Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources) Share this | Hansard source

Recently in Australia we celebrated National Volunteer Week. So, Mr Deputy Speaker, you can understand my concern when I read the Newcastle Herald last Saturday and saw on page 7 an article called ‘Helpers on the outer’. The article outlines a deal by the New South Wales Labor Party for the Premier’s awards in New South Wales to exclude anyone who is not in a Labor held seat from receiving a Premier’s award. This is political bias at its worst.

Two people have been highlighted in this, one from my electorate of Paterson. Mrs Hope Simpson is a lady from Karuah who is an advocate of the Tidy Towns Committee, has worked with Karuah Meals on Wheels for 12 years and is a long-serving member of the Karuah community centre. Mrs Simpson, along with another volunteer, Gladys Blackie from Arcadia Vale, which is outside of my electorate, has been told she will be excluded from the honour of receiving a Premier’s Community Service Award because her sitting member is not a member of the ALP.

I thought that the Premier was supposed to represent all people in New South Wales, not just those in the Labor Party. But the New South Wales government only allows ALP members to nominate constituents. This is a sham, it is a shame, it is disgraceful and it is politics being played out with the public purse. This issue should be about recognising those thousands of volunteers in New South Wales who have given so much to our community, not just those who happen to be in Labor Party seats, to prop up support for ailing members. The Premier is quoted in the article as saying that he has no intention to change the system. That is not fair to volunteers like Hope Simpson and others in the community who do not happen to live in a Labor held seat.

Where is the difference between the federal government and the sate government? The federal government produces a volunteers certificate signed by the Prime Minister and Mal Brough, which is open to everybody regardless of whether the seat they live in is held by Labor, Liberal, National Party or Independent.

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