The Federal Labor Party is taking its first tentative steps away from the more extreme elements of the Howard government’s economic fundamentalism. One of the influences has been the electoral successes of state Labor governments. The lessons are not that complicated. Australians still want to live in a country where the water is drinkable; community services, health care and public transport are accessible and reliable; and schools and universities are sufficiently affordable to provide ground for optimism about the future of their children and grandchildren. Australians want to live in reasonably friendly, reasonably safe, reasonably supportive communities. This last expectation may also help explain the resurgence of interest by state and local governments in a diverse array of initiatives under the broad banner of building, strengthening and engaging local communities.
The goals and strategies of ‘community building’, or ‘community development’ as it was more commonly known 30 years ago, are far from new and continue to raise questions. There is an understandable suspicion that ‘community building’ is just a smokescreen, obscuring underlying structural inequalities and conflicts. No government looks forward to making hard decisions about the redistribution of, and public investment in, health, education and community services. And inviting a few local community leaders to comment on such decisions does not constitute community engagement.
There are many ongoing experiments in community engagement that appear to be making a difference where it counts, although all are still in their early days. In Victoria, the Wendouree West Neighbourhood Renewal program, the Aboriginal Justice Agreement implementation strategy and the Glenelg Hopkins Catchment Management Authority are three such examples. These may serve to illustrate some of the benefits and limitations of community development projects.
Wendouree West Neighbourhood Renewal: ‘Everybody here will want to be here.’
Wendouree West was established as a public housing estate on the western edge of Ballarat in 1950 and now has a population of 2500. This is certainly not a slum: its layout and appearance are textbook Housing Commission-styled suburbia in a semi-rural setting. However poverty, unemployment and crime have been rubbing shoulders with the problems of limited access to health and education services, and to mainstream Ballarat life, since the late 1960s.
For this reason, Wendouree West has been one of the priority sites for the Victorian government’s Neighbourhood Renewal program designed to use community-building strategies to narrow the gap between the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods in Victoria and the rest of the state.
Faye Macintosh