Making Society More Civil Roundtable discussion

The current major parties both focus heavily on economic growth and ignore social needs and desires, so we recently set up this Roundtable on a More Civil Society to fill the gaps and link people who had other priorities for social change. Current formal political institutions seem to be stuck in rigidly defined outdated paradigms so we are now setting up new informal ways of working out what makes a good society. Using web based lists to both join the dots with similar initiatives and recruit wider networks and individuals, will allow both online discussion and document sharing. These will allow us to devise proposals and assess levels of support for particular social changes.   

To just stay in touch or find out more – sign up to the MailingList link on this website or if you would like contribute to a society that values social wellbeing and equity over economic growth, consider contributing your time and/or ideas. We are establishing an online set of networks to work towards making Australia a more civil society and we need broad-based input of food for thought via our Dinner Party and/or Think Tank.   

• The Dinner Party – Invite a small group to share food and discuss the futures you would like to see, and feed the information back to us. We will summarise, distribute and encourage views on how to make better social futures. The idea is to encourage widely diverse groups and to foster wide-ranging conversations. Send us your thinking and together we can expand and change the narrow and limiting viewpoints now given prominence.

• The WETTANK was set up originally as the Women’s Economic Think Tank to use economic arguments for feminism. We now will review policy-making with a feminist lens so Equity replaces Economics and reinstates social goals as a policy priority! This is feminist because social policies are assumed too often to be women’s spheres. We need women (and men) with wide skills and interests to sign on and develop policies and proposals. If you want to update the ideas for wider social change, our target is general policy reform, not just the so called ‘women’s issues.’