Chapter 15

Decisions

In shock, I let my half empty cup of coffee slip from my hands. I caught it in time, though not before a few drops of very warm liquid spilled onto my trousers. “Free housing, free food, free health care, seven-hour working weeks, government by the people. This can’t be real. How the hell can you afford free housing?”

“The same way we afford free staple food,” said Dianne, showing no offence at my outburst. “The costs are absorbed into the prices of other goods and services, using CAPE.”

I suddenly remembered Wilbur mentioning this in passing, yet still I could not believe it. “Surely not! Houses are too expensive. If they were made free, other goods would have outrageous prices. No one could afford them.”

“No, er, that’s not so,” said David, now mimicking his wife by fidgeting in his seat. He continued, in sentences full of ums and ers, his arms waving, his hands gesticulating wildly. The movements, as far as I could see, mostly had no relationship to the words, but they were of such a magnitude, I found myself thinking of a puppet show. “In the early days, that is when we were all children, the building of houses comprised only about eight or nine percent—I think, wasn’t it, Di?—certainly less than ten percent of most nations’ costs, I’m pretty sure. So, that being the case, the prices of other goods—non-housing goods that is—were naturally only about ten percent higher than they would have been if there had been no free housing.”

Again, my coffee cup almost fell to the ground. Even with my bank’s staff discount, Yvette and I spend a lot more than ten percent of our income on our mortgage. So do most people.

“The percentage is somewhat higher now,” continued David, “with so many other costs removed because of the shorter working week. But then the population is also stable enough for there not to be nearly as much need for new houses. Even if we had to spend, say, half of all our costs on housing, making it free would still be affordable—I think that would be a fair thing to say, wouldn’t it, Di? That’s the way CAPE operates, after all: if the total costs of an economy are balanced by its total prices, then the prices are by definition affordable.”

His final gesture of a pointed finger being abruptly lowered almost made me feel like I was back at school. “What else is free in this place?” I demanded irritably. “Do you pay for anything? Apart from restaurant meals and toilet paper?” That was about all I’d seen that involved a payment. “And tropical fruit?”

“Of course,” said Dianne. “You saw me pay for Gino’s work this morning. It’s only essential needs that are free—for the most part. Housing, food, basic clothing, education, health care.”

I grappled momentarily with this news before returning my thoughts to the concept of free housing. An objection immediately reared its ugly head. “What happens if you decide you want to move?” I said. “Surely there’ll be more than one person or family interested in the same house. If you don’t offer a higher price for a house, how do you manage to get to own it ahead of someone else?”

“We don’t own our house,” said Dianne.

“But you said you had no mortgage or rent.” Suddenly I realised. “Ohhhh. The state owns it. Your locality or town. Or city.”

“No one owns it,” said Dianne.

“But we steward it,” said David. “Ownership has been transcended—by stewardship.”

I remembered Wilbur using the same word in relation to Alice and her restaurant, but the memory did not aid my understanding. “What?! No one owns anything?! Not even clothes?”

“Sorry,” said David. “I expressed myself poorly. Too general and brief. Most things are owned, but not houses. Nor land and fixed capital. They’re stewarded.”

“And who is Stuart?”

My mind already broiling, I listened with a mixture of horror and fascination as they explained how the costs of developing land for use, and building factories and industrial plants and other fixed capital, were all absorbed via CAPE into the prices of other consumable goods and services, so that, like houses, land and fixed capital were free. They pointed out that even under capitalism, the costs of creating and maintaining capital goods are covered by the prices of the goods they help produce—effectively absorbed into prices just as with CAPE. Nevertheless, making fixed capital free had (allegedly) caused stocks, bonds and other speculative money-raising methods to become obsolete. Was my subconscious trying to tell me it was a good thing I never became a stockbroker, a career I’d once briefly entertained?

Stewardship of land and fixed capital was not as alien as I expected. Essentially it was a plurocratic form of collective ownership. The people living in the smallest plurocracy with borders that fully enclosed any unused land were its stewards, which is to say they had responsibility for looking after the land until they could agree on how, if at all, it would be used or developed. Whereas fixed capital was stewarded mostly by the people operating it—all of the workers of a factory or restaurant, for example—but also, and ultimately, by those most directly affected by the capital’s operations: again, those living in the smallest plurocracy with borders that fully enclosed it. All of which, it was said, tended to encourage environmental and social care.

Home stewards, on the other hand, had the usual rights bestowed by ownership, except they could not sell or buy their houses. What they did instead struck me at first as a little complicated. Even though houses were free, they still had ‘prices’ associated with them. Whenever a house had new or vacating occupants, valuers would inspect the condition of the house and estimate what it would cost to rebuild it from scratch. Adding standardised amounts for location, proximity to services, the state of soil and land, and other advantages or disadvantages, produced a quasi-price. If people left a house in worse condition than when they moved in—if its ‘price’, adjusted to take CAPE-fluctuations into account, fell during their stewardship—they could only move to places with an equal or lower ‘price’. But if house stewards maintained or improved the value of their homes, they were eligible to move to higher-‘priced’ houses—in Chord, higher by the percentage increase in the price of their existing home plus ten percent of the average house price. This allowance for ‘upward mobility’ differed between plurocracies, as did the maximum ‘price’ for anyone’s first home.

I was pleased to hear that burdos were treated somewhat differently. Anyone below retirement age who had refused to work for more than a year, regardless of the state of their house, could move only to houses with lesser ‘prices’. If this obstacle prompted any burdos to return to work, they still could not move to a higher-‘priced’ house until they worked for as long as they had previously avoided working—in other words, it had to be a committed change of mind, not just a brief effort to exploit a possible loophole. Likewise, anyone with an account in the red beyond a specified value could move only to houses with lesser ‘prices’. Of course, burdos could still spend to their heart’s content, and rack up more colossal negative balances, but at least there was some pressure on them to contribute—a motivation more concrete, I thought, than the distant prospect of an accusative epitaph.

“But you still haven’t answered my question,” I said at the end of the explanation. “There is bound to be more than one family interested in buying a house when it’s vacated. How do you decide who gets it?”

“Waiting lists,” said Dianne. “Accessible online and alterable at will. We nominated eleven specific houses we were interested in as soon as we were engaged. When the occupants of any of those houses decided they wanted to move, whoever was at the top of their waiting list was notified automatically and given first choice to move in. As it turned out, when this house’s previous stewards moved elsewhere, we were second on the list, but the couple ahead of us decided against it, so we moved in.”

“We were a bit lucky,” said David, “I have to admit. It could have taken much longer, and for others it often does. But then the other ten houses on our list would have suited us just as much as this one, or maybe even more”—he turned to Dianne—“wouldn’t you say so dear?”

“But there must have been many other people waiting on those houses,” I said, not at all convinced by their explanation. Visions of poor crowded public housing in Soviet Russia came to mind. “And how often would they come on the market? You might have been waiting for years. And what do you do in the meantime?”

“Well,” began David, “for a start, there are more houses than occupants in Hillbeach, quite a few more in fact, so there are always—or very nearly always—some vacant houses to use while anyone is waiting. We were living in one such house in the adjacent city for about two years before we moved here. But of course we weren’t so silly as to put all our eggs in the same basket of just eleven houses. We also put ourselves on waiting lists for this locality, and for two other nearby localities as well. And for several others in other towns and cities. That way, whenever any house in those localities was vacated and we were on top of the list, or others ahead of us rejected the houses, we were offered them.”

“We knocked back at least ten,” added Dianne.

“It sounds a bit like pot luck,” I said.

“No more than it ever was,” replied David. He blinked rapidly (either a habit picked up from his wife or passed to her), before meekly regretting the certainty of his reply. “At least that’s what it seems to me. Indeed, I would think there was probably more luck involved in the old days, what with everyone bidding against everyone else and trying to guess what they could afford and what the manic-compulsive market double-thought a home was worth. Wasn’t that how it was under capitalism? A breeding ground for homelessness?”

With his last sentence, the faltering gentle quality of his voice vanished, replaced by a certainty and gravity that bordered on anger. His face also settled into an expression that could not be misconstrued: he did not approve.

Dianne’s response was similar in mood, though her face maintained its standard composure. “What sort of excuse can be made for condemning even one person to living under railway bridges or inside tunnels, begging on streets, kept merely alive by handouts from charities, isolated, unwanted, half-frozen at night, and semi-catatonic during the day? Is that supposed to be a mark of civilisation?”

“Civilisation?!” said David, with more passion than I thought him capable, free of hesitation and nervous movement. “It often seems to me that pre-enufist civilisation is an oxymoron.” He turned to me. “I never cease to be amazed how you can study history so dispassionately. Some of its travesties are more than I can bear to think about.”

I did not reply, since there seemed no point in reminding him I was not who he thought I was. Dianne diplomatically changed the subject, asking about David’s progress with his work. His response, again replete with puzzling gesticulations, informed me—in about twice the time really required—that his nitinol phase transformation engine was prototyped about a century before, but largely abandoned for most of that time. He and other researchers across the world, mostly hobbyists, had resurrected it recently and solved several of its more pressing hurdles. But it was clearly a work in progress, though he was optimistic about the prospects. Soon after, he returned to his workshop, and soon after that, Dianne took the dishes inside.

The next moment, she was gently jostling me awake—I had dozed off in her absence and she’d let me sleep for over an hour. My sleeping hours in this dream, always irregular, still hadn’t settled down.

Dianne informed me that she, David, and Victoria were about to head off to the locality meeting and asked if I wanted to join them. Why not, I thought—and said. It wasn’t like I had anywhere else to go.

David, apparently as usual, curtailed his day’s research only at the last possible moment, so we were on the verge of running late. But the hall was only a few hundred metres away.

Victoria walked there with us, surprisingly enthusiastic. She claimed she liked the meetings and all their activity, even though she could not vote. Her brother, however, preferred playing football with friends, but was going to join us afterwards.

Soon after starting our walk, my eye was caught by a flash of movement on the opposite side of the road. I looked up just in time to catch a glimpse of a small dark shape as it scrambled into the bushland that fronted the entirety of that side of the street.

“Did you see that?” said Dianne to no one in particular, pointing.

“Only briefly,” said David. “Too briefly to be sure what it was, I’m afraid. Was it a possum?”

“No, Dad,” said Victoria with relish. “It was a lyrebird.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Dianne.

“Could have been,” I muttered. “Didn’t really see it properly.”

“I suspect it was,” said Dianne. “That would be the third sighting this year.”

“What’s it doing in an urban area like this?” I asked. “I thought they’re very timid creatures.”

“They are. But that’s part of a nature corridor,” explained Dianne, pointing at the bushland, “one that winds through Chord and connects up ultimately with open habitat. The original town planners hoped it would have this sort of effect, but I doubt they expected lyrebirds. They haven’t been seen in this area for nearly a century. Not until this year.”

Two cyclists rode past, waving. The Knights waved back.

We walked the rest of the way without incident. The hall was a spacious mud-brick construction on the near side of the tennis courts, set on a large block devoted to sporting and community facilities, located according to Dianne near the centre of the several localities which shared it. Inside, there must have been hundreds of people, mostly adults but also many children. I looked for Wilbur, but could not see him. I did see Mattie and Gino, and returned their waves, along with many other salutations I received from complete strangers. Mattie’s spirits seemed to have risen, but his expression indicated cautious restraint—an admirable change, I thought.

It was a kaleidoscopic crowd. Women wore everything from jeans and t-shirts to formal gowns, billowing frilly dresses, skin-tight mini-skirts, glaring rainbow colours, drab greys, muted monotones, floral ornamentation, modernist and abstract patterns, modest high neck- and hem-lines, plunging décolletage and brazen midriffs and thighs—a plethora of coordination and dishevelment. Men were less varied: none in dresses at least, but everything else from shorts and singlets to formal jackets and pants. One red-headed old fellow even had a kilt. Makeup ranged from subtle to savage to none, but there was little jewellery, facial or body. More surprisingly, there were no tattoos, and hair colours were all decidedly natural. (Something I could admire: I never have understood why people who object to the slightest artificial additives in their food or who worry about pollution can choose to have their heads covered with abrasive chemicals just to change the colour of their hair. Even Yvette used to do it.) But if hair colours were plain, their styles were not—for men and women. Long hair, short hair, curly, straight, wavy, frizzed, loose, tight, buns, plaids, pony-tails, shaved scalps, men with sideboards, moustaches, beards from full-face to thin lines, even a pair of cheeks covered in facial hair without moustache, sideboards, or van dyke.

When I could tear my attention away from the people, I noticed, along one wall of the hall, a series of tables almost spilling over with large lidded containers of food, copious bottles and jugs of drinks, stacks of plates and glasses, and several microwaves and kettles. My appetite awoke. Another free dinner by the looks.

On the same side, near the hall’s entrance, was a large electronic noticeboard with several lists each of about two hundred names. Each list had large headings, but the only one I recognised was ‘Jibilee’. As soon as we walked into the hall, David moved to the Jibilee list and waited in line behind several people. Eventually, he put a tick against the names of himself, Dianne, and Ernest. I was on the verge of objecting to his last tick, and making my usual denial, but decided it was futile. I noticed that all but five of Jibilee’s names had ticks against them.

While David waited in line, Dianne reminded me that consensus was needed for one of the issues to be discussed. “All of Jibilee’s voters really should be present tonight,” she added.

“What happens if some don’t turn up?” I asked, looking at the faces in the hall.

“We mark them as absent and carry on without them. It would only be a problem if they were inclined to vote against the issue, but very few objectors tend to miss these meetings.”

“What if they have a good reason for missing them? Illness, for instance.”

“They can always appoint someone to vote on their behalf, or send it through online. But if, for whatever reason, they were prevented from conveying their views to the meeting in time, they could still discuss it with me afterwards. I’m not altogether an unreasonable person.”

“I imagine not,” I replied. Having finished scanning the hall’s occupants, I asked, “Where’s Wilbur?”

“His house is in Aurora, an adjacent locality. They met last week.”

Dianne moved to the front of the hall, onto a low stage, while the rest of us found seats. She inserted a finger-sized device into a slot at the side of a large whiteboard, and pressed some buttons near the slot. The board lit up with a typed agenda. The steady stream of conversation ebbed. Dianne took what looked like a remote control device from the side of the board, checked her watch and stood to one side, waiting silently until the missing five stragglers arrived not long after.

“Thank you all for attending,” she said as soon as they found seats. Her clear voice quieted the last dregs of chat. “As you can see, we have only four items to discuss this evening, so we should have a fair chance of finishing on time. The first is Jeff Myer. I doubt any of you wouldn’t have seen his work in Galadriel Street, but just in case, here’s a less than exhaustive sample of it.”

She pointed the remote control at the board and the agenda was replaced with a photo of Dianne’s street, and its idiosyncratic decorations. Further photos followed before Dianne began to speak again. To my surprise, she was no longer blinking and her fingers were still. Had her fidgeting merely been symptoms of performance anxiety? She certainly seemed to be in her element now, comfortable and relaxed.

“At the last meeting,” said Dianne, “the proposal was made to record Jeff’s efforts officially by treating it as his needay work. In the month since, I’m pleased to report that the necessary two-thirds majority has been recorded in favour of the proposal, so the cost of paying him will now be included in Enote’s CAPE budget, starting from the beginning of next month.”

“How can that suddenly be afforded?” I whispered to David, as Dianne paused to let a mother quieten the sudden cries of a baby. “I thought CAPE was planned out for the whole year.”

“It is,” he whispered back, nodding slightly. He continued, accompanied by more facial and hand gestures, but like his voice, they were muted, less sweeping and more circumspect than usual. “However, each town and higher level plurocracy sets aside nominal amounts in their annual CAPE plans for unanticipated expenditures. These are used as needs and desires arise, although I should add there is certainly no compunction to spend everything.”

“Needless to say,” continued Dianne, the baby now silent, “Jeff works far longer than seven hours a week, so the town is definitely getting a bargain employing him.”

“How long will he last?” demanded a surly voice from the back of the hall. I turned to see its source: a young man, slouching in his seat. “Your street’s about as decorated as it’s ever going to get. Then what will he do to earn his keep?”

I turned to David with a quizzical expression.

“Len Dartmouth,” whispered David. “He’s always been inclined to play the devil’s advocate, but even more so since he broke up with his last girlfriend.”

Meanwhile, Dianne answered Len’s question. “Jeff will be available to decorate any street whose occupants desire it, Len. The occupants of one block in Briony Street have already asked him to sketch some plans for their approval. I daresay others will follow.” She turned her gaze directly at Len when she continued. “And I must remind participants that, for the sake of orderly discussion, it’s the custom to raise one’s hand and wait for me to acknowledge you before speaking.” (A snort from Len’s direction.) Dianne paused before asking if anyone else had questions on the matter. After a suitable silence, she continued with the second agenda item.

This was not a report about decisions already plurocratically made, but the issue that required consensus: the location of a new fire lookout tower. According to Dianne, this had been proposed by a city planning group, to overcome blind spots of existing lookouts in Chord and surrounding cities. They had selected five sites as most suitable, one of which, a small area of one block’s central garden near the corner of Jibilee, almost opposite where we were meeting, was near the border of three other localities. The tower had an obvious drawback: it intruded visually—even given the plan’s attempts to hide it behind new plants and to maximise the existing screening provided by houses’ backyard hedges and other plants. As a result, the proposal required approval by the bordering localities as well as by Jibilee. Dianne used her remote to display on the board a computer graphic of what the tower would look like on the site in question, depending on the viewing location.

Two of the other localities had already voted in favour of the site, and one narrowly against, but Enote’s rules had been plurocratically agreed that, in such a situation, the proposal would be carried by the ‘home’ locality’s approval. At the previous meeting, Jibilee had voted to require consensus approval; but as this was not immediately forthcoming, people had been given the month since to consider the issue.

Even though the initial show of hands indicated only fourteen people were prepared to vote against the proposal, the debate that followed took over half an hour. All objectors agreed that the locality, town, city, and region would be better served by having the tower than not—the risk of bushfire had apparently not lessened since my day—but all were concerned about its visual intrusion. None of the objectors lived close to the proposed site, where the planned screening along with bordering hedges were expected to more or less fully hide the tower; instead, as the computer graphic demonstrated, their homes were further away in locations that gave them a line of sight to the tower. Nevertheless, the objectors’ resistance was gradually whittled away as additional strategically placed screening was suggested and considered—usually in their own yards, and not very tall due to the distance and angles involved. The final result was indeed a consensus in favour of the new tower.

When I failed to raise my hand in the initial vote, David whispered that I “really should” have my say, not only because the proposed site was not far from the rear of ‘my’ house, but also because ‘my’ vote was necessary for consensus to be reached. I objected, saying I was not a member of the locality, but he insisted that if I did not vote, the proposal could not be decided. As it turned out, my vote was not needed, because after the initial raising of hands, Dianne was sensible enough not to attempt to repeatedly count the nearly two hundred in favour, but instead opted merely to count those against. When this number finally shrank to zero, the issue was decided.

“Congratulations,” said Dianne. “I can remember few issues where we have reached consensus as quickly as we have today. I will record our decision formally on Chord’s website, but of course this is only the first step. As soon as the stewards of all other nominated sites finish voting, the city planners will make the final choice. As usual, this will be based not only on the differing suitability of each site, but also on the level of consensus and extent of additional requirements made by each site’s voters. From what I have been informed about progress with the other sites, I would expect the planners’ decision and their reasons for it to be on the Net within the month.” Something from the back of the hall took her attention, and she nodded towards it, saying, “You wish to address the hall, Len?”

I turned to see Len lower his raised hand, stand, and begin speaking. “This is so damned slow,” he said.

“Here we go,” whispered someone behind me. David shifted his eyes skyward. At my quizzical look, he said, “Len makes more or less the same complaint, I would say, at every single meeting.”

Len expanded at length on his initial statement, while whispers mounted. Several people headed toward the public conveniences.

When Len finally finished, without offering any way of speeding the discussion along, an old fellow near the front of the hall raised his hand.

“Seiji,” said Dianne, “you wish to speak?”

He stood and spoke in a quiet dignified voice, far clearer and louder than I would have expected from someone his age. “I trust Len has now let off enough steam for the meeting to resume. I wish only to point out that if he had been around in the old days, before these meetings, when decisions were made usually too quickly by someone who lived and worked miles away and had no familiarity or understanding of who and what we have here in Jibilee, Len wouldn’t now be complaining of sloth.”

A short round of applause erupted from most of the hall, including David.

“It’s still too slow,” grumbled Len, unrepentant.

Dianne waited briefly for further comments, then began the third agenda item. It may have been my imagination, but I thought the meeting proceeded then at a slightly quicker pace.

The third item took me somewhat by surprise, though everyone else seemed to treat it as old news. Dianne explained how in the previous week, a number of refugees had landed by boat on Australia’s north coast, seeking asylum from a repressive regime whose name was unknown to me but apparently well recognised by everyone else. She made a brief reference to national and meta-national policy dictating that the refugees were to be accepted into Australia as long as sufficient housing was available. And she added that diplomatic negotiations and something I thought she called ‘pair giving’ were continuing in the hope of persuading the regime to abandon its authoritarian system in favour of plurocracy and a free lunch.

The issue for Jibilee was whether or not to offer some of its vacant houses to some of the refugees, although there was no guarantee an offer would either be needed or accepted by national and regional authorities who, according to Dianne, might well be facing a glut of similar offers. To assist Jibilee in the making up of its mind, Dianne had electronically circulated a summary of the cases for and against the proposal. She put a shorter point-form summary on the board for all to see. It seemed thorough and even-handed. When I whispered the question to David, he replied that this was typical of how Dianne handled issues.

It was all in stark contrast to the policies, procedures, and opinions dominant in recent years—my recent years, that is. For a long time, even as foreign millionaires, leaders of industry and anyone considered a skilled worker migrated without fuss to the land down under, when it came to refugees we had all but suffocated under a deluge of well-worn phrases like ‘opening the floodgates’, ‘invading hordes’, and ‘queue jumpers’. Xenophobia ruled to the extent that it was questioned not only whether those seeking asylum were genuine refugees but even whether some were terrorist plants. Consequently, both major political parties tried endlessly to duck-shove the refugees onto more willing nations.

I was one of the alleged minority at the time who found the national reaction appalling. Allowing every refugee into the country ran a risk of encouraging more to do the same and stretching our resources beyond their limits, but I did not accept that this demanded a blanket rejection of all so-called ‘boat people’. In my opinion, what it did require was a more humane response to those in need and better diplomatic relations and understanding between Australia and the countries of origin. Financial assistance and technological aid to improve living standards and so deter refugees from leaving their homes would also not have been misplaced. But, as Yvette pointed out, it was truly an international problem, with the same scenario enacted in many other countries. “It will never be fully avoided,” she warned me one night, “as long as nations are pitted against each other in economic war. It will require a cooperative solution to bring everyone’s living standards and political institutions up to something resembling a civilised level.” Her words sounded right at the time, but I gave them barely any further thought. Obviously, my subconscious had contemplated them considerably more than my conscious mind: the dream it had thrown me into was indeed looking at the problem from Yvette’s angle.

“To begin the discussion,” said Dianne, “I’d like to offer my own view. Let me remind you of plurocracy’s single guiding rule: any practice of one’s own choice is a right, as long as one fulfils the duty not to harm others in the process. Some might claim we have a right to keep Jibilee to ourselves, a right to privacy or self-rule, a right to do as we have been doing without being burdened by people who at least at first will require considerable care and attention, who will probably not even speak our language. My own view is that Jibilee cannot exercise such rights or any right that might allow us to reject taking in some of the refugees without neglecting its duty not to harm those people. Who would like to respond?”

Several people raised their hands, and Dianne selected the closest, an elderly man sitting on his own. As with all of the others who had spoken during the meeting, she addressed him by name—quite a memory. “Poppycock!” he said in a loud but croaky voice. “There are enough spare houses all over the country to accommodate a thousand times the number of refugees we’re talking about here. Why should Jibilee take them on when others could do so just as easily? More easily in fact since our spare housing stock is not as high as many other places. I say we leave it to others.”

He was rebutted by a nearby elderly woman who spoke about Jibilee setting a good example, and the discussion passed back and forth between those willing and those less willing. I was struck by how there was no talk about rejecting the refugees overall, the only question was where in the country to relocate them. And through it all, Dianne kept making gentle references to rights and duties. She did not denigrate any person’s opinion, and allowed all to speak, but nevertheless made her own views clear. Her actions during the meeting, and her preliminary dissemination of both sides of the case, persuaded me she was a very committed representative keen to raise the standard of thought of her electorate. Quite the contrast to what I was used to!

“Are all locality representatives like your wife?” I whispered to David in the midst of the discussion.

He smiled and shook his head. “If only. Most plurocrats are fairly conscientious, I would think, however a few leave much to be desired. Di’s predecessor, for instance, it would be fair to say, took it very easy. I doubt he ever distributed any background information, or even tried to set out both sides of an argument. He did not stay our plurocrat for long.”

My attention returned to the discussion. The floor was held by a middle-aged mother flanked by two pre-adolescent boys, all of obvious Asian ancestry. “In this country,” she said, “we are all refugees, and have been ever since Britain first sent convicts to Botany Bay. How can we refuse them?”

The discussion continued for another ten minutes or more, before it quietened to the point where Dianne brought it to a vote. I would have liked to have voted in favour of this one myself, but I still felt an overriding sense of being an impostor, so I kept my hand down. It made no difference. The vote was a clear two-thirds majority in favour of offering some houses to refugees, without an exact number of houses being stipulated. When that question had its turn to be voted on, Dianne began by asking for a show of hands in favour of offering all eleven spare houses in Jibilee. No one agreed, and so the number was reduced incrementally by one until the necessary majority was reached. Dianne’s only comment during this process followed the narrow rejection of three houses. She pointed out that offering only one house would probably cause more problems than offering two, since it would help any refugees to have someone else nearby with whom they were familiar and could speak the same language. Jibilee then voted—almost unanimously—to make two houses available to the refugees.

The fourth and final agenda item took barely a minute. It concerned a number of new products that were on the verge of being released across the region, including a battery-free smoke alarm developed by a Jibilee resident present in the hall. In what she called a “reminder”, Dianne explained that if enough voters nominated their preferred price for the new products, as a percentage of cost, the average value voted would then be used by CAPE. But if too few voters made the effort, the price would be set at cost. She pointed out that with less than a week still left to nominate prices, no one in Jibilee, apart from the inventor, herself and David, had bothered, and that it might be courteous, as well as ultimately in their own best interests, to cast their votes. Some uncomfortable shifting in seats, particularly those closest to where the inventor was sitting, suggested Dianne had struck guilt.

“Now is there any other business?” she asked, after a brief pause.

A tall youth, I thought just barely old enough to vote, raised his hand. Dianne said his name, and he stood and spoke. “Last year, you might remember, before consensus was reached about building the new tennis courts, a few of us pointed out we preferred an upgrade to the basketball court. We ended up giving in when it was pointed out that more people here play tennis than basketball, but it was conditional on the basketball situation being reconsidered a year later. That time has come.”

“According to my records, Nguyhen,” said Dianne, “the meeting you refer to was a year ago next month. I have included it in next month’s agenda.”

“I thought it was…,” said Nguyhen, blushing. “Sorry.” He sat down abruptly.

“It won’t hurt,” said Dianne, “to have reminded people now. It will require a town vote, of course, since the facility is used by people from many localities besides Jibilee, and any upgrade will naturally need to comply with city regulations. But I suggest those in favour of the upgrade prepare their case as fully as possible, including its affordability, and promote it in person and online before next month’s meeting. I doubt Jibilee or any other of Enote’s localities will require consensus for it.”

Another call for further business was answered by Len, who complained (apparently not for the first time) of Jibilee having different representatives for different town and higher-level issues. Although Dianne was the official plurocrat for Jibilee, for some specialist issues the locality was often represented by other locals who (usually) had more knowledge of those subjects. The ensuing discussion also mentioned that some localities did not even vote for their representatives but rostered the positions among volunteers.

It was clear to me that Len wanted to be Jibilee’s sole representative on everything. Yet he had no option but to let the matter drop when Dianne reminded him that his had been the only dissenting vote against the standing arrangement for over five years.

When a thorough silence greeted her final call for further business, Dianne declared the meeting over. “Okay,” she said, quietly beaming, “let’s eat.”

The entire gathering stood, moved to the tables, and helped themselves to the waiting smorgasbord.

Eat we did. And drink. I made a pig of myself. And drank more wine than probably was wise. That’s my excuse anyway.