Bruce Baird (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1)

recognises and supports the United Nations Association of Australia (NSW Division) for its resolution to declare 2006 the ‘National Year of Community’;

(2)

acknowledges the importance of ‘community’ to the social fabric of Australian society; and

(3)

notes the role of community in developing young Australians.

The United Nations Association of Australia (NSW) has declared 2006 the National Year of Community. The association has stated that this is an opportunity for people around the nation to celebrate their local, regional, state and national communities. The association aims to facilitate the building of stronger community links between Australians. I wish to congratulate the United Nations Association on this declaration and on working to improve the strength and cohesion of Australian society. ‘Community’ is defined as society as a whole, but it goes further than that. Community is a group of people with a common interest and a common identity, a group of people sharing and participating in fellowship for the common good.

The importance of community, of shared interest and fellowship, was recently reinforced to me in a very real and tangible sense. As the House would be aware my electorate was at the centre of the recent so-called race riots, which occurred just a hundred metres or so from my home in Cronulla. These riots were brought about by a feeling amongst some beach goers and local residents that people from outside of the shire, in particular young Lebanese Australians, were not participating in Australian beach culture and were in many cases there solely to cause problems. On the Thursday following the riot, I called together the leaders of the Australian Lebanese community and Sutherland Shire communities to meet and discuss the continuing problems. I was extremely pleased by the cooperative approach that each and every one of these participants took. The leaders of each community freely and easily admitted the problems that exist, and we all began to look toward solutions. Of course, the need to avoid further violence was the driving motivation and was something that dominated the first meeting. Since then, however, we have continued to meet as a group and continued to look at ways that we can break down conflict and misunderstanding between our two communities. It has been a great credit to all the leaders that participated that further incidents have not taken place.

As the leaders of both communities came together to address the ongoing unrest, we began to see that each side felt aggrieved by the actions of a small number of the other. Yesterday’s Sunday program report on Cronulla demonstrated this well. One young man of Lebanese background made the telling observation that if he, his cousin and his brother walk down the street, people view them as a gang rather than as some young Australians going about their business. Similarly, people from the shire and elsewhere have either had a bad experience with Middle Eastern youths or heard of people who have. The old saying ‘once bitten twice shy’ is a truism in this case. There is no doubt that there is an element of crime amongst Lebanese youth, which is no doubt born in part of the social ostracism and disproportionately high unemployment rates. However, these acts of intimidation and harassment et cetera have helped to label the entire Australian Lebanese community as people to be feared or avoided.

Since the Cronulla incident and subsequent retaliatory attacks by young Australian Lebanese, the leaders of the two conflicting communities have come together. We have done so to work in the full spirit of community, as a group of people with a common interest. We have come together with the best interests of our young people and our local communities to work towards a greater understanding and appreciation of each other and each other’s communities. Broadly, one great responsibility of our community is to ensure that appropriate social mores and a sense of community spirit are instilled into our younger generation. In 2004, there were 2.79 million people in Australia aged between 15 and 24. As has been shown recently by the Cronulla incidents, and by both sides, society has an important role to play in showing young Australians in a positive sense what it means to be Australian and what it means to be a sound citizen.

According to Australian government figures, 14 per cent of young people aged 15 to 19 are not engaged in either full-time study, full-time work or a combination of the two. For the 20 to 24 age group, this figure rises to 22.5 per cent. There is a greater role for community—that is, for parents, community leaders and community organisations—to play in this regard. These young people who are not fully engaged in society are considered at risk. They are at risk of not achieving their best and at risk of falling into a criminal cycle or one of welfare dependence. The community and, of course, parents are the groups who can effect change in attitudes of these young people. Through the community’s expectations, through the so-called social contract, these young people can be assisted to get back on track. (Time expired)

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Martin Ferguson (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Primary Industries, Resources, Forestry and Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion. I rise today to indicate my support for the resolution by the United Nations Association of Australia to declare 2006 the National Year of the Community. In that context, I think of last weekend. On Saturday I had the chance to spend the evening at the local Maronite dinner dance in Northcote in my electorate. Prior to that, in the afternoon, I enjoyed a celebration with the Buddhist community in Reservoir to mark the opening of the 2006 lunar new year. And yesterday afternoon we had the local Greek festival in Northcote. Next weekend, we will have the Darebin community festival, which has a highly successful multicultural local community getting involved to celebrate the Commonwealth Games and to celebrate our diversity and tolerance. I highlight these events because they share an important feature that is common to my local community, whether it is the Lebanese community, the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Somali, the Iraqi or the community of the city of Darebin.

In its most simple terms, a community is about a group of people sharing something in common, whether it is where they live, their ethnicity, their interests or their values. In an increasingly frenetic society driven by individual goals and aspirations, it is easy to forget the importance of community and family. In fact, I would say that where it is not forgotten it is significantly undervalued.

This is underscored by a recent survey of Australia’s electorates on the basis of wellbeing, conducted by Deakin University. The survey, reported by the Australian today, found that the saddest electorate was in the richest and most expensive city in the country—Sydney—while the happiest electorate, Wide Bay in Queensland, was one of the poorest. In standards of living, health and connection to community, Wide Bay came out on top. Moreover, eight of the top nine happiest electorates were poor and isolated rural communities where there is a sense of wellbeing and pulling together by the local community.

These results illustrate how vital the sense of community is to our overall wellbeing and our commitment to the general community. In a world full of rhetoric, the phrase ‘a sense of community’ gets lost. But it is not intangible. You only have to think about sections of a community to understand its role and importance as a whole—its importance as a whole to Australia as a nation. Those sections are the young, the old, the sick, the disabled and the poor and less privileged in the Australian community.

However, it is not simply the vulnerable and weak who look to community for support. It is the most successful among us. When you ask leaders in a community how they succeeded to their positions within society, they invariably point to their dependence on others—a sense of team and community effort. Sir Gustav Nossal said:

... very few achievements are made alone and so much depends on collaborators, networks and people one has influenced.

Westpac’s David Morgan argues that leaders are, for the most part, not born but bred. That is, our environment is critical to our success, our sense of community. David Morgan said:

We are all remarkably adaptable beings and our experiences, especially in our early formative years, are crucial in developing our capacities.

For those reasons, I indicate my full support for the motion moved by the member for Cook this afternoon. It is exceptionally important. I referred to Sir Gustav Nossal’s advice and that of David Morgan from Westpac. The advice is well known in terms of where these people stand. I also want to quote advice from a well-known national campaigner on equality and human rights, the chair of Victoria’s Equal Opportunity Commission, Fiona Smith. She said:

Identify and connect with your community—no matter what forms the basis of it.

I reiterate her words for all Australians: identify with your local community, support your local community and do whatever you can to strengthen your local community.

I commend the motion to the House and encourage all Australians to work with and support their local, regional, state and national communities. It is about time we moved away from a dog-eat-dog approach to society and accepted our full responsibility to get involved in our local communities, to try to help overcome some of the difficulties which are faced by the less privileged. Without that commitment and accepting of responsibility, we will unfortunately, if we are not very careful, create a society of haves and have-nots. That—unfortunately the case in many countries beyond Australia—is the last thing we want to occur in Australia. Many people from overseas want to come to Australia, because of our past success in creating a sense of community.

In conclusion, I simply remind the House that, if we are about maintaining a sense of community and a willingness to go together as a community in Australia, then it is the responsibility of all of us to pull our weight to achieve such an outcome. If we are not careful from time to time, it can be easily lost.

Michael Johnson (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to speak in the parliament today and to support very strongly the motion of my friend and colleague the member for Cook. The motion is in relation to the United Nations Association of Australia, Division of New South Wales, putting forward a resolution that calls for this year to be declared the National Year of the Community. I want to quote the website of the New South Wales Division of the United Nations Association of Australia. It says:

The UNAA has declared 2006 as the National Year of Community. This is an opportunity for people all over Australia to celebrate living in their local, regional, state and national communities. It is hoped that this year will allow people to build stronger community links.

I am particularly delighted to be able to speak in the parliament today on behalf of the electorate of Ryan, which I have the great privilege of representing. I read in today’s Australian that the electorate of Ryan ranks sixth as one of the happiest constituencies in this great country.

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They’ve got a great local member.

Michael Johnson (Ryan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

One of the reasons might be because of strong representation from their local member, but a more compelling reason might be because of the character of the Australians who make up the Ryan constituency. Part of the character of the Ryan community is its sense of community. This is a community which is very much dedicated to helping each other; this is a community which comes together and contributes very strongly and very genuinely to the wider society.

People from all over the world come to Australia to make this country their home and they do so for many reasons. They do so, of course, because of the great values that we cherish: the values of democracy and the values of freedom. Freedom includes freedom to publish, freedom to associate, freedom to practise our own faiths and, indeed, the freedom to protest—of course, the key point about that last one is that it is the freedom to protest peacefully.

One of the other reasons I think people come to Australia is the sense of community, and I want to give some figures in relation to the generosity of Australians. The Giving Australia report published in October 2005 estimated that the giving of money, goods and services to non-profit organisations by individuals and businesses totalled in excess of $11 billion a year. This excluded the enormous amount of resources given in response to the Asian tsunami crisis in late 2004 and early 2005. This comprised $7.7 billion from an estimated 13.4 million individuals—or 80 per cent of adult Australians—in the year to January 2005; and $3.2 billion from almost 536,000 businesses—or 67 per cent of all businesses—in the 2003-04 financial year.

I mentioned that the Ryan electorate is very generous. I want to bring the House’s attention to two young Australians who will be representing the Ryan electorate at the National Youth Roundtable here in Canberra. We all know that the National Youth Roundtable is the centrepiece of the Australian government’s youth consultation mechanism. It brings young people between the ages of 15 and 24 to Canberra from all over this land to discuss some of the important issues that impact not only on them as young people and as young Australians but also on issues that affect the wider community and their country, Australia.

I want to pay tribute to Naomi Lim from Middle Park in the Ryan electorate, who is 17 and is completing her final year in school. She is an active volunteer in her local community and is interested in the issue of drug and alcohol abuse among young people, addressing Indigenous issues and, in particular, confronting prejudice. That is something that we in this House and indeed in this parliament must work together to not only minimise but indeed to eliminate from the fabric of our community.

The other young Australian from the Ryan electorate is Eve Campbell from St Lucia. Eve is 23. She recently started working for the Australian Red Cross and she is a member of the Army Reserve. She is interested in education, homeless issues and access to justice for young people. These are two, fine young Australians who very much embody the notion of community—the subject of this motion.

I want to commend once again my friend and colleague the member for Cook, who has a reputation in this parliament and in this country for his very strong sense of justice and for his very strong sense of community focus. In the parliament today I want to congratulate very strongly all those in the Ryan community and all those in my home state of Queensland who contribute their time very generously to make this country great. Of course, part of that is because of their sense of community and their generosity of spirit.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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)

Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I also support this motion put forward by the member for Cook. It truly behoves every member of this parliament to engage in often complex questions about what can strengthen community, what the role of government is and how much can be done from the ground up—from community efforts. It would be difficult to start anywhere other than with the works of Robert Putnam and others, who first promoted the notion of social capital back in the 1980s—Bourdieu and Coleman were in fact the first to coin the term. Since that time, many social researchers have worked hard to determine what exactly can promote social capital. We all seem to be able to define it, but what actually delivers more social capital and what does not? What works in the community sector?

To define the term, obviously we are all familiar with financial capital and physical capital but, as Eva Cox pointed out in her 1995 Boyer lectures, there is just not enough focus on the sense of social capital and the things that can promote it. To put it into simple terms, social capital is about building an inclusive community where many of the social norms are neither written nor spoken but still understood, and where individuals can have shared and mutual trust. One would hope that through the work of the 2006 National Year of Community we can promote more enterprising and more vibrant communities that have more room for individual expression and that are able to form the cross-cutting cleavages that bring people from different backgrounds together on potentially common and agreed grounds.

It was Putnam who attempted to quantify it by looking at the number of small community groups that exist in a society. He argued that where there were small community groups that brought together people from potentially different groups—cutting across political, ethnic and religious divides—there was better class and school retention and there were lower levels of crime. There is no more stark an illustration of this than the difficulties we saw in southern Sydney just recently. One wondered where the social norms were—those unwritten rules which allow respect for different points of view, without the whole thing breaking down into the kind of farce we witnessed a month ago.

Reciprocity within a community includes the understanding that we are looking out for each other. That seems so simple to say, but it is something that has been very difficult to quantify. There are many parts of the world where there is no social capital and very little trust, and when a situation arises those communities must rely more on rules and regulations to ensure they have some sort of stability. The hope is that with a strong community that would not be the case. I refer to my electorate of Bowman, where a number of community driven programs are receiving support from all levels of government. That is the way it should be. Australians expect that there be programs—such as a community garden program—that bring people together from different backgrounds to share a common resource, without overutilising it, without free riders and where there is a common concern that that garden be something of beauty and utility that everyone can enjoy.

We also have a number of community groups that do enormous amounts of work, including some of the great Indigenous groups in my electorate. Goori House is one in particular that now has very strong government support. It looks out for young people who are having difficulties with substance misuse and helps them to get the life skills they need to re-engage with the community confidently. Goori House does that in an excellent manner.

Dell Bonner, a lady who lives in the southern part of my electorate, has just been named ‘Redlander of the Year’ in the Australia Day awards. Dell Bonner has held together her Neighbourhood Watch group for nearly a quarter of a decade. While people have moved from one community group to another, she has been a stalwart. She is a person that the entire community can come to and discuss community issues with, openly and frankly. Through the toughest of times, Dell Bonner has looked out for her community of Victoria Point. They are some examples from my electorate, but certainly in the end it is up to every person within a community to manage the place in which we live and which we love. There are many people doing that in my electorate. I strongly support the motion put today by the member for Cook. The year 2006 is the National Year of Community.

Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Link to 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.

…            …            …

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.

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 1.45 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting. The honourable member for Reid will have leave to continue his remarks when the debate is resumed.