Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate the mover of this resolution on the National Year of Community. Coincidentally, last week I was reading a book by Tom Fremantle: The Road to Timbuktu. In there, he mentioned an American who retired to Djenne, in Mali, the site of a World Heritage mosque. The American made the comment:

What I love about this mosque is that it is replaced with mud at the end of every rainy season. Those wooden beams sticking out of it are used for climbing up. Everyone in the town joins in. Those not plastering on mud make tea or cook. It is a great communal event.

So, in the world, this is still occurring. However, as the previous speaker said, the American sociologist Robert Putnam has painted a dismal picture of the situation in the Western world. In his groundbreaking book, in 2000, Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community, he says:

Most Americans today feel vaguely and uncomfortably disconnected.

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The bonds of our communities have withered and we are right to fear that this transformation has very real costs.

Of course, the reality is obvious to us all: people move homes more frequently, they change jobs. There is casualisation of our workforce and increasing numbers of people are in part-time employment. All of these elements undermine community cooperation and a sense of society. In a recent edition of the Journal of Australian Political Economy, Barbara Pocock and Helen Masterman-Smith note that in this country part-time employment is at 46 per cent, compared with the rest of the OECD group of wealthy countries, where 25 per cent of the workforce is in part-time employment. Thirty-one per cent of females are in casual employment.

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