Kindness and empathy would go a long way towards solving the ACT’s problems of disadvantage and inequality, Dr Emma Campbell believes. As CEO of the ACT Council of Social Service (ACTCOSS), the social conscience of Canberra, she lived by those principles, and held the government to account by them.

Dr Campbell’s three-year term at ACTCOSS’s helm ended this week. She has steered her organisation and its cargo of vulnerable Canberrans through some of the most turbulent years in the ACT’s history – the COVID pandemic, the cost of living and housing crises – and leaves with pride in ACTCOSS’s achievements, sadness at bidding her team farewell, and frustration that ACTCOSS and its work are still needed.

• ACTCOSS CEO Dr Emma Campbell to leave in February (1 November 2022)

She believes that she has taken ACTCOSS (which turns 60 this year) back to its roots as a “brave, outspoken, uncompromising, social justice organisation”, and included everyone in Canberra in the debate about making the city better.

“I came into this job not for a career, but to actually make a difference,” Dr Campbell said. “I think that I’ve been able to encourage the community and the government to really pay attention to the issues that impact the most vulnerable in our community and the issues that we really need to address if we want to make Canberra fairer, more sustainable, and more just.”

While she says Canberrans are good people – open-minded, caring, and progressive – many are unaware of the inequality, inequity, and disadvantage on their doorsteps: 38,000 people living in poverty in Canberra, more than 9,000 of whom are children; struggling migrants and refugees; more than 2,000 homeless people; and some of the worst over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the child protection and justice systems.

Many of these people often find themselves in difficult situations through no fault of their own, Dr Campbell believes; if government policies, systems, and practices understood that, and were kinder, they would achieve many of the outcomes that ACTCOSS hopes for.

• Canberra an especially hard place to be poor: Anti-Poverty Week report (18 October 2022)
• Governments respond to community sector’s poverty plea (21 October 2022)
• ACTCOSS: Cost of living worsens one year after lockdown (28 August 2022)

“This is a great city to live in, but there are many people who are not as lucky as the majority of us,” Dr Campbell said.

“The fact that we see this happening in the ACT, which has the highest median income of any jurisdiction in Australia, makes it really unacceptable.”

With her contract ending this month, she believes it is a good time to hand over the reins of ACTCOSS to someone who can switch from bringing people’s attention to these issues to a new phase of working with the government to solving them.

Triumphs and frustrations

Dr Campbell said she was most proud of ACTCOSS’S pandemic response. “We directly supported the most vulnerable in our community … but also played a really important role in helping the government in a very constructive, positive, and co-operative way, which we often do.”

The organisation helped the government to shape its policy, and react in a timely way to realities, by passing information from frontline workers and vulnerable people to then-Minister for Community Services and Facilities, Suzanne Orr, and key bureaucrats. “I think the policy and the response wouldn’t have been as good had we not been so proactive and hardworking in doing that.”

At the same time, ACTCOSS, in partnership with Carers ACT, disseminated COVID information to more than 500 small, unfunded community organisations that represent migrants and refugees. Dr Campbell attributes the ACT’s high vaccination levels to ACTCOSS brokering relationships between the ACT government / ACT Health and organisations that work with marginalised Canberrans (homeless people, people with problematic drug and alcohol use, people in social housing, people who do not trust health providers).

She was also proud of ACTCOSS and Canberra Community Law’s campaign against the government’s Growing and Renewing Public Housing program, which forced public housing residents to vacate their homes. Some had lived in their homes for more than 50 years; others had dementia or complex mental health issues.

In Dr Campbell’s opinion, it was “deeply unfair”. Her campaign, she said, persuaded or forced the government to put in place a robust appeals process that protected the most vulnerable from inappropriate forced relocations; many people received reprieves through the appeals process, and will remain in their homes.

• ACTCOSS: ACT public housing policy ‘heartless and cruel’ (3 March 2022)
• Minister Berry refutes ACTCOSS’ public housing relocation claims (4 April 2022)

“It demonstrates why organisations like ACTCOSS are really important in bringing the voices of a number of people together to represent their issues to government,” Dr Campbell said.

But the worsening over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the justice and out-of-home care systems frustrates Dr Campbell.

Indigenous people in the ACT are 21 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous people, while Indigenous children are 29 per cent of the out-of-home care cohort, but only 3 per cent of the ACT population. ACTCOSS has worked with Winnunga Nimmityjah Aboriginal Health and Community Services and Gugan Gulwan Youth Aboriginal Corporation to get the message out that this injustice happens here, Dr Campbell said.

“The majority of people in Canberra really do want to have true reconciliation and true justice for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples,” she said. “But there’s a perception that these injustices are happening elsewhere … not in Canberra.”

• Royal Commission needed for Indigenous disadvantage (28 January 2022)
• ACT’s $20M response to Aboriginal overincarceration ‘not enough’ (27 July 2022)
• Review finds conditions for ACT prisoners have worsened (30 November 2022)

While the ACT Government has committed to fix these issues – an external and internal review mechanism of out-of-home care; appointing an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children’s commissioner; a community-controlled drug and rehabilitation centre in the offing – Dr Campbell believes this is happening too slowly.

“If we’re serious about justice and reconciliation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, we need to really prioritise those issues.”

• ACT Government takes Next Steps for child protection (4 June 2022)
• Bill to recruit Aboriginal child commissioner passes Assembly (29 November 2022)
• Chair appointed to Our Booris, Our Way committee (7 December 2022)

The worsening housing crisis is another frustration. According to ACTCOSS’s annual poverty factsheet (October), Canberra is the least affordable Australian city to rent in for low-to-moderate income households, people receiving income support, young people, and essential workers.

Again, the ACT has the highest rate of rental stress in Australia among lower income private rental households, at 73 per cent (up from one-third in 2019). The ACT has an estimated shortfall of 3,100 housing properties, and 8,500 more social housing dwellings are needed by 2036, but there is less public housing now than in 2012.

“There has not yet been a significant shift in policy in the ACT Government to focus on the delivery of more social and affordable housing,” Dr Campbell said.

“The housing crisis in the ACT is in many ways the root of many other of our problems. You can’t have rehabilitation in our justice system if you don’t have anywhere to live. Often, interaction with the child protection system is because women and children don’t have secure housing; they can’t leave violent situations because there’s nowhere for them to go. Your health outcomes are going to be much poorer if you don’t have safe and secure housing.”

ACTCOSS has put housing at the centre of the debate, Dr Campbell believes.

Now, she says, the government is starting to engage community housing providers to deliver additional social housing – the best way at the moment to deliver large numbers of affordable homes, so that the public housing system can focus on social housing for people in the lowest income quintile.

“There is a move there, but again, it’s about speed, it’s about priority. And again, I don’t see that urgency and prioritising that I would like to see, and that’s the frustration.”

• Low-income ACT renters struggle needing 117% of income to pay rent (29 November 2022)
• Community sector backs Parton’s motion to fix ACT housing crisis (8 February 2022)

Next plans

Dr Campbell will take up a full-time position as director of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) – a position she has held part-time since May – while she looks for her next substantive role, possibly in academia or with another not-for-profit organisation.

She has experience of both. She holds a PhD in Korean politics from the Australian National University (2011), and has been a visiting fellow at the ANU (2014–2020) and lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney (2018–22).

But she insists there is not a big schism between working overseas for an airline (she was a manager at Cathay Pacific, in India, Korea, and Hong Kong, from 2001 to 2007), or studying social policy, immigration, and inclusion in Korea, and her work at ACTCOSS.

Her thesis examined young South Koreans’ attitudes to unification with North Korea and to North Korean migrants; it concerned belonging, identity, and interactions between immigration status, ethnicity, and socio-economic circumstances – themes that recurred in her work as CEO of the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (2016–18), the peak national body representing culturally and linguistically diverse Australians.

Her involvement with MSF began a decade ago. She was a change manager / project administrator in Swaziland (2011–12), an emergency project administrator in Sierra Leone (2014), and an international human resources and administration co-ordinator in Lebanon (2015). That work also combined her business experience with her PhD work around migrants and refugees.

While working overseas may seem more glamorous, she believes it is as exciting and rewarding to work in your local community.

“There are huge injustices going on in Australia,” she said. “Whilst I’ve really enjoyed and felt very proud of the work that I’ve done in overseas aid, the work that we do here in your own community, and in your own city, is just as important, because you need to learn about what’s happening here for you to really play your part as a citizen and as a voter…

“The things I do at ACTCOSS are everything I believe in personally. It’s more than just my job. I’m just incredibly lucky to be paid for it, but I think all of us here want to live the values that we have at work in our lives as well.”

Dr Campbell urges people to be speak out about disadvantage in the ACT.

“Now, that’s not to say you shouldn’t also work co-operatively with the government to try to fix these things, but we can’t be silent.

“I really hope that ACTCOSS continues to hold onto its original roots of social activism, of speaking out, of being brave, of being determined to highlight where there is injustice in the ACT. Not everyone can do that. They don’t have the time. The risk is too high for them. So, it must be people like myself who have the space, who have the capacity, who do not have much to lose in speaking out who do it. And so if you can, don’t keep quiet. But also say thank you when you see that things have gone well.”