Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too would like to commend the member for Cook for moving this motion recognising the federal council of the United Nations Association of Australia’s declaration of 2006 as the National Year of Community. This is a great opportunity for people all over Australia to value, promote and support their local and regional communities.

The member for Batman has already spoken a little about the personal wellbeing index, which was covered in the major papers this morning. I would like to touch on that also in a slightly different area and note for the House that there is a strong correlation across all areas between a poor sense of wellbeing and a lack of connectedness to the community. In fact, the report states that the most consistent domain in the lowest performers in terms of personal wellbeing is connection to community, which is deficient in all of the nine lowest divisions. In order to determine whether the consistency would continue into high divisions, the ranks above those nine were also investigated. True to form, connection to community was below the normative range for 11 of the remaining 15 low-performing divisions. The personal wellbeing domain that most consistently separated the lowest from the highest divisions is community connection. It was consistently lower—even diagnostic of the divisions with the lowest personal wellbeing.

When we talk about community, people often talk about volunteers. That is an extremely important part of community, but community extends much more broadly than that. It is the way we share our knowledge, it is the way that information and ideas flow around a community and it is the way that we meet each other and interact in our streets, shopping centres and public places. It is the way we find out about local stories and the way we tell each other things. When a community loses its local shopping centre, it loses not just the businesses but a place where people come to meet and share time. When a person pops down to the local grocer—who may have been operating that grocer for many years and may have known their parents—they have an interaction and a local story to tell.

In my community of Parramatta I have been amazed, particularly in the last six months, how often people raise the word ‘community’ with a troubled note in their voice. People are well aware that over recent years we have seen a significant degradation of community—not just in our values but in the way we interact with each other. A woman said to me recently, talking about her current life and the way that work has taken over her family life, that she had lost the capacity to build her family community. She no longer put on local barbecues for the cousins and the extended family. She no longer spent the same amount of time with her relatives. So even her family community was being degraded by the choices that she and her family had made and felt they had to make in order to survive in the world. Equally, I hear people grieve for the loss of community spaces. When the skating rink gets pulled down—the place they met their partner for the first time or where they went on their first date—they lose not just a venue but part of the memories that hold them in place and that cause that connection with the local community.

It sometimes astonishes me that the word ‘community’ is not used more often in this parliament—that we do not consider almost every bill we put to this House in terms of the effect that it will have on the strengthening or the weakening of our community. While we sometimes do not pay enough attention to community, I believe our constituents out there pay a considerable amount of attention to it. We are in fact a nation of joiners and, at times of extreme challenge such as we find ourselves in at the present, we are quickly reminded of the wonderful volunteering ethic in this country. Even the Prime Minister made a statement, following the findings of last year’s Australian Social Attitudes report. He said that the lifeblood of active Australian citizenship is the voluntary sector. A remarkable 86 per cent of adult Australians belong to at least one voluntary organisation and over 4.4 million Australians volunteer in one organisation or another. I am delighted to speak in favour of this resolution. It is a reminder to the House of the importance of the word ‘community’ to Australian communities. We in this House should not take it for granted. (Time expired)

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