The Howard government's social coalition is a cop-out on social services

We need business to play a real part in addressing the growing divide between the wealthy and the poor. That means if you happen to be a private utility; you’re thinking about how your billing practices affect a person on income support, who for very good reasons, might need more time to pay their bill. If you’re a bank, it means thinking about products for low-income earners who can’t afford to keep a minimum monthly balance of $500 or $2000.

Ideas like Triple Bottom Line accounting are one way of beginning to address the issue, but only if they require business to account for the social obligation that is inherent in their everyday activities. You can’t pull down a boarding house for disability pensioners to make way for a luxury hotel, and then hope to redeem yourself by sponsoring a van that serves coffee to them once they’re on the street. The triple bottom line rhetoric is just rhetoric if organisations neglecting their core social responsibilities are allowed to balance the ledger with token activities.

Many organisations are already good corporate citizens. These organisations don’t need to be prodded with Government handouts in order to play their part. They can benefit from guidance from Government, but also from Government doing its bit.

John Howard has manipulated and distorted the social obligations of individuals and business alike. He has spent much of his time in office increasing the obligations on our unemployed while walking away from his. At the same time he has sought to define the social obligations placed on businesses in limited terms rather than encouraging them to look more broadly at their role in our society.

But it is difficult to ask businesses to take a closer look at the social obligations that lie within their core activities when you are trying to entice them to take on some of the many activities Government no longer provides.

The fact is we are all members of a community, not just cogs in a corporation. Both individually and collectively we all have a part to play in advancing the nation. Government most of all should be leading the way rather than using corporate Australia and the vulnerable to shield its failures.