Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) acknowledges the almost 6 million Australian volunteers who contribute 600 million hours each year to help others through secular and faith-based volunteering organisations;

(2) notes that:

(a) in early 2020, two out of every three volunteers cut back their hours, including many older volunteers who had to self-isolate, leaving charities short by an estimated 12.2 million hours per week; and

(b) only around one in four volunteer organisations managed to get volunteer participation back to pre-pandemic levels of activity by the start of 2021;

(3) recognises that while volunteering organisations have been supporting much greater numbers of people in need with fewer resources during the coronavirus pandemic, there was nothing in the Government's latest budget for volunteers; and

(4) calls on the Government to get behind our volunteer organisations and make sure they have the resources they need to continue their important work.

When you're lucky enough to be elected as a member of parliament you meet the best people, people who volunteer, give their time and capacity every day to help others. And in this time of COVID I particularly want to pay tribute to the six million Australian volunteers who contribute around 600 million hours each year to helping others. They are the backbone of our secular and our faith-based community organisations. This became all the more obvious during the coronavirus pandemic when volunteering organisations stepped up when the Morrison government was absent.

In my electorate volunteers mobilised to feed thousands of people, including temporary visa holders, international students, refugees and asylum seekers who received no support from the government when they lost work last year. Unfortunately, for most organisations this has meant doing more with less because as demand shot up many volunteers had to opt out. In early 2020 two out of every three volunteers cut back their hours, including many older volunteers who had to self-isolate, leaving charities short by an estimated 12.2 million hours per week. Only around one in four organisations were able to get volunteer participation back to pre-pandemic levels of activity by the start of this year. I give my profound thanks to all of those individuals and organisations who stepped into the gap last year and who continue to do so at a time that is still of great need in our community.

When COVID hit hard last year there were huge gaps in the support that the Morrison government gave. We saw gaps in support for temporary visa holders, international students, refugees and asylum seekers and a number of organisations stepped in. The Sathya Sai organisation, which was established in 1960s by Sathya Sai Baba, is an organisation dedicated to providing service activities for people as a means for spiritual advancement. They participated in an interesting way last year. They stepped into the middle. Volunteers from the youth wing of Sri Sathya Sai International collected donations of staple foods like rice and flour from the front door of people's homes and distributed those to other organisations who would package them up for distribution to the community. A really interesting approach, stepping into a gap that existed, providing support to organisations who worked on the frontline. I thank the youth wing of Sri Sathya Sai International for an extraordinary contribution. I know that their service continues. It's a really extraordinary contribution at a time of great need.

An organisation that stepped into the gap last year when so many people were left behind was the Tamil Friends of Labor. With support from Sri Sathya Sai and the Tamil Resource Centre at Pendle Hill, volunteers at Tamil Friends of Labor delivered thousands of emergency food parcels last year. For the most part the parcels went to people who had been left out of the support packages. These included refugees, asylum seekers and temporary visa holders—people who received no support from the government during the pandemic.

I put my hand up to help with some of the deliveries—many, many others did too. They put in many more hours than I did, but in that short period I met people who'd been working in local restaurants who were the first to lose their jobs when the lockdown started, people let go because they weren't eligible for JobKeeper. I met one young refugee family living in a share house in Granville with a newborn baby. His dad had lost his job when COVID struck—one month before the baby was born. There was no money left for food and nappies. They were sharing that two bedroom house with two other families. Thank you so much to Tamil Friends of Labor for the work they did. I met so many people who were really struggling. It was a small amount of help but help that really made a difference.

I also want to talk about Parramatta Mission, one of the mainstays in my community that provides meals—breakfast, lunch—and other emergency services to people in most need. Their demand for services, including cooked meals and food, had absolutely skyrocketed when COVID struck. Like so many organisations, their regular volunteers are retirees so during the lockdown they lost most of them overnight. At the same time demand for their services skyrocketed. There was a 25 per cent increase in new people accessing their services and a 40 per cent increase in demand for food hamper relief. When the queues stretched outside the Centrelink office volunteers went down to tell people in the queue that they were there if they were needed. They met one man who, as soon as they spoke, broke down in tears because he'd never been out of work and had no idea how to feed his family. I thank Parramatta Mission and all the other volunteers so much for their efforts. They were absolutely there when our community needed them and we wouldn't have got through it without them.

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