Lawmakers need consistent feedback!

Lawmakers need consistent feedback!

I am not one to say that I am fully vaccinated against naivety. I was even accused, rightly so, of such in the middle of January this year. And, as such, I would like to speak to naivety in social and economic planning; at times, our technocrats and bureaucrats could be considered to be plagued by the very thing. This is the reason why checks and balances must be encouraged for all when it comes to economic and social planning. Being inside our very own heads is the recipe for disaster when catering to the masses. As an example, some musicians claim that there is a “je ne sais quoi” in terms of what works when creating and promoting their music. They have the “it factor”, they say. They do what works and continue on like so. They even listen to the record label who may encourage them to go after some wider trend in fashion or behaviour. The trouble here is that they never ever listen to who really matters: their specific fan base. Fan bases may grow but they tend to be drawn to you —to have confidence in you — based on what you put out as art. You stand to lose if their support or feedback is not incorporated in your effort to grow as a product or as an artist. Ironically, in any democratically-run society, the thinking has to be similar when designing policy.

Societies and their economies are inherently complex. Sometimes, we Bajans think as though our national economy and society are complicated as, say, that of the United States of America. We may not convey so directly. You’ll come to know this sentiment clearly if you cut through “the fluff” that we put out there in our daily conversations about the political landscape, especially on social media. Barbados is a multifaceted small socio-democratic economy. Policymakers should inherently get it right every single time given how simple an economy we have. Our society is defined by multiple religions and morality bases with varying attitudes to those; an evolving racial and sociological dynamic; and radically-changing environmental and technological factors. Our economy is, as a result, more complex than it should be given the state of our society along with the limited capital and labour resources available to us. People and money tend to leave more than they come still, for context.

Despite this, the Barbados we live in today is not the same as years ago. It could never be. Therefore, a unilateral approach to policymaking, for one, would always result in policies that solve yesterday’s problems. And even then it fails to do so remarkably. I do take it, nonetheless, that the typical operating procedure of our government, especially the one we have had since 2018, is to put ideas out to the People for dissection and feedback. This is a welcomed improvement since it is done through public fora. But it isn’t agile. We are and have been in a very active technological age since 2010 and the common sighting of gray-haired folk, like myself, at these events shows that public outreach isn’t “reaching”. Government should consider improving on this aspect significantly.

There is an economic cost to making legislation which pushes against the tide of the public will, especially in democracies. And even if the legislation is generally meant to protect, it remains or heightened if feedback isn’t at least considered. This same economic cost is best conveyed in terms of confidence and there’s an indirect relationship when expressed in this manner. Essentially, the more the type of legislation and the process of creating it goes against the public tide, the less confident the people are in the government and the wider economy. For those political science inclined, I say that you cannot slow boil a frog who won’t easily get into the water in the first place.

The recent public discourse on the Cybercrime Bill is the perfect and most recent evidence of this. The People are clear that we are not comfortable with the bill it is present form, especially where it concerns the use of emotionally-charged language. The bill is so much more than that, but the nature of certain words used implying, for example, that one could be “offended” by what is truthfully posted online about them and seek legal recourse for this is troubling. It is even more worrisome since these proposed provisions imply a disregard to if the same information was public to begin with.

Once more, I submit that the bill seems like so much more. There are quite useful protections included against harmful behaviour online, particularly concerning minors and victims of abuse. But the impression is that public feedback is being provided from position of ignorance even when you have one of top 25 cybersecurity experts in the world, one Niel Harper, providing helpful “future leaning” interventions. There are calls for open forums by the general public as well, something one would think easily accepted given the nature of government lately.

Personally, I think the bill could have benefitted from greater public discourse in an effort to define what is truly meant by the word cybersecurity. Therefore, in my view, the bill is too narrow in its scope and definition. We have recently seen where data breaches, both in the public and private sector, resulted in no accountability for lapse data protection measures. There has been no fines, reports, nor mea culpas offered. I estimate that these recent breaches cost our economy tens of millions of dollars and, above that, our society a large contraction of trust. This is difficult to recuperate now but doesn’t need to be in the future, if we all just listen to each other.