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Status: activeType: 📢 advocacyCountry: Australia Website: www.sortitionfoundation.org/become_a_member_australia
Status active
Type 📢 advocacy
Country Australia
Website www.sortitionfoundation.org/become_a_member_australia
Contact press@sortitionfoundation.org
Contact form ↗
RSS feed www.sortitionfoundation.org/updates.rss
News page www.sortitionfoundation.org/updates
Concepts Sortition Deliberative Democracy Citizens Assembly
Last activity 2026-07-19 dod
Parent org (Sortition Foundation) confirmed active; Australia chapter page returns 403 to automated fetch (Cloudflare bot-block) but is indexed and referenced live; monthly Zoom meetings ongoing per site copy.

Sortition Foundation (Australia)

The Sortition Foundation is a UK-based organisation that campaigns for the use of stratified random selection (sortition) in government, primarily through citizens' assemblies. The Australian chapter operates within that global structure and is established by Dr Sonia Randhawa, based in Preston, Victoria, who works as a Project Manager at the Foundation.

The UK Sortition Foundation already has a landscape entry. The Australian chapter is noted separately because of its distinct operational activity in Australian democratic processes.

Key people

  • Dr Sonia Randhawa — established and leads the Australian chapter, based in Preston, Victoria. Works as a Project Manager at the Sortition Foundation and has driven its operational presence in Australian local and federal democratic processes.1

What the Australian chapter does

  • Monthly online meetings — second Thursday evening of each month, open to anyone interested
  • Victorian council recruitment — assisted 11 Victorian councils in using random selection for deliberative engagement under the Local Government Act
  • Federal electorate pilots — ran a service for federal MPs (ACT seat of Canberra, Victorian seat of Casey) randomly selecting voters to help identify electorate priorities
  • National assemblies — provided sortition recruitment for the 2025 AMPLIFY National Assembly on Housing: 36,000 invitations sent, 120 participants selected across 11 demographic categories
  • Education — developing deliberative democracy curriculum for Australian secondary school students

See also

  1. "We want to change the way politics is done in Australia! Join us" Sortition Foundation, Australia chapter, 3 September 2020. - What if we replaced politicians with randomly selected people? — Brett Hennig TED talk, discussed at DOD 2018 - Your Party is using sortition — UK case study, 2025 ↩

History