Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last month I was delighted to attend two wonderful community events in Doveton: the Doveton annual show the Celebrate Doveton event. On 18 September I attended the 12th annual Doveton Show, which was attended by about 7,000 people. The previous year I think 27,000 people attended the show and it is at a facility called Myuna Farm, which was an initiative funded by the Hawke and Keating governments in particular. My predecessor in Holt, Gareth Evans, ensured that we got the funding many, many years ago. It is an iconic community facility. It is a mixture of country meets city but it is in Doveton.

The event itself was outstandingly successful. As I said, there were 7,000 people who came to this event, for a gold coin donation. This is held at the same time as the Melbourne Show and, unfortunately for the Melbourne Show, there are a lot of people who live in my constituency who simply cannot afford the price of entry plus the show bags. So what they do is they go en masse—as I said, there were 27,000 people last year, when the weather was a little bit better—to this event. This event has show bags, artistic presentations, animals, rides, arts and crafts—you name it. It has the whole gamut of things that you would want to see if you were taking your family to a great event.

I would like to commend the people who run the facility—in particular, the manager, Steve Hill—for doing such a marvellous job. It is the changing face of Doveton that we should be talking about in positive terms rather than negative terms. So much good comes from the diversity that makes our country the great country that it is, and I saw that diversity on abundant display at this event. So I would like to congratulate the Doveton Neighbourhood Learning Centre for running an amazing event that was free of charge and attended by many hundreds of people.

In the time remaining, I would like to congratulate the Salvation Army for the new Project of Hope caravan that they launched to assist people who need employment. Doveton is an area that gets a lot of bad press, but it is full of hope and will continue to be a great area to represent.