National Volunteer Week

The Hon. A. PICCOLO (Light) (15:40): Today, I would like to touch upon an event happening next week right across Australia, and that is National Volunteer Week, when we acknowledge and celebrate the work undertaken by volunteers in our community.

Volunteering has been put to me as 'time willingly given for the common good without financial gain', and I think that sums up what volunteers do: they give up their time freely and they expect no financial gain. Even though that is such a simple definition of volunteering, it means so much more to our communities. In fact, I would say that without the work of volunteers our communities would be a lot poorer, and I will explain why in the next few minutes.

There is not an area of our community that is not touched by the hand of volunteers, whether it is aged care, disability support, emergency services, the arts, education, sport, environment, health, tourism, and general community wellbeing. In every nook and cranny of our communities, there is a volunteer presence helping out. The importance of volunteering is that they pick up where both governments and the market fail. They fill the gaps in our communities where both governments and free market enterprise do not deliver. That is important because there are a lot of people whose lives would be worse off without the important volunteers.

It has been estimated that from an economic point of view volunteers make a $46 billion contribution to Australia's economy—$46 billion. While that is important, I think some of the greater work that volunteers do is the social aspect of their work, connecting people and helping people to be connected. We just have to look back over the last 12 months, when the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that more people have been isolated because of restrictions in movement, etc. It is the work of volunteers over the past years and decades that has helped connect people.

A small but important example of this is Meals on Wheels, who deliver food to people who, for whatever reason, are not able to care for themselves. The reality is that for a lot of people that contact with the Meals on Wheels person at their door on a weekly or twice-weekly basis or whatever is the case may be the only contact they have with their community. That is sad but also important to note. Volunteers do a lot of work connecting communities and preventing people from being isolated.

As I mentioned, volunteers work in a whole range of areas. I am fortunate enough to have a number of volunteers working in my own office who help me and my staff to serve the community and they are happy to do so. I have a number of volunteers who provide a JP service in my office, and in my electorate we are the only nine to five JP service in the town, and that is only achieved because of the number of volunteers. I would like to acknowledge those volunteers who come in every week and do a half-day shift of JP duties, which means that my staff can perform other work. I would like to acknowledge Pat Adams, Shane Hennessy, Kym Reynolds, Jeff Jedani, Michael Johnson, Sandra Sullivan, Barry Neylon, Kim Potger, Jacqueline Raphael, Judy Gillett-Ferguson, David Pedler, Paul Little, Terry Francis and Linda Hopgood, who all provide support through the JP service in my office.

We have some volunteers who help out in the office: Rosanna Rigliotti, Kathryn Krieger and Muhammad Zaki Muhammad Sharif. We also have a number of volunteers who help from time to time with events: Pat Fabian, Isaac Solomon, Rebecca Vandepeear, Lea Rebane, and Charlie and Maureen Costin. We have a wonderful couple who come in regularly to help stuff envelopes in my office. It is one of those tasks that has to be done, a time-consuming but important task, and so I would just like to acknowledge Denise and Trevor Earl for their contribution in helping me to serve my community.

Another thing I would like to quickly touch on is the challenge we face in rebuilding our volunteer effort because of COVID-19. Some research has shown that up to two-thirds of volunteers no longer volunteer as a result of COVID. It is so important that we as a community and as a government help support the volunteer effort and work out what we need to do now to make sure we get those volunteer numbers up. Our communities need our volunteers. Thank you to all our volunteers.