36. Canberra Restorative Community Network
| Question | Response |
|---|---|
| Please provide a brief summary of your suggestion. | Continued support for Canberra as a Restorative City through the Canberra Restorative Community Network, its member organisations, individuals and projects. |
| What services do you believe are most important for the Territory? | Services that best address and meet the present and future needs of all Canberrans, are those that are most important for the Territory. Many of our existing services promote human wellbeing and human flourishing and provide needed additional support to us as individuals, our children, and families. Services can however, fall into a program-centric mindset, more focussed on ticking boxes than on their intended purpose and outcomes. As a result we might see high levels of 'busy-ness' and high costs, but disappointing results in terms of whether a positive difference was experienced by those at the receiving end. Other times, services intended for good, are experienced in a damaging way and actually do harm to individuals, their families and communities. Government, together with community, must acknowledge when this occurs and work to repair these harms and do better going forward. A whole-of-service system restorative approach would cover all those areas that have been identified in this budget consultation; health, education, justice & corrections, social inclusion, Indigenous, vulnerable, sports and recreation restorative environment (active travel, public transport/roads, urban renewal), arts and culture, economic growth, tax and concessions. |
| How can the Government deliver current services more efficiently and productively or to better meet the needs of Canberrans? | The Government can deliver a broad range of current services more efficiently and better by supporting, helping build and actively adopting a restorative approach across our service systems. A restorative approach takes a comprehensive and holistic view of the needs of Canberrans. It involves ongoing dialogue, learning and understanding of how various issues affect us as community members. It means government adopting a 'doing with' rather than a 'doing to' approach, collaborative problem-solving and decision making which is solution-focussed and forward looking rather than blaming and backward looking. Part of a restorative approach involves developing restorative practices, policies, processes, procedures and strategies. It is not a 'rolled out program' but a philosophy for living and how we want to live in community - at home, work, where we play and pray. The needs of Canberrans will be better met through restorative engagement and action. We see this from restorative initiatives internationally, including close to home, with our sister city Wellington and the work occurring in New Zealand across various service systems including health and child protection. |
| Are there particular services that you consider the Government should stop delivering or should deliver in a different way? | If we want to deliver services differently, we must also think differently about what we are currently doing. Since July 2015, Canberra has been involved in a community-wide conversation about Canberra becoming a Restorative City. The focus has been on exploring our interdependencies and how we might work together through an intentional restorative approach. To date, we have held workshops to build relationships across a number of areas include restorative health care and Indigenous health, elder abuse, family relationships, education, disability, sexual harassment and abuse, domestic violence, corrections, workplace conflict management, occupational health and safety. The Law Reform Advisory Council's current work on public housing and child protection will offer a number of insights and hopefully, possibilities and recommendations for future restorative engagement, planning and action. |
| Are there any new ways to generate revenue and/or services you consider that the community should make a direct contribution to (a fee for service)? | A number of national and international restorative initiatives that have been developed by communities with the support of government have resulted in large savings. Perhaps we need to be looking at generating savings before looking at generating revenue. We have become increasingly expectant of highly paid professionalised care when clearly worker shortages and costs are forcing us to rethink how we care for each other in community. Exploring how formal service systems can work together with informal communities of care would be one way of exploring a reduction in expenditure. |
| What can the Government do to make Canberra even more liveable? | More liveable cities are those that are more equitable and just. Current issues that cause on-going pain and suffering for our community members, need to be addressed.. This could include support for the Ngunnawal Elders in their vision for a residential healing farm and considering how as a community we can ensure their vision is realised. Paying better attention to building community trust, reaching out and build relationships across our differences, looking for common points of connection - these are all ways we can make Canberra more liveable. On-going community dialogue is critical. A restorative engagement requires building relationships, listening, learning and building an understanding of what issues affect people's lives and the impact of these issues. It involves an iterative process of inclusion, thinking creatively of ways to hear the voices that generally go unheard. Actively seeking out those affected by issues and encouraging them to be involved. Fostering new community collaborations on issues, adopting a restorative lens and approach can yield new ways of thinking and longer term solutions. Sadly the damage done to workers in our various systems cannot go unmentioned, in our schools, hospitals, statutory services to name a few. How we treat each other at work, the demands on and expectations of workers, who are also carers, partners, single parents, school volunteers, neighbours and hold multiple other identities apart from 'employee', 'teacher', 'nurse', 'case-worker', impacts on the health and wellbeing of the community overall and on safety and quality of services delivered by workers under unreasonable pressures and stresses. Psychological injury at work is often the result of negative, harmful and hurtful work cultures which create pain and suffering not only in the workplace but is then taken into our homes, impacting on those relationships as well. By Government supporting the work of the ACT Restorative Justice Unit, the Canberra Restorative Community Network, its members and organisations, we will be able to continue the work commenced in July 2015 on Canberra as a Restorative City. It is hoped that through this endeavour, Canberra will be a more liveable, equitable and just community. |