Corporate Social Responsibility

The National Group has continued to develop and implement a range of innovative and effective community involvement programs.

Our Group recognises that the communities in which we operate expect us to do more than provide banking and financial services. They want us to directly contribute to achieving broad social and economic goals, while supporting local community services and projects.

In seeking to meet local expectations we have focussed on four areas: community consultation; the involvement of employees in community life; community investment; and partnerships with major community services and volunteer groups.

Our most innovative and successful initiative has been the National CommunityLink program conceived by staff members in Melbourne - and now recognised as one of the most influential community involvement programs in Australia.

It recently received an award from the Prime Minister of Australia for excellence in "business - community" partnerships.

CommunityLink is a series of projects designed to promote the value of community service and volunteerism. It includes partnerships with leading community service groups; Australia's major awards program for volunteerism; a national magazine that promotes excellence in volunteerism; and employee outreach projects that enable our top young managers to be involved with community service groups.

As a result of the success of this program, CommunityLink is being extended Group wide. The first international project will be in the United Kingdom.

While we have other highly successful community projects in the United States, Europe and New Zealand, our overall community involvement effort must be integrated into a broader approach to the issue of corporate social responsibility.

We will continue with our community involvement programs including CommunityLink, Michigan National's Community Development programs, Bank of New Zealand's environmental protection projects and Europe's conservation and outreach activities.

These will form the "community" component of an integrated approach to meeting the needs of our stakeholders - employees; customers; shareholders; and communities.

Corporate social responsibility is best described as a "genuine commitment to meeting the needs and expectations of all stakeholders".

Only if we meet our obligations to our shareholders and our employees, will we be able to provide the service standards and product quality our customers expect of us.

However, the fulfilment of these key stakeholder needs does not meet all our obligations.

We also need to work actively with our local communities to address issues of mutual concern. In the case of major banks that means we need to address issues such as affordable access to our services, for groups in society with particular disadvantages.

For us to be seen as a "socially responsible" organisation, all of our stakeholders need to accept that we are genuine in our efforts to address broad social issues.

Clearly, we have some way to go before that occurs. However, we are increasing both our consultative activities and the investments we make in significant community programs.