Strange Jamie; Rurawhe AdrianJAMIE STRANGE (Labour): Mr Assistant Speaker thank you for the opportunity to stand and speak on this bill the Health and Safety at Work (Volunteer Associations) Amendment Bill. I'd also like to acknowledge the member opposite Harete Hipango for having this bill drawn. Yes we do have another ballot coming up soon and I've got my fingers crossed as well so we'll see how we go.Look I'd like to begin by acknowledging the many volunteer groups that we have across our country. I know it has been mentioned earlier in this debate but I'd like to add my thanks to those many groups because many of the wonderful things that are happening in our society could not happen without these volunteer groups who contribute thousands and thousands of hours each year. We're talking about community groups churches and groups in the area of health. One in particular is St John Ambulance who I collected for recently. So I'd like to acknowledge those groups.Now if we have a look at this bill I think one of the issues here is around—this is as I like to say a solution looking for a problem because as I engage with many of these volunteer groups I haven't had any of them raise this issue with me so I'm not really sure how much of a big issue it is. But I think the key point here is around valuing and protecting our volunteers. The agencies rely on their volunteers for the work and the volunteers must be valued they must be kept safe and they must be protected. Actually we're going to have an example of this coming up soon with the by-election in Northcote when many volunteers will be heading out and I wish both candidates all the very best for that.But it is about protecting these volunteers because you see when someone's running a business they have got protections in place for their employees. So why should a community group a church group not have the same aspects in place for their volunteers? Article 7 of the UN human rights declaration says All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law." I do worry here that our volunteers will be treated differently to employees and not have that protection of the law. By the very definition of "volunteer" they are doing work without payment. Volunteers provide a valuable service to the communities in which they operate and I'm worried that this bill will potentially lead to the degradation of the quality of the services that these organisations provide. So essentially if the volunteers are not protected if they're not given clear understanding and clear protection around health and safety we might lose a number of the wonderful volunteers who are currently volunteering in this sector. If this bill passes many volunteer organisations could levy their workers for their own safety equipment. At the moment the volunteers are exempt from that but I do worry that these volunteers will then have to pay for all their own safety equipment and like I said before it could lessen the amount of people who are willing to volunteer.Another issue is that if this bill passes it could provide workers with an unnecessarily unsafe workplace. In fact under this legislation those running the community organisations would not even have to talk to their volunteers about health and safety at work. I think that will be a big issue and I do worry that if this bill comes in then we're going to have a lot of volunteers who are not kept safe and we could have a few issues that could arise from that. The biggest one is that we could potentially lose many of these volunteers because like I said before the thousands of volunteers who are currently volunteering in our sector we absolutely rely on them. The Government can only do so much. We need Government we need volunteer agencies we need churches community groups and sports groups all working together all on the same page and the volunteers are a key aspect of this. Now I myself have employed staff. At one point I employed eight staff and it was absolutely vital that they were kept safe in that workplace. It was absolutely vital that they were kept safe in that workplace and I worry that this bill would degrade the safety aspects of volunteers. So unfortunately this party will not be supporting this bill in its current form. Thank you.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): I call Harete Hipango—five minutes in reply."