Page 1819 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 7 June 2006
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situation where we know that this is one of the key obstructions to people being able to deal with other factors in their lives, such as their work, their education and their transport.
Of course, the government does have some self-interest in resolving this issue. I am not denying that it has taken an ethical stance here, but there is no doubt that the cost of providing alternative residences for 102 households would be prohibitive—indeed, it may be logistically impossible—and the cost of subsiding the moving of these people, if indeed we could find somewhere that they could park their mobile homes, would be a minimum of $110 a kilometre and a couple of hundred dollars would need to be thrown into each of those for the hire of cranes. So, one way or another, the government would be very heavily out of pocket.
Funding replacement services that are offered by just living in that park cannot be quantified. Indeed, many of them cannot even be named because they are invisible. They are at the level of just noticing whether someone has opened their blinds that day, whether someone has collected their mail, the kinds of thing you can see as you walk past a house and the kinds of things that are very difficult to provide and very expensive to provide as community services.
I attended a barbecue the other day at the park and was talking to an elderly woman who told me that her father-in-law had been one of Canberra’s earliest citizens, had lived here long before the lake was here. I think that sometimes we forget when we talk about the history of this place that most of Canberra’s earlier settlers were not Campbells and landholders, but low-paid workers, many of whom were never in a position to own their own property. Some of their descendants are among the residents of the park and they still are not in a position to own their own block of land. Nonetheless, they feel as though they belong here, they feel as though they have a right to stay here, and they contribute immeasurably to our community.
Mr Speaker, I am very concerned that, if the Canberra community fails to secure a good resolution for the people in this park, we will in a sense have shown that we have lost our social concern, that we are very happy for the yuppification of Canberra to proceed apace and that there is no place in this town for people who cannot afford the high private rents and cannot afford the prices for buying a dwelling of any kind.
I turn to the federal government’s corporate social responsibility discussion paper, which I did allude to before. This relates to the part of my motion which, I note, the Stefaniak amendment actually takes out. In fact, I note that the Stefaniak amendment excludes every part of the motion, which is very worrying, I believe. Perhaps he will explain that later.
The paper notes that the terms “corporate social responsibility” and “corporate social accountability” lack a precise fixed meaning and that some descriptions focus on compliance with the spirit as well as the letter of applicable laws regulating corporate conduct, while other descriptions concentrate on the societal impacts of corporate activities. Those who think that mere compliance with the letter of the law is enough to satisfy their obligation to the society that protects, nurtures and ultimately supports them are obviously in the “don’t get it” camp.
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