Lunch with Luca Belgiorno-Nettis Exotic taste: Luca Belgiorno-Nettis proposes an upper house of citizens selected at random. Transfield Holdings executive director Luca Belgiorno-Nettis is a bit stylish and cultured for corporate Australia. He wears his shirt like an Italian, as if it is a decoration rather than a uniform, an adornment and not a disguise. He is a respected figure in the art world, a man of taste. In conversation, he uses classical analogies, historical references, and polite, informed rhetoric. He looks fitter than he ought, and younger than perhaps he should. He is a bit thoughtful too, a bit concerned. He is no longer involved with the day-to-day operations of the family building company. He gives much of his time to his fashionably punctuated newDemocracy Foundation, a project to improve democratic decision-making in Australia. He believes more of a voice should be given to the disinterested and the unaffiliated, in a process that's been captured by political parties, special-interest groups and lobbies - although if any class of people has been responsible for the distortion of Australian local politics, it's arguably property developers. And, as Belgiorno-Nettis readily concedes, "we have been a developer." You could end up with a better environment if you could get a stronger body politic. Belgiorno-Nettis invites me to lunch in the Transfield apartment, at the end of a pier in Walsh Bay. The unit's two bedrooms have been converted into executive dining rooms, and the staff seem to live in the walls, occasionally emerging discreetly through half-hidden doors. Belgiorno-Nettis has a right-hand man, Iain Walker, who, confusingly, sits at his left. Walker has the facts and the figures, the crunched numbers and digested data. The problem, Belgiorno-Nettis says - with some help from Walker - is politics has become professionalised, and the parties often simply manufacture their differences. "It's fairly plain that the parties are, so often, not that far apart," he says, "but the opposition has to say something different, because that's the nature of the opposition." "That's where all of this futile what we call 'B-grade high-school debating' is not effective," says Belgiorno-Nettis. It's wasteful, and it's reached its use-by date. The whole ideological positions of left and right: young people aren't that interested in that any more. It's not relevant to Australia. In the backwoods of Bolivia, you might still find Marxist guerillas, but we've gone beyond that. A solution he proposes is the creation of a new parliamentary entity - an upper house of citizens selected at random. I point out this seems to have happened in the last upper-house elections anyway. "Not quite," he says, laughing. This lot were elected. He says democracy, as originally conceived in ancient Athens, was modelled along his lines - although it excluded women and slaves. "We believe if you get ordinary people - we call them 'everyday people', because ordinary suggests they're just dull - the opportunity to deliberate together, they come up with extraordinary recommendations," he says. The arbitrarily chosen members of the new parliament would serve a fixed term, be paid a fair salary, and would not be eligible for re-election. They would not reflect public opinion so much as exercise public judgment. And they would somehow be prevented from forming factions. John the waiter emerges from a crack in the wall with a lunch prepared by Sean the chef. John describes my dish from the bottom up. "We have a white aioli sauce underneath your salad," he tells me, "and then on top you have duck." The others have the same, but with calamari. It is zesty and delightful, and we all believe it is the main course, and are perplexed when a second plate arrives. Mine is grouper with a "panache" of vegetables, and I can no more fault the fish than criticise the apartment's view of the harbour. Belgiorno-Nettis and Walker take wine with their meal, another relic of a lost civilisation. To my shame, I ask for a Diet Coke. The closest thing John the waiter can offer is Peroni Leggera, a light beer. The newDemocracy team have been testing their theories, giving policy problems to groups of demographically representative "everyday people" and watching them produce non-ideological solutions. For example, following the Thomas Kelly punching-death tragedy, Lord Mayor Clover Moore and Premier Barry O'Farrell had newDemocracy put together a citizens' panel to examine how to make nightlife safer in Sydney. "And we've just completed the exact same question in Adelaide for the Premier of South Australia, Jay Weatherill," Belgiorno-Nettis says. Weatherill is in a bind, caught between two slogans. If he tightens regulation, he is a harbinger of the nanny state. If he does not, he is not protecting our kids. The Australian Hotels Association is known to be a huge political donor. NSW polling firms told newDemocracy regulating the sale of alcohol costs a finely calibrated 1.8 per cent of a primary vote, and that's why politicians won't move. But non-politicians have no such constraints. And, once the panels examined the evidence, they realised there was no terrible problem in Adelaide anyway. They called in expert opinion from Curtin University's national drug research institute, and were told if drunken young people were the only ones on the streets, there would be more violence than if they shared the nightlife precincts with a mixture of people of various ages who had had different amounts to drink. There would be the same number of under-age drinkers, and they would be just as intoxicated, but they would behave differently in a mixed crowd. So there was talk of trying to get more diversity on the streets, and general astonishment that Adelaide's laws permitted alcohol to be sold 24 hours a day but obliged shoe shops to close at 7pm. They figured this - and a regulation which prevented live music in the CBD where most workers want to go out - before 9pm, did not necessarily serve the common good. But they looked for technical solutions rather than clinging to populist ideas. It all sounds promising, but where does Belgiorno-Nettis stand on workers' control? Would he have let ordinary workers run Transfield? "Yeah, well, no," he says. That's ... something I've struggled with. There's an interesting distinction, from the point of view of someone who's got capital as an owner of a company, whether it's you or me. It's him. "Yeah, OK then, me," he says. The business owner is "definitely interested in certain outcomes, certain performances, which are related to the business," he says. So you want talented people who have got some capacity or competency to add to that particular business proposition. Walker has to leave for another appointment, giving me a chance to find out more about Belgiorno-Nettis. He was schooled by the Jesuits at St Aloysius in Milsons Point. "I was a pretty obedient sort of fella," he said. I was not particularly exceptional. He was a small kid, OK academically, a halfback in the first XV. "I was just happy-go-lucky," he says, "going along with whatever was on offer. I don't believe I had any ambitions - maybe to get into bed with a number of girls. At the same time? "At the same time," he nods, laughing. That was my main ambition in the latter years of my schooling. When did he have the first stirrings of ambition? "Which were not sexual?" he asks. Right. He decided he wanted to be an architect, he says, and studied at the University of NSW. "I enjoyed school," he says. I can't say I enjoyed university terribly much. He felt he was too young, at 17, and "just couldn't relate" to the large number of mature-age students. Although he was intrigued by the course, he struggled to find his focus amid architecture's competing concerns of psychology, design, structure, mechanics, acoustics, environment and social histories. He graduated, then worked for a number of private practices before joining the family firm. In those days, the design aspects of architecture most appealed to him. He only later came to realise buildings were for people. The GIO centre in Parramatta is one of his buildings, as is the GIO centre on Hunter Street, Newcastle. He is married with two children, aged 21 and 23. His wife, Anita, is a yoga teacher and movie producer. She's Italian, and they met through his cousin while she was on holiday in Australia. He was the more liberal parent, Anita the disciplinarian. They live in Woollahra. He washes the dishes on occasion and he's good with tools: he hangs paintings, fixes electrical things, does odd jobs. Their daughter is gluten-sensitive, so the whole family has incorporated quinoa pasta into their Italian diet. It's "fantastic," he says. You wouldn't know the difference. He pauses. You'd know the difference if you were wheat-sensitive. He has a Pilates session twice a week, swims, practices yoga, walks and cycles. At home, he tends to drink organic, preservative-free wines. Belgiorno-Nettis became interested in the idea of improving democracy because Transfield was a big company in the infrastructure business, so he would often go out to political fund-raisers, looking for a party to support. But he concluded their rhetoric was all semantic and he felt infrastructure projects were sacrificed to political expediency. He tried to take his concerns to academia but says he was dismissed as a rich man dabbling. He concedes he has more money - and time - to spend on these issues than most. He abhors the way the commercial imperative determines public space, leading to zombie precincts such as North Sydney CBD, which he describes as "terrible ... banal." "In the past," he says, "developer lobbies would dictate, as much as anything. You had the councils who were having trouble resisting this sort of pressure, and it's not a healthy environment. He continually returns to the same point, and it is obvious he means what he is saying. He is not didactic. He asks a lot of questions. He seems to want to learn how to sell his project to a media which feeds off fabricated conflict and manufactured rage. He does not claim to have found the solution to everything. "You're not necessarily going to end up with the better decisions," he says. What you're trying to do is build the level of public trust ... The Greek council determined to kill Socrates - that was a randomly selected group of people. But what we're saying is, if you introduce better representation and better deliberation, you're bound to have a better outcome.