Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Prime Minister for Social Inclusion) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about a very important matter, and that is the Rudd government’s commitment to sponsoring and supporting more than five million Australian volunteers who keep our societies going every day. This week is National Volunteer Week, which has been celebrated annually since 1988. The theme this year is ‘Volunteers change our world’. I think that is a very appropriate theme. I have not yet had a chance to survey members and senators about their own volunteering contributions, but I know that every one of them is in regular touch with voluntary organisations in their electorates or among their constituencies. I know they appreciate the work that is being done.

There are people everywhere working in a voluntary capacity—protecting our homes during summer bushfire seasons, delivering Meals on Wheels, organising local sports, coordinating cultural and community groups and protecting our local wildlife and our heritage. They also perform countless other activities, many of which are much less visible in our society. I am thinking about court support workers, neighbourhood coordinators, literacy and language tutors, night vans and night patrols, mentors, champions, advocates, carers and counsellors—all giving their time and expertise in a voluntary capacity.

On Monday I had the pleasure of launching National Volunteer Week in Adelaide for Volunteering South Australia and Volunteering Northern Territory, in conjunction with Volunteering Australia. Adelaide’s Rundle Mall was a fantastic venue for the launch, where we were literally surrounded by representatives of South Australia’s diverse and dynamic volunteering community. I used that opportunity to say thank you on behalf of all Australians and the Australian government to all our volunteers. I say sincerely that volunteers do change our world. Voluntary organisations and key bodies such as Volunteering Australia and the state and territory volunteering bodies also need to be congratulated and acknowledged for the professional and innovative leadership that they are providing to our volunteer workforce.

The government is committed to working with them and with the wider not-for-profit sector to promote volunteering and to encourage future generations to get involved. We have seen a very different range of volunteering approaches in recent years, particularly with respect to grey nomads. There are many new opportunities for episodic and virtual volunteering. Many young people are involved in virtual volunteering—for example, tutoring disadvantaged students online or translating documents for AMES or refugees. These are just two examples of how young people and those who are perhaps not able to have face-to-face contact can make a voluntary contribution.

The best figures that we have in Australia are from the ABS, in 2006, which show that 5.2 million Australians, or about 34 per cent of the Australian adult population, participate in some kind of voluntary work. Officially, they give 713 million hours of their time to the community every year. Officially, these volunteering hours are valued at around $40 billion to our economy. Here in Australia we have a satellite account for the not-for-profit sector that provides these measures and is part of the implementation of the United Nations Handbook on non-profit institutions in the system of national accounts. This is a procedure that has been developed and is being promoted around the world to increase the visibility of the third sector. It informs researchers and assists policymakers to gain a much more coherent and systematic picture of the scope, structure, composition and fiscal base of this important set of institutions on a regular basis. We need to be able to provide systematic comparative data on volunteering, which is a critical component of our social inclusion agenda and involvement. It is a project of the International Labour Organisation and will be discussed at a forthcoming international conference of labour statisticians, at which Australia will be represented.

The launch of National Volunteering Week on Monday also gave me the opportunity to unveil Volunteering Australia’s National Survey of Volunteering Issues for 2008. This is a very important document, which is the culmination of the survey that VA undertook on voluntary work across the nation. As well, I launched the Australian government’s report Volunteering in Australia: changing patterns in voluntary work 1995-2006. It, too, provides very useful guidance on how we should and could engage with volunteers and make the best use of the work that they do. We will also work very closely with the state based volunteering resource centres and Volunteering Australia to make sure that by this time next year we are very close to having a national volunteering strategy. I have been travelling across the country and hearing about the challenges for organisations supporting, managing, training and accrediting volunteers, and we want to make a difference in that regard so that we can celebrate the work that our volunteers do.

One of the challenges that we have in doing this is to understand what is volunteering. This is quite difficult because many people who volunteer do not consider that this is what they are doing. They think what they are doing in their communities is part of being a good friend or a good neighbour or a good citizen. It is certainly part and parcel of Australia’s ‘fair go’ mentality.

I think that the official statistics very much underestimate the extent to which Australians are volunteering. Last week I attended a hearing of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family, Community, Housing and Youth’s roundtable, which was set up to consider what we can do to support our volunteers and to understand the contribution that volunteers make to our community organisations. This week I was able to announce $5 million in funding for voluntary resource centres across Australia to continue the excellent work that those centres are doing—supporting and training our volunteers. This $5 million will go to ongoing support for them and will expand the number of volunteer centres that can continue operating across the country. As well, from 1 July this year we are expanding our $64 million Volunteer Grants Program, and that is going to enable another 6,000 not-for-profit organisations to provide assistance to their volunteers to purchase equipment—sporting items, for example—and, most importantly, for the first time, to help reimburse fuel costs, which in the current climate is going to be a great help. It was actually one of the issues in Volunteering Australia’s national survey that volunteers identified as preventing them from volunteering.

The purpose of our national framework for volunteers, which we will be working on with state and territory organisations over the next year, will be to address the issues of consistency in accreditation and skills transfer across state and territory borders. This is an issue that has been raised very much by the volunteers themselves, particularly by grey nomads, who may have to have police checks or working with children checks, which may not be recognised from one state or territory jurisdiction to another. They find that very frustrating, but it is just as frustrating for the organisations who want to draw on their skills and have to wait for a complicated regulatory process—it often takes three or four weeks to get those clearances. That is very frustrating for all concerned.

The final important issue that I would like to raise is that volunteering is a very genuine and appropriate pathway to employment. The idea that we can provide volunteers with accredited skills is something that is very important to our government, so the accreditation of certificates II and III in volunteering and the rollout of training in volunteering across organisations is something that we want to see happening very quickly. It is a fantastic curriculum that has been accredited. I recommend it to any community organisation that is looking at volunteer management structures and the regulatory obligations that volunteer management committees have to their own volunteers such as workers compensation, insurance, occupational health and safety and child protection.

These are just some of the initiatives that are happening in the world of volunteering. It is an important part of our social inclusion agenda. Every day, volunteers are working at the front end of service delivery. They are doing the things that many of us cannot do ourselves. We admire them, we support them and we celebrate them. Indeed, they are changing the world.