Page 4026 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 20 September 2017
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Sewerage actually is still a live issue in Canberra. As members may know, I used to live in Downer, and there has been considerable planned expansion of housing in Downer. The Downer Community Association for many years has been campaigning for a sewer upgrade before there is any housing expansion. The late Di Fielding was our convenor for many years, and we normally referred to it as the “Di Fielding memorial sewer”. I understand it has been planned but not yet constructed. This sort of stuff is still an issue for an affluent, well-run city like Canberra.
As I said, these everyday things make such a huge difference to how people live their lives. It is not so much about a convention centre, and for most people in Canberra it is not so much about light rail. It is about things like your rates bill and it is the footpath that you walk on every day. Almost all of us walk on footpaths on a regular basis, and I have met a number of people who feel they cannot leave their houses in safety because their local footpaths are not in good enough condition. And if it seems that the bus is running late, it means your kids do not get to school on time or you do not get to work on time.
There is another useful phrase from previous times. I have known about this one for some time because it is from the second wave of feminism—that is, “the personal is political”. When Carol Hanisch coined that phrase, she was referring to personal relationships and the invisibility of the private lives of women to the public world of politics. But it is just as relevant to the personal interactions people have with public utilities and private space. The personal is political.
This is one of the things that the Women’s Centre for Health Matters have been doing with their mapping of where people feel safe in the public space and where they do not. I think Ms Lawder has also heard some presentations from the women’s centre on this issue. It is certainly an instance of the personal being political. Of course, right now, the best example of that—it is not city services, I admit—is the marriage equality debate, where the personal has become well and truly political.
With respect to another instance, one of the major reasons that the modern world has drinking fountains is because of the struggles of early feminist movements like the Temperance Union. They did not want people drinking alcohol, so they wanted water available everywhere. The reason that we have public sewers and public toilets, and the whole idea of public health services, is due to firebrand reformers like Edwin Chadwick, George Jennings, Robert Owen and Josephine Butler, and their compatriots all around the world who pushed for reforms in their own countries.
There is an example in recent memory of what happens when we lose sight of the most vulnerable in municipal matters and start pretending it is all apolitical. Across our cities, and even in Canberra, we have seen the rise of “aggressive architecture”; that is, architecture which has been made with the purpose of punishing and isolating the homeless, poverty stricken and most vulnerable members of our societies, such as having extra bars on public benches. You may have noticed that all the benches in the open areas of the ACT have little bumps on them. If you have wondered why, that is because officially we do not like skateboarders anymore. Also, we have often replaced square windowsills with rounded ones.
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