Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about a program in my community that has been incredibly successful. It's called the Greater Shepparton Community Connector Program, and I want to talk a bit about its genesis and how a partnership with government made it happen. We firstly identified the problem. Greater Shepparton has an incredibly vibrant economy. A lot of jobs are available, but we were having real trouble filling them. When professional people, particularly, were moving to the regions, they'd move back to the city in many cases after six months or a year because they hadn't made any connections. The Committee for Greater Shepparton, of which I was the CEO, and the Greater Shepparton City Council looked at this problem, and we talked to Dr Cath Cosgrave. Dr Cosgrave had done a Churchill fellowship to Canada in 2019 and found a very successful program called the Health Workforce Recruiter Connector position in Ontario. We worked with Dr Cosgrave to adapt that to the Goulburn Valley, and came up with the Community Connector Program. The Community Connector Program had a staff, and it got hold of people who had just moved to the region for a job—in many case a professional job—and helped those people to find schooling for their children if that was required, to find housing—either a rental or a house to purchase—if that was required, and to link with community groups in their areas of interest, if they were interested in sport, the arts or anything else going on. We found the community groups those people were interested in, and they made friends and they made connections immediately in the community. It enhanced the chance they would stay and provide their incredibly needed services to whatever professional job they had gotten.

The program has been hugely successful. People now come to Greater Shepparton for a job and they stay because they connect immediately. What that needed was the grassroots initiative of the community, but it also needed the assistance of government through funding. The Committee for Greater Shepparton went to the previous coalition government and said, 'Here's our idea,' and the then minister for water, Minister Pitt, found the funding to operate that program. It's what I call grassroots policy development and government saying, 'We don't know best here in Canberra; you know what works in your community, and we're going to back you and help you out with it.' The success of this program is testament to that approach. I see this government is a bit more Canberra centric: 'Here's a bucket, here's a program we've developed, your program has to fit within that.' I think this is a really good example of partnership between community and government. It's worked incredibly well in my community, and I hope to see more of it.