James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Government Waste Reduction) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to sincerely thank the Co-ordinating Italian Committee, CIC SA, who hosted me at their headquarters in Stepney in my electorate last week. They provide a very vital service to the Italian community, and particularly to the ageing Italian community, in my electorate. I'm very proud to have the largest Italian community of any electorate in the country. Some of the first significant Italian migrations came in the years after the Second World War. Members of that generation, of course, now are entering into aged care, and they need the community support around them, particularly language-specific support at times. CIC are a fantastic organisation that have been doing that for decades, and demand for their service is ever growing. I strongly urge that we give them all the support that we can.

I am pleased to have the aged-care minister here opposite me, and I genuinely look forward to an opportunity to engage and work with her on organisations like CIC, because they do get support from the Commonwealth. I'm sure she agrees that organisations like CIC do a fantastic job. They are volunteers that are also taking an enormous burden off a system that would have to pick up the slack if they didn't exist and do the excellent hard work that they do. Thank you to CIC for the service that they provide to my community, and I very much look forward to supporting them well into the future.