How do politicians remove influence of unelected organisations or foreign powers and ensure voters have a bigger influence? Danielle – have an active approach to seeking out alternative voices/ meeting people where they are/ ensuring opportunities to engage are as flexible and as varied as possible: when, where, how and where people feel comfortable. Be proactive to seek organisations and work with their timetables. Cristina– way to ensure that big groups don’t have more influence must be very pro-active to reach out to diverse voices. Lots of groups out there to influence so needs to be effort to reach diverse voices and thats how to counteract influence of big groups. For example speaking in differing languages but also rid of jargon, different accents as well as different languages. Need to translate what Parliament says and be able to communicate with diverse groups Jaya had a supplementary question about the transparency of Parliamentary process Cristina– make clearer what Parliament is doing, for example committee, doing an inquiry: it must go see/hear from range of different groups. Parliaments in general, do not make this work very visible – if it does talk about engagement work that has been done it will be buried in a report. Will – transparency in terms of visibility in terms of Parliaments do and also who they engage with EG evidence provided by, consultations with etc. Beyond that thinking about transparency in activism – about who is able to donate money/ advertising issues etc – so citizens know who is throwing money at things - is also important too.
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