Love their work but is the Canberra Citizen of the Year Award the best way to honour them? Photo: Dominic Giannini.
For the third year in a row, the Canberra Citizen of the Year Award has gone to a group of people rather than an individual who has made a major contribution to the community.
This year all the Canberrans who have enacted the Territory’s public health response to the COVID-19 pandemic were jointly named the 2021 Canberra Citizen of the Year.
Last year it was all members of the ACT Emergency Services Agency and ACT Parks and Conservation Service for their response to the unprecedented bushfires during the Black Summer of 2019-2020.
In 2019, the University of Canberra Capitals team and their supporters got the nod for being the 2018-19 WNBL champions.
You then have to go back to 2010 when the Rotary Clubs were recognised and further back to 2003 when everybody was recognised after the trauma of the bushfires that killed four people and destroyed 500 homes.
It may seem churlish to call this seeming trend to collective praise into question when the recipients have worked so hard and played significant roles in the community in what will always be seen as seminal periods in ACT history, but the award criteria has now taken on such a wide brief that its value is diminishing.
One has to ask whether there is a lack of individuals doing good works and/or impacting the community, or whether the judges suffer from something of a lack of imagination.
Some might argue that as much as the health workers, ESA and ACT Parks and Conservation service staff are to be praised, thanked and appreciated for their efforts, the bottom line is they are doing their jobs.
Much like the other public servants who regularly turn up on the Honours lists every year. Or the police, who put their lives on the line every day.
And should a professional sporting team take the glory and honour away from individuals whose service is usually self-less and makes a real difference in the community?
As a Weston Creek resident, I know what impact the 2003 fires had on the city’s psyche, but should the Citizen of the Year Award be used for group hugs?
There is something anti-climactic and deflating for an award like this which is meant to be inspirational to be reduced to an exercise in collective consciousness or group-think.
Awards are made to honour and reward excellence in achievement to those who stand out from the rest, who have taken a path less trodden to give something of themselves that most of us won’t.
We need our heroes, and mostly they come in ones, not whole agencies.
The award is for Canberra Citizen of the Year. The ACT Government should remember that next year when hopefully it can find someone in the community who deserves the accolade because every time these group honours are made, these people are overlooked.
I doubt whether it would have to search too far to find Canberrans with amazing life stories doing extraordinary things that lift us all up, or as the website says, promotes our civic pride.
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