Even though it’s probably a lot of wasted time (they read proposals ahead etc), I think it’s a good idea to ban phones entirely in parliamentary chambers. The opposition should be granted the attention. People watching should see people debating or listening, not sleeping or looking at their phones.
If this creates a problem for those in the chamber then perhaps the solution is shortening the sessions and removing redundant sessions like reading proposals that everyone could read beforehand, and instead focus on efficient debate and voting.
Politicians could be treated like students: below a certain attendance rate or failed pop quiz they "fail the class".
Lack of attendance or lack of understanding of the discussion they vote on greatly undermines the already narrow interpretation of democracy we do have. It means that not only are "the people" in no way in power, most don't even have a representative in any reasonable interpretation. They are physically not in the room to contribute to the decision, or don't understand their own choice.
A very small minority of representatives gets to decide for a large majority of people they don't representnt.
I support mileage taxes on Electric vehicles. The whole idea of the gas tax (at least in the US) was a way approximately tax road usage to fund infrastructure. Why should predominantly well off ev owners get out of paying for road maintenance? If we want to discourage carbon emissions just tax carbon.
> Why should predominantly well off ev owners get out of paying for road maintenance?
Great point. We should raise gas taxes to subsidize electric vehicles for people with low incomes. If enough people switch to electric to the point that this revenue starts seriously dropping, great: keep turning up the heat with more gasoline taxes until polluting vehicles are completely gone.
The "it's not fair" trope about road maintenance for EVs isn't super compelling - the vast majority of road damage is from heavy vehicles like semis. Road damage increases with the cube of mass. Once we've put gasoline vehicles in the history books forever we can work on a mass*acceleration tax.
In Australia, roads are paid for by our taxes - not the fuel excise.
I think I actually support a KM usage tax, but it'd have to be for all kinds of cars - not just the green kind. CO2/PM25 emissions tax should be on top of that.
And: To buy an EV in Australia would be considerable stretch on my own budget, and I'd need every single dollar left after it. I'm actually needing a 2nd car now, and am loath to buy another ICEV.
There's a $3k limited incentive that was used to distract from the fundamental issues behind taxing EV mileage. It doesn't cover long range cars as they're outside the price bracket.
The reasoning was that there's no fuel excise being collected, yet the fuel tax isn't being used to cover roads - normal tax payments are.
Also it doesn't care that ICEVs currently aren't paying for environmental emissions, when they should.
Actually having said all that I should just have pasted https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLflYkgnNBY , which explains it all so much better. (Fair warning: Australian language).
The last I can find on the proposal for NSW to do the same is from April [0] yet in June they introduced EV purchases [1] with no mention of a mileage tax.
I find it more than a tad ironic that the NSW Liberal (conservative) state government has the best EV incentives while the Victorian Labor ("progressive") has the worst, out of our two most populous states.
Why is it pathetic? As other commenters have stated, the fuel taxes have supposedly been about offsetting infrastructure costs of the roads and not a pollution control (at least in US). All cars need use of the roads whether EV or ICE powered. Personally, I'd rather they actually charged you by requiring odometer readings instead of a generic tax on utilitly fees. Maybe collect that info on your annual inspection vs the over the air telemetry??
Sadly, I see this as a natural consequence of how much influence individuals have versus how much influence organizations with money have. I, as a concerned citizen, have nothing compared to a group with a revenue stream orders of magnitude above my own. Even if I were to become a full time activist, the number of people I can reach is tiny compared to an institution with an advertising budget and a consultancy.
I get your point, and it is valid, but also observe that there have been numerous successful social movements in the near and longer past! They had to fight against vastly more powerful systems and still succeeded in the end.
As activists, we can obtain substantial press coverage even without an advertising budget, by carrying out well-thought-out direct actions and acts of civil disobedience, and we can offer direct resistance (for instance, when we build tree houses to occupy forests which are on the clearing list of governments or the fossil fuel industry, like we successfully did with the Hambach Forest in Germany).
And what's the result of "failing"? A popularly elected representative gets automatically removed from the house because he failed some arbitrary attendance threshold or a test which is going to biased by whomever designed/approved it?
I don't think there is an easy way out of this, the "quality" of politicians can only improve if the majority of the people voting for them actually started caring about the actual work they do when elected (instead of basing their decisions entirely on the party they represent, their public image etc.)
A popularly elected representative who does not represent has failed their mandate. The "contract" of democracy is (at least morally) "vote for representation". Without the representation that person is no more entitled to be there than any other random person if you ask me.
At the very least in the next election cycle the people will know who represents them and how.
Tell that to Sinn Fein MPs who were elected to the British parliament in all the elections since 1997 but any of whom is yet to attend a single session.
Abstaining from participating in parliament when you're elected or participating in unconstructive ways (i.e. by being disruptive etc.) is a legitimate behaviour. As long as you're transparent about your intentions to behave so to your voters, removing such MPs without an election would be authoritarian.
If he/she is not transparent about this and this is/becomes a widespread problem it's preferable to decrease the duration of office terms or allow recall elections instead of instituting arbitrary rules (which will have to be approved by the ruling party/coalition and therefore will likely be designed in such a would which would favour them over opposition parties).
i'd be down for giving tests to legislators of all the bills they're voting on for the day, with questions designed by legislative analysts of all stripes. that way, potential consequences are tested for, not just the contents.
The vast majority of politics is about things reasonable people disagree on. When you have an elections bills that one side considers to expand access to voting, while the other side considers it to enable voting fraud, how would you write a test?
ah, the dichotomy trap again. we've really got to get past "two sides". what's best for people? for society? if voting is expanded, to who? why? how? what kind of fraud could it enable? how much? how likely? it's not that hard.
> Even though it’s probably a lot of wasted time (they read proposals ahead etc), I think it’s a good idea to ban phones entirely in parliamentary chambers.
This is general theme with meetings: once you've allowed people to do something else and reduce the perceived inefficiency at a personal level, you've allowed meetings to become excruciatingly inefficient since nobody complains anymore. The incentives (again, at a personal level) to make the whole process more efficient disappear, so nobody bothers.
Anything like that would just be silly public posturing. Probably in all parliaments almost all of the actual work happens in committees or in other places outside the chamber. An MP who would attend all the public sessions but do nothing else besides that would be completely useless regardless of how attentive or active he is in the discussions.
And in any case any question being discussed in the given time might be only relevant to a small subset of the people currently present, what's the point to forcing everyone else to pretend that they are listening...
Why would posturing be silly? As you say the main chamber(s) of most parliaments is rather symbolic in nature. But it’s important as such: it represents
to the public a lot of what their representatives do.
There are usually tons of formal rules for etiquette, dress code etc which are also in a way posturing, or in another way, showing respect for the institution and processes and showing that they take the job seriously. That something is only superficial does in no way mean it’s useless!
Showing on opposition speaker the same respect that a 10 year old shows their teacher in school seems like a pretty low bar.
The point of forcing everyone to pretend they are listening is the same as the point of forcing everyone to wear a tie: to not make it look like a condo board meeting.
What if the opposition speaker decides to speak for 10+ hours (assuming the rules/etiquette of the house allow doing so) because he wants to prevent the government from passing some legislation he strongly disagrees with? Should the entire house be forced to sit attentively listen to him reading TV scripts or whatever? Even in less bizarre cases the opposition speaker might purposeful asking irrelevant questions/talking about irrelevant points to appeal to his supporters or otherwise being unconstructive.
I'd say most of the formal etiquette and dress code rules are needless distractions which historically were designed either to exclude lower class people from government or as a form of a public ritual which would lend additional weight and gravity to decisions made the parliament (because the majority of the population were not educated enough/didn't have enough time/etc. to take them seriously just based on their content).
> What if the opposition speaker decides to speak for 10+ hours (assuming the rules/etiquette of the house allow doing so)
I think the answer to this is pretty obvious: if you are touching tiny issues with chamber procedure and etiquette but have this problem, perhaps start with this and return to dress code and cell phones once the chamber is functioning at all. Again: the idea with “no phones” completely rests on the idea that there is a minimum of dead time in the chamber. If that can’t be arranged then that’s the issue to address.
> a form of a public ritual which would lend additional weight and gravity to decisions made the parliament
It’s this. And it’s the same reason people wear suits in a courtroom. It’s because showing that something is serious has a point. Being superficial doesn’t mean pointless.
> completely rests on the idea that there is a minimum of dead time in the chamber
I don't think we can really compare public sessions in a parliaments to regular business meetings. I'd say their main point is to broadcast a summary of decisions (which are largely taken behind close door and the actual voting is just a formality) to the public in a somewhat transparent and formalized way. I would expect a competent MP to generally know what another MP would say on a given topic before he even stands up to speak so unless he's directly participating in the discussion it shouldn't really matter whether he's using a phone at that moment or not.
> It’s because showing that something is serious has a point. Being superficial doesn’t mean pointless
While I'm fundamentally not against maintaining some kind of minimal dress code requirements, I think in modern, advanced societies that mainly serves an utilitarian purpose (by minimizing unnecessary distractions). The assumption that somehow the more distinguishing dress code or complex etiquette rules a specific public procedure has the more seriously it's taken by the society sounds bizarre to me. It obviously made sense in the past when status symbols like various non standard suits, gowns, robes and wigs had a point in the past because they signified that the person wearing them was somehow qualified and/or entitled to perform a jobs he's doing. But I don't think many people now would believe that a sentence passed by a judge who wears a wig is somehow more 'serious' compared to if he/she was instead wearing just a gown or simply a suit.
Well I don't see how any of your examples are equivalent of wearing something but a formal suit (as long as you don't have too much dirt on your shoes). I mean if somebody like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Buckethead happened to be elected to parliament (as unlikely as it would be) I think he should have the right to wear his costume during sessions regardless of the opinion of other MPs because wearing that costume is a significant part of his political identity.
AFAIK there are no formal rules on dress code in the Netherlands parliament. There was (or is?) a member of parliament who attended in jeans and a T-shirt (because that's what the people he represents wear).
Dress codes are usually set to formal in order to mark that the representatives are not representing themselves (by not allowing personal style - even one that mimics their constituents). That is: the anonymity of uniforms instead of allowing personal style underlines how the person is merely a representative and not there in their own capacity. The most extreme version of this is of course robes and wigs in some courts.
Like everything else, this is about to change (as it is looking increasingly weird) but that doesn't mean the underlying idea is crazy.
Better than a ban would be to make public whatever the politician is looking at on the phone during a public meeting, in real time. If it is private or secret they can simply not look at it during the meeting.
Of course politicians in meetings like these would be the ones to vote on such a proposal, so don't bet on it.
Some things are perhaps rightly too small to see people voted out for, so it’s not an effective means of control. I wouldn’t want my representative to break speaking rules or dress code either but I’m perhaps not ready to choose a different candidate over such a thing.
It is trolling. And while I understand the motives of the artist who created it, I hate the conclusions that are being made, that somehow this is related to accountability.
Anyone who has ever visited a plenary session of parliament (as I have as part of school trips) knows that they are unbelievably boring. 99% of the time, they aren’t about cutting edge law making that will propel society into the next century, but about routine declarations or posturing where a politician wants to promote the local industry.
It is IMO completely acceptable for attendees to just be there and do something else, while waiting for a topic that interests them. This is no different than zoning out during some group meetings where you don’t really care and don’t need to know about most of the topics, but you still are present in case your input is required.
Unfortunately, the article doesn't mention the motives of the artist. This isn't about politicians using their phones. It's about surveillance and license plate or facial recognition. With camera systems popping up in all public spaces at an astonishing speed, the artist wanted to make politicians feel what it is like to be constantly monitored as a suspect.
I listen to a podcast that often plays long snippets of verbatim Congressional testimony. Part of the reason why it is so unbelievably boring is because your congresswoman’s colleagues are wasting everyone’s time by asking irrelevant and repetitive politically-motivated questions in a fishing attempt for a sound byte to aid their re-election campaign.
Most of the time that there is someone speaking on the House or Senate floor, there are only a handful of other representatives around, milling about, waiting for their turn to speak, or doing something else. The only times the chambers are ever full are during votes or public events. Not only are most of them not paying attention, they aren't even in the room most of the time Congress is in session.
They are being paid to work with our money, if you do the same in your work you get fired. Some of them don't even go, also they should show more respect to the others. But maybe you think they are special and should have privileges.
I’m on my laptop or phone during meetings all the time. So are my colleagues. I don’t get fired because everybody understands that some meetings don’t require active participation from everybody at all times, yet attendance can be useful to intervene when necessary. (I explained as much in my original message.)
That said, I understand your concern if your definition of work for an elected official seems to be “staring aimlessly at a podium during a plenary session.”
And before you say: “they should actively participate!” Good luck doing that in a session with 200+ participants. Law making is done in smaller sessions and committees. The plenary session is a formality.
In this particular case, chances are that they were filming during “het vragenuurtje”, the Q&A where Flemish members of parliament can get answers from ministers to submitted questions. It’s completely normal for one member to sit at attention while their question get answered while others sit and wait for their turn, and do something else. After all, that member may have an interest in the lack of highway signalization to his village, while other members don’t care. (Yes, Flanders is small enough for these kind of things to be brought up in parlement.)
I totally understand that this doesn’t fit the standard narrative of the lazy politician who doesn’t work for my money, and for that I’m sorry.
I would guess some of them are doing actual work on their phones while sitting around pretending to listen to something they already read and some of them are goofing off. Just being on their phone isn't enough to determine that they're not working.
I think you are being overly kind to them, which you would think their postions would afford them. However, I live in the real world and believe that they are not doing what you are suggesting. I'm personally more inclined to believe they are scrolling social media. They are humans, and we have all become accustomed to pulling out that device the split second we become bored. If the person speaking is in the opposition party, then you're also probably doing it as a bit of show to say you don't care anything about their ideas. We all do this without thinking about it, but I wouldn't put it past this being done on purpose.
Maybe I'm too pessimistic, but I no longer think politicians deserve the benefit of the doubt and one should always be wondering what the ulterior motives of any of their actions are.
Exactly: as a politician myself, it is extremely common for me to be frantically adjusting the notes on my phone for what I intend to say based on what I am hearing other people say and what I am finding online or quickly fact checking with my various connections. (And also: I am more than capable of zoning out without a phone, thank you very much ;P.)
I tend to use my phone because tapping on the screen doesn't cause as much noise as typing, the communication apps I might be using to talk to people make more sense tend to be better designed to quickly operate on phones, and it is much easier to take my phone--with the notes I was writing--with me to a speaking podium than my laptop.
That all said: you are saying it is somehow different to you if someone spends their time staring at a laptop, but not a phone? The real response that seems important here is "this is the future: phones are the new laptop"; I typed this comment and my prior comment on my phone, as I tend to do all my comments... what are you still using laptops for?
Live in the moment, one thing at a time. You should be listening. The logic is simple, when it is your turn to speak people should also listen. Currently they are frantically adjusting their talking points in stead. What does it even matter what anyone says at that point?
Or even more hilarious: At the moment the only media attention these politicians get is about their excessive phone use. What they are going to say when it is their turn to talk I have no idea.
To be equivalently (ok, maybe just a bit more) blunt back to you: if you (as another person who will be speaking after me) care so little about what I am saying when I am speaking that you aren't fact checking what I am claiming and taking notes while adjusting your own talking points, what the hell are you even doing? Hell: what am I even doing at that point? Isn't the goal of this entire exercise wherein we all came together to have a massive meeting that we are supposed to be talking--even "sparring"--with each other in an attempt to find the truth? Your quaint concept of what it means to "listen" to someone else is just extremely strange to me... (though maybe a bit less strange as your final sentence makes it sound like you don't even care what people say anyway).
The point of a parliamentary session is for the general public. All the real meaty discussion takes place outside parliament.
This is mostly down to the low amount if time your average member of the public has for politics giving the news media enormous power over narrative (particularly out of context quoting), which requires the public stuff to be kayfabe.
FWIW, while I appreciate that federal government is pretty broken, it is worth at least understanding that that isn't always how it works, or really even how it is supposed to work at the federal level either: at my level of government, for example, if "all the real meaty discussion takes place outside", that is actually illegal, due to California's Brown Act, which enforces open government transparency; the premise is that all meetings must take place in the public so the public can know the how and why behind decisions, and the public must even be able to interact with the meeting.
The problem is that our legislators famously do not write or even read the legislation that they vote on. Sometimes it's strategic and intentional that a party will try to hold a vote on some 1000+ page piece of legislation with 24 hour notice. Other times, they simply don't care to read it, so they do not.
Actual lobbyists write actual legislation, in fact. And our politicians vote on them without having read it. It's a really stupid system.
This is a point that is often overlooked when they are accused of not working.
Each politician has an office of staff behind them collating and feeding them updates. They have staff in that office monitoring the chamber feeds as well.
Disconnecting from that fire hose to only focus on the current speaker would not be as effective to consume all the different sources of information coming in during proceedings.
I think it's something everyone can take to heart.
Sitting in meetings but looking intensely at the laptop or phone.. in the long run this just feels like not being present at all, so I do my best to avoid it. Close laptops when in meetings (when you don't need them).
The worst I've seen of this was in academia, everyone staring into their laptops so hard it felt like a contest.
As a past top contender, this was due to meetings being far too long and irrelevant so I usually tried to do something more productive. Private sector has its share of bullshit meetings but people are at least a bit more sensitive to the cost.
A lot of what happens in politics is theatre, always was. Sitting in chambers listening to speeches is politicians' job though, for whatever that's worth.
Anyway, parliamentary stuff is theatre and this bot is participating in that theatre.
And so do we, when we participate in voting - we legitimise the theater.
But don't worry - we are at the end of the democratic time. We are moving/have moved into technocracy communitarianism, where all the meaningful decisions are taken by NGOs at the supra-national level. This is why we have electric car charging points, 7-8 storey building blocks with a shop downstairs, narrower roads (the future is car-less), tiny homes, being pushed off the land, etc.
Mark Carney etc will be help lead the charge away from capitalism.
"In his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Mark Carney, former governor both of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, claims that western society is morally rotten, and that it has been corrupted by capitalism, which has brought about a “climate emergency” that threatens life on earth. This, he claims, requires rigid controls on personal freedom, industry and corporate funding."
If you're confused how the governor of 2 national banks is now rallying against capitalism, don't worry - go back to sleep.
I never said theatre is illegitimate, just that it's always been a big part of governance. This is true for Pharaoh Tutankhamun, King George, Boris Johnson, Xi Jinping and I can't even think of a counterexample. I'm not sure if it's good, bad or neither.
In any case, if you're at a place where you're trying to squeeze the Truth About Power And Everything into a paragraph comment...
IMO, the danger of thinking through "isms" is that they become more meaningless as they become more evocative. A cascade of evocative, idealistic terms definable via other evocative idealistic terms.
If you ask me, I'm calling a spade a spade, and Carney is saying a dog turd is cake. But I think its great you engage in the conversation - we can then establish what each of us means by whatever term, and proceed. You will not get any such satisfaction from Carney and his ilk.
I'm providing more concrete terms for others to potentially investigate, instead of the evocative, idealistic ideas we are provided.
We are told 'progress', 'society', 'justice' etc - these mean whatever you like. But who is stating them? What do they mean by them?
What is justice to person who represents the governance structure? What is progress to someone who heads up a corporation?
These are terms we all use, but the idea behind them means exactly the opposite by those who govern us, to what we commonly understand.
Ultimately, its for us all as individuals to understand what those terms (and other) mean to us, and to then do the research to see if that is the usage that those who govern us also have. That is the work for any individual to do.
Of course, no one checks what is meant - no one. Yet it is all out there. The mistake we make is to assume we are on the same page.
Interesting to compare this with the story about Tencent using AI and a webcam to catch children computer playing games illegally (outside of allowed time).
At least one person argued that people have sufficient agency to monitor their own behaviour; it's intrusive and over-steps boundaries ... I'm not saying those responses are wrong, just that it makes an interesting comparison.
There's a key difference here in that these people agreed to be in the public sphere. Taken to the extreme though, I can see this affecting who wishes to go into politics
I wonder how much infurance could be made of _what_ they're doing on their phones based on thumb/finger movement. Scrolling through reddit/facebook (or whatever the latest cat-picture site is,) tends to have a pretty obvious hand movement associated with it.
In Polish Sejm (the "lower" but actually more important house of parliament), there are a few restaurants and they sell alcohol. So a deputy can just step outside, have a few alcoholic drinks, and vote. People in other professions would be fired on disciplinary grounds.
TL;DR: This project is not so much about political transparency as it is about the erosion of individual privacy due to the proliferation of government surveillance cameras and AI-driven data analysis.
What most people seem to overlook: Dries Depoorter is an artist/activist interested in the intersection of privacy, artificial intelligence, surveillance & social media.
Flemish cities are installing surveillance cameras and ANPR cameras everywhere, and they're quickly doubling back on their promise that they'll only be used for tracking serious (organised) crime. Already there have been attempts to use the cameras to enforce lockdown related curfew rules and to surveil streets that have been vandalised with spray paint.
It isn't surprising to see so many poor postures while using the phone. You want your spine in a neutral position, not with the head bent forward. Thus raise the phone in front of your face, allowing the spine to be in a neutral position. Or bend at the hips to lean forward while maintaining a neutral spine (which is hard to do at a desk).
In human info networks, politicians are huge hubs. They are usually the most connected people in society for very good reasons. So all joking aside about what they get caught doing on theif phone, without them on their phones day and night society would very quickly splinter into groups that have nothing in common with each other.
So what will happen is that some politician's husband will die in an accident and the bot will call out the politician on Twitter right when she reads about it on her phone. Then the makers of that funny bot will apologize and promise not to do something stupid like this again. A year after that a new crop of students will invent another way to troll politicians.
The bot actually tracks time distracted, so in your bizarre hypothetical example, the attentive politician who pulls out their phone because of an emergency call and then rushes to the hospital to be at their husbands bedside would still have a positive ranking and no apology would be required.
You see, the problem is judging people from appearances. Because the next crop of students would create a bot that tweets that she left the session early.
If this creates a problem for those in the chamber then perhaps the solution is shortening the sessions and removing redundant sessions like reading proposals that everyone could read beforehand, and instead focus on efficient debate and voting.