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Building trusted relationships with our stakeholders, actively listening and responding appropriately to their needs, are all fundamental to ensuring ourbusiness practices and presence in local communities remain relevant.
Multi-stakeholder dialogue - globally
We are organisational stakeholders of the Global Reporting Initiative - a UN-sponsored program based in Amsterdam. As members, we participate in many forums to develop guidelines for stakeholder dialogue and reporting frameworks on environmental, social and economic impacts for companies.
Dialogue with stakeholder groups is an important mechanism to build social capacity and sustainable solutions to community issues and also enables stakeholders to gain insights into our business thinking and processes.
External Stakeholder Forum
For the last four years, National's Australian businesses have facilitated an External Stakeholder Forum. The External Stakeholder Forum has representatives from prominent environment, community service and consumer groups, and indigenous and rural communities. Since 1998 Tim Costello, CEO of World Vision Australia, has been the Chair.
The Forum has influenced the establishment of programs and facilities that seek to address financial services for low or vulnerable income members of the community. Products such as 'Step Up', the micro credit initiative and accounts for people receiving certain government benefits, are examples that the Forum is delivering tangible outcomes.
Green Capital
As a sponsor, we support the Total Environment Centre Green Capital Programs in Australia. The program aims to stimulate debate and raise awareness in Australia between environmental groups, community groups and business on environmental consequences of business operations and legislation. This year the topics for discussion have included the environmental footprints of corporations, pricing and market signals on carbon emissions and community expectations on transparency and accountability through triple bottom line reporting.
Quality of relationships
In 2004, we undertook external independent research in Australia to gauge the views of stakeholders who included media, opinion leaders, community groups, government and regulators. The aim of this research was to receive an external verification of the quality of our relationship with our external stakeholders.
The methodology used assessed the quality of the relationship and looked beyond satisfaction to also include elements of trust (integrity, dependability and competence), mutuality of control and commitment to relationships. The results demonstrate that our Australian stakeholders have understood that we are actively seeking to repair recent damage and focus on establishing a better quality of relationship with them. The results have given us key insights and will be used to improve our stakeholder programs in 2005.
Benchmark comparisons
We actively pursue a range of ways to communicate with our stakeholders to ensure we keep abreast of emerging community views and are able to respond to them in our business practices. Each year we participate in surveys that assess our performance against other global and Australian companies. These include the Dow Jones Group Sustainability Index globally and RepuTex® in Australia.
Click here to download a PDF of the Corporate Social Reponsibility Report 2004 (388KB)
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