Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I have lived a very lucky life, like many people in our community. I have good genes. I had good parents. We were not rich by any means, but I was well raised. I have not had the floor pulled out from underneath through the loss of a loved one or ill health or the many circumstances that can smash into you and break your life apart. Those of us who are members of parliament meet those people in our offices every day.

It occurs to me that there is a great irony in life that at the time when you do not really need to make big changes to your life, because your life is going well, you have all the capacity you need to actually make the change. You have friends, financial security and a belief and ability to control your life, at the very time when you need it least. It is ironic that at times when you really do need to pick yourself off the floor life can have taken that capacity from you, through grief, through extraordinary loss, through illness or just through grinding poverty, when you do not have the capacity or the energy to make your life better.

Volunteers step into that gap, not with their money but with their spare capacity. That is what makes volunteers special. They are people who believe they can change the world and have the capacity in them to do it, who lend that capacity to someone who does not. That is what they do, and that is what makes it valuable. They do something that taxpayers cannot pay for—their community—they lend their spare capacity. They are remarkable people. We all have many of them, and we thank them every day.

I think that the government's policy decision to remove the funding from the volunteer management services shows it does not understand that bringing together the person with the capacity and the person without the capacity is not as easy as it looks. It is easy through organisations that we know well, such—St John Ambulance, perhaps, Salvation Army; the really well known organisations—but what if you are a person who has unique skills: you have accounting skills, an ability in social enterprise, and you are looking for a good match? That is what these volunteer services do; they are actually the matchmaker. They put together the person with the capacity and the person without the capacity in a way that only a professional organisation can do, because the infrastructure in the organising role that these volunteer management services do is about who they know, what they know and their networks within the community. Those kinds of networks, which are the genuine infrastructure which supports volunteer services cannot be done on a volunteer basis, because they require longevity of relationship building, of comprehension, of understanding your community; skill and experience in knowing where those matches are; and, of course, knowing all the laws that governments do impose on volunteers, such as insurance, food handling, health and safety—all the things that a volunteer might need to learn before that person can go in and give their capacity to someone in need. They may need training in working with people with trauma, for example. They may need a greater understanding of working with people with mental illness. There are lots and lots of things that volunteers need.

The providing of that training, the seeing of those gaps and the filling of those gaps is a professional job. That is what it is, it is a professional job. It is currently handled by the Centre for Volunteering. In my community it is handled by Leep incredibly well. There are very few organisations in Parramatta that do not use the services of Leep to augment their volunteer staff and to train them for the work they will do. They are incredibly important organisations. To assume that the entire volunteer sector can just appear out of the ground without that kind of overview, without the skill in knowing the needs of the community and the unmet needs and without there being a matchmaker is a little naive.

I would like to acknowledge the many organisations in my community that work with volunteers: Lifeline, Shakti et cetera. They are incredible organisations that do great work. I do not have time, unfortunately, to talk about them all today, but I would urge the government to rethink this decision. It is a relatively small amount of money for organisations that dramatically increase the volunteer participation in our community. They are incredibly important roles and they cannot be done on a volunteer basis, because they need the continued longevity of their relationships and their knowledge.

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