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Democracy is Failing the Planet
Published 13 February 2012 | St. James Ethics Centre – IQ2 Oz, ABC Big IDEAS
Why should we assume that democracy is the best of all political systems?
Hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets in the Arab world demanding freedom and democracy. And countless numbers have been prepared to die in exercising these demands. But here, in the relative comfort of the Sydney Recital Centre, IQ2 panelists hammer each other in a robust debate as to whether democracy is failing the planet.
Chaired by Dr. Simon Longstaff, The Executive Director of the St James Ethics Centre
SPEAKERS: FOR
Professor Clive Hamilton
Public Ethics and Vice Chancellor, Charles Sturt University. Founder and former Executive director of The Australia Institute, a public interest think tank.
Cheryl Kernot
Leader of the Australian Democrats in the mid 1990′s and Shadow Labor minister for 3 years. Currently Director of Social Business at the Centre for Social Impact at UNSW.
Luca Belgiorno-Nettis
Joint Managing Director, Transfield Holdings and Founder of The New Democracy Foundation, researching new forms of government.
SPEAKERS: AGAINST
Professor John Keane
Professor of Politics at University of Sydney and at theWissenschaftszentrum Berlin and Director of the recently-founded Sydney Democracy Initiative.
Professor Steven Schwartz
Vice-Chancellor Macquarie University. His academic research spans clinical psychology, psychiatry, public health and medical decision making.
Martine Letts
Deputy Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy. Specialised in arms control and disarmament on postings in Geneva, Vienna and policy officer in the Dept. Of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Global Occupation Movement
John Keane was guest of Radio Australia (ABC) on 21 November 2011 to talk with Isabelle Genoux about the global occupation movement.
Democracy in the Age of Google, Facebook and WikiLeaks
This is a lecture delivered by John Keane on May 18, 2011 at University of Melbourne. Read the full text of the talk.
Democracy and extremists
In the aftermath of the Norway mass killing many people are pondering whether modern democratic communities might have to re-think some of their nostrums about what’s said out loud, and how it’s said: about whether certain tendencies within communities can promote or quell extremism.
Is Democracy a Dirty Word?
Abraham Lincoln famously said that democracy is of the people, by the people and for the people; Winston Churchill said that the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter…and American journalist Sydney J Harris wrote that ‘Democracy is the only system that persists in asking the powers that be whether they are the powers that ought to be.’
But what do they mean by democracy?
Refolution in the Arab world
A new word is needed to describe these events of recent months. They should be called ‘refolutions’, radical refusals of the old choice between reform and revolution – remarkably sensitive to the grave dangers and high costs of using violent means to get their way. Read the text here Watch Here
Democracy in Egypt
The Egyptian revolution came not from the intellectual elite or opposition parties, but via Facebook and the Twitterverse, from the young men and women of Egypt fed up with autocratic, geriatric rule. Nor are they interested in a theocracy. Does this mean we’ve seen the end of an era which began with the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979? What will take its place? And amid all of this, how does the traditional western model of democracy stand up?
An interview with John Keane by Phillip Adams
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The Rise and Fall of Democracies
At the Byron Bay Writers Festival, in conversation with Griffith Review Editor Julianne Schultz, Professor John Keane talks us through the rise and fall of democracies and empires, from a primarily historical perspective.
At the Melbourne Writers Festival
John Keane joins a Q and A panel at the Melbourne Writers Festival.
Panellists: Former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser; author Jessica Rudd; author and political historian John Keane; biographer and commentator Christine Wallace; and Chris Berg, research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs.
The First Recorded Parliament
En su celebrado libro Life and death of democracy el profesor Keane de la Westminster University afirma que la democracia representativa no nació en Inglaterra sino en las Cortes Leonesas de 1188. El escritor Juan Pedro Aparicio relata el magno suceso, para luego mostrar, desde una perspectiva sintetizadora de dos mil años de historia, las raíces de un reino, cuyos súbditos practicaban la democracia directa en sus Concejos Abiertos.