Celia Hammond (Curtin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Surf lifesaving clubs are an invaluable part of the Curtin community. We, of course, have the best beaches in the world on our side of the country, which are visited by thousands of people each year, and our volunteer surf lifesaving clubs in Curtin do an amazing job—as they do, I'll admit, on beaches all around Australia. They do many things: they provide advice and first aid to people, they take preventative actions to make sure that the beachgoers are safe, and they educate the public on how to stay safe at the beach.

Swanbourne-Nedlands Surf Life Saving Club is one of six fantastic surf lifesaving clubs in Curtin. It's known simply as 'Swanny' to locals, and it's been keeping the Curtin community safe since 1932. On average, the volunteer surf lifesavers at Swanny perform over 4,000 patrol hours each summer and log over 600 preventative actions. They've got a growing membership of over 740 people, with nearly half of that membership—about 48 per cent—being women. Swanny doesn't just keep our community safe at the beach. It also plays a really important role in training the kids through its fantastic Nippers program, it helps people to get bronze medallions, it runs first-aid courses, and it hosts and participates in a number of sporting competitions.

While Swanny plays an undeniably vital role in our community, its facilities are, quite frankly, outdated and inaccessible, and they require urgent and long-overdue upgrades. The over-330-strong female membership currently have access to only one toilet amongst them, and they are required to use four dilapidated gangway-style showers of the sort that you might have seen in the old TV show Prisoner. Their change rooms are just a converted old, tiny first-aid room located in a building that was built in 1959, when the club had zero female lifesavers. Volunteer surf lifesavers who are looking out for us on the beach deserve better than sharing one toilet amongst 330 of them. The club also requires urgent improvements to storage facilities, as it's outgrown its current storage space, meaning that vital rescue and training equipment is not readily accessible or stored under cover.

I, along with the state member for Cottesloe, Dr David Honey, and the club's president, the marvellous Luke Bishop, recently launched a petition to build support for the much-needed funding Swanny requires to bring its facilities up to modern standards. I will continue to work with Swanny and its remarkable team and members to make sure that we can get it the funding so that it gets the facilities that it deserves.