Rooting Democracy: Growing the Society We Want.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 January 1998
• Author: Marjoribanks, Timothy
• Published date: 01 January 1998
• Author: Marjoribanks, Timothy

Moira Rayner (with assistance from Jenny Lee), Rooting Democracy: Growing the Society We Want, St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 1997, 296pp., ISBN 1864481323, Aus$17.95.

Resistance to the privatisation of society that is occurring in contemporary Australia, and the construction of an invigorated civil society, requires a fundamental reconceptualisation and remaking of the institutions that constitute society, and of the relations between individuals and communities and those institutions. This is the argument of Moira Rayner's Rooting Democracy: Growing the Society We Want (1997), in which she proposes that a just society is one that promotes human rights and participatory democracy, and that to do so, there is a need to

look beyond government to our representative institutions, and beyond these institutions to the networks of conversations and co-operation that constitute our civil society (Rayner 1997:240). Rayner's wide-ranging and provocative analysis of Australian democracy suggests that privatisation is occurring not only through the sale and contracting out of public assets to the private sector, but also more fundamentally through efforts by governments and corporations to transform publicly aware citizens into isolated consumers. While Australian society exhibits the formal dimensions of political democracy, avenues for open...