That great organisation started more than 40 years ago in Australia in Sydney by the then Reverend Allan Walker and it spread all around the world as a unique way of providing access to people who feel in the depths of despair and are in need of assistance in handling their particular personal and emotional problems. And the value to me of a gathering like this is I guess encapsulated by what I've just said over the last five minutes or so. It reminds me of this marvelous collection of people doing good things by their fellow men and women which is the hallmark of Australian society. A lot of things are said about Australia. People often remark about our love of sport and that's accurate because we love it, and I'm no exception to the rule.
People talk about our sense of mateship and that's accurate too.
People talk about the fact that we're an open society. We respect people according to their worth not according to their class or according to their background or their ethnic origin. There's another characteristic of Australian society that's very important and that is the characteristic of the volunteer spirit. We are one of the great volunteer societies in the world. We are a society which gets things done with the assistance of volunteers in a way in which few other societies are able to accomplish.