Know your candidate forum Brindabella

Canberra Alliance for Participatory Democracy convener Peter Tait speaking about the alliance's meet the candidate forums.

Transcript

00:00Yeah, so I think one of the elements of good government is having good representatives.

00:05And one of the things that's important about good representatives is who the person is.

00:10And so this is a mechanism for constituents and voters to be able to find out who their

00:15candidates are as people, as we say, beyond the policies and promises that their parties

00:20or groups might be promising.

00:21Pretty much.

00:22We've had, you know, a smattering of candidates, not any of them have had 100% of candidates.

00:28We've had up to a third of candidates show up with maybe, you know, a few apologies on top.

00:33And we've had between 25 and 40 constituents show up to each one.

00:39There's been a good amount of interaction.

00:43Candidates do find it hard to focus on the questions in four minutes.

00:48And in the other four, there's been a lot more focus on policy.

00:51So I think we've learned how to frame what we're expecting from the voters differently.

00:56So again, this afternoon we saw there wasn't so much focus on policy, much more focus on

01:01this, you know, who are you and how are you going to be democratic?

01:05Okay, well, CAPAD is a volunteer community organisation and our purpose is to try and

01:12change the political system so voters, community members can more actively participate in the

01:19democratic process.

01:20CAPAD means have better input into policy formulation, legislation, but also in holding

01:27our representatives accountable.

01:30And one of the mechanisms for doing this is the candidate forums.