Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On Saturday, 21 February, the annual Gimme Shelter concert was held at the Fremantle Arts Centre to raise funds and awareness of homelessness. This year’s concert, featuring artists who played for free, including John Butler, Mo Wilson and the Drivers, Kavisha Mazzella, the DomNik’s and Dream State Circus, was an enormous success, raising an estimated $66,000, more than three times the amount raised at the inaugural concert in 2008.

As I said to the crowd on the night of the concert, the global financial crisis and the Victorian bushfires have brought home to us the fact that the line between living a stable, normal existence and being plunged into difficulty, homelessness and even tragedy is thinner than we think. I am pleased that a portion of the profits from Gimme Shelter will be donated to the victims of the Victorian bushfires. Of course, there are disasters like this that rock entire communities and nations, and then there are the private disasters, whether through mental illness or other health issues, drug or alcohol addiction, family breakdown, unemployment or other reasons, where human beings end up utterly alone and dispossessed. Gimme Shelter is the community coming together to say we care for these people and we want to help. These people are us under different circumstances.

I want to pay tribute to Dave Johnson and Phoebe Corke, the heart and soul behind Gimme Shelter; also to the staff and volunteers at St Patrick’s Community Support Centre, especially Victor Crevatin; and to the staff and volunteers of other church and community based organisations who deal with homelessness 365 days a year. I am hopeful that this Gimme Shelter event, together with the massive $6.4 billion investment by the federal government in public housing, will mean we are— (Time expired)

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