As modern Western democracies continue to struggle to engage and include public opinion in a globalised world, the fight against civil disengagement and the growing gap in our knowledge community has the potential to alienate the most important spoke in the wheel of the ideal democracy – the public. As the complexity of our globalised world continues to increase in tandem with the scale and size of the bureaucracy needed to govern it, our key democratic principles must not fall by the wayside.

It is imperative that we avoid the temptation to fall back onto a particularly Australian view of politics and civil engagement, a mix of cynicism and derision that has in many ways lodged itself within our national psyche and continued to pervade a cycle of political apathy amongst successive generations.

It is for this reason that the Eidos Institute remains committed to breathing new life into the public sphere, viewing public debate and transparency of public policy as the keys to healthy democracy, and it is in accordance with this commitment that Eidos is working to reanimate and revitalise the public sphere on a number of levels, most notably through the staging of events aiming to facilitate and inform public discussion and debate.