Fiona Martin (Reid, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Reid is home to a very proud Italian community, with over 16,860 people living in Reid with Italian heritage. On Wednesday 9 July I visited CO.AS.IT, a well-established Italian association that provides assistance to the Australian-Italian community in New South Wales. I visited with the honourable Senator Dr Francesco Giacobbe and met with CO.AS.IT president Loranzo Fazzini, CO.AS.IT general manager Thomas Camporeale, and members of the CO.AS.IT management team.

CO.AS.IT has always been a strong advocate for the CALD community and recognised as a prominent community organisation in multicultural New South Wales. They offer a range of services, including language services, which are so important in the Italian community. Keeping the language and the culture alive is very important to the people that I represent. They also offer community services, including mental health services, aged-care services and health campaigns. One health campaign in particular, the 10,000 roses project, has had a significant impact on raising the awareness of breast screening in the Italian community in New South Wales. They also run the Italian bilingual school, which is a success story, so I just wanted to highlight how wonderful CO.AS.IT are and congratulate them on the wonderful work they do.