to survive as the shit starts to hit the fan , as the as ecosystems are really starting to collapse .

The solutions to how we manage our own individual mental health and our social and societal mental health , and all these things . It all comes back to connection .

You've done very well and and , of course , found a great music Australia . So I'm doubly curious what music you'll talk to us about right now oh this .

It's saved our lives , yours too . Yeah , yeah , and it helped me in so many ways to learn , learn some of these lessons about transcendence .

And and , yeah , i guess the piece of music that I might , that I might kind of reference , which is perhaps a bit obscure , is a , is a is a classical piece by French composer , maurice Dourifle , turn of the 19th , 20th century , and he wrote a requiem mass which is almost unique among requiem masses in that it's mostly in the major key oh wow , and it's a .

It's a magnificent orchestral organ , coral work in in the way that most requiem masses are . So a requiem is is the mass for the dead , and most of them are these dark , portentous things .

You know , some of the most famous being Mozart's , which is very , very famous that one of the last pieces he wrote on his own deathbed , very dark , verdi wrote this incredibly dark , satanic requiem mass .

Dourifle is a work of uplifting beauty , the most extraordinary uplifting beauty , and I've had the privilege of being part of both an orchestra and a choir at different times performing this work , and there's something about being part of a group of hundred and fifty , two hundred people together singing and playing about marking death with joy and beauty , which is just

, it's a . It's a mind fuck , if you don't mind my using that language on this podcast , in this context , in And it just changes the way you think I'm instantly hearing the relationship to everything we've talked about . And it's taking you .

The thing for me about the great power of music is that it takes you out of yourself and makes it it's impossible when listening to great music , and particularly when performing and playing music , to ever think of yourself as an individual .

You are fundamentally part of something that is much , much bigger and more complex than yourself and incomprehensible in terms of its transcendence , and you just need to let yourself be swept away by it and take part in it and understand that you have the power of it is reliant on you as well as a performer , but also as a listener .

It's all about that transcendence and interdependence .

And going on with the metaphor of regenerative agriculture to relate to how we regenerate our democracies and everything else , It'll all be on the table at the next big regenerative agriculture event in Australia in Margaret River WA , in September . I'm privileged to be emcee and hope to see some of you there .

For subscribers , i'll continue to send you behind the scenes stuff and news of what's unfolding as I get around the country , and if you've been thinking about becoming a subscriber , i'd love you to join us . It's with thanks , as always , to this community of generous supporters that this episode was made possible .

Just head to the website via the show notes Regennarration . com forward slash support . Thanks again , and thanks for sharing these episodes where you can think of someone who might enjoy it , and for continuing to rate and review the podcast on your favoured app . It all helps .

The music you're hearing is Now to the Future , by Tim and friends in the FourPlay String Quartet . I believe this will also find its way into the forthcoming audio book of Living Democracy . And do listen through to the end . My name's Anthony James . Thanks for listening .