Well thank you very much Jim, my Jim Myers, Michael Gallagher and I understand we have in the audience Roy Fox who turned 100 in January and he's a life member of the Wamboin club. It's an astonishing achievement, good on you Roy, shows what surf life saving does for you.
Well ladies and gentlemen, I'm particularly pleased to be here and to have the opportunity of making a couple of announcements which I know are important and will be welcomed by the groups that that are gathered here today and who Central Coast surf live saving. Before I do that I did wish to say that we pride ourselves as Australians on being a great volunteer society, we pride ourselves on being a community that holds together because we have lots of volunteer organisations. And there are many that vie for the title of the most respected and iconic Australian volunteer organisation. And I can say without fear of contradiction not only here but around the country, there is no organisation which over the years which has earned more respect and is more seen as indelible part of the Australian spirit and the Australian tradition of volunteer service than the surf life saving movement. And what it has done for Australia, the lives its saved, the enjoyment its bought to countless hundreds of thousands of young and middle ages and Australians of all ages and the role model it represents to young Australians, the opportunity it provides to young girls and boys, to not only experience the pleasure of life and the surf, but also through it to understand that society is about helping others, it's about providing a community service and in the process having a good time as well and doing it in a sensible fashion. So I unreservedly salute the surf life saving movement of Australia. It's made an enormous contribution to our nation and it will years into the future.
Now I know that Jim has become recently an associate member and I also understand that Michael Gallagher is a member and a competitive rower and a surf life saver at Toowoon Bay surf life saving club, so our colleagues are quite well represented on the ground, or on the beach, whichever way you want to put it.
But ladies and gentlemen, Jim mentioned the projects, particularly for beach education for schools that the Central Coast surf life saving had in mind, and I'm therefore pleased to announce, and this is very much might I say a product of Jim's representation, he's one of those local members that, to put it bluntly, he drives you mad until he gets an answer. And I guess for a local community that's not a bad qualification. But I'm very pleased to announce that surf life saving Central Coast will receive $138,200 over the next three years from the Government's stronger families and communities strategy and this is to provide programmes on beach education to schools on the Central Coast and this funding will help young people on the Central Coast to get involved in community life through volunteering, mentoring and building community leadership and initiative. And these programmes I gather will reach about 10,000 Central Coast school children over the next three years. And I say that that particular overall programme was designed a few years with two thoughts in mind, to provide funding for early intervention where it was obvious that some children from almost the day they were born were not going to get much of a fair go in life because of the dysfunctional character of the family environment in which they were born. And also to provide small and medium sized grants to local community organisations that had projects that were going to be of longer term value to the local community and the beach education to schools programme which I know you run on the Central Coast falls very much into that category and therefore I'm delighted that we've been able to fund that to the tune that I've mentioned. I'm also very pleased to announce that surf life saving Central Coast will receive just under $30,000 for its future leaders development programme and that will come from the Government's regional partnerships programme and this project will develop a leadership programme for young people, provide personal development skills and ensure the ongoing viability of volunteer beach rescue services on the Central Coast. And I know that the clubs have put a great deal into that particular programme and once again it is about a great local organisation reaching out to younger people, very young boys and girls, providing them with encouragement and support and the appropriate role models and I think the more that Government's can help organisations that want to make a contribution the more they should. I've always been somebody who think it's a better for a government to say to a local organisation what would you like to do and we can decide whether we can fund you, rather than a government coming into a local community and saying this is what we think you should do and we will provide the resources for it to be done in our way because all of you know the Central Coast better than any federal government department, no disrespect to them, maybe many of you work for federal government departments, I'm not knocking people that work for the government, I'm simply making the point that nobody knows the Central Coast like people who live there, any more than people know the outer suburbs of Brisbane or Melbourne better than the people who live there, and the people who live there and their expression through their local organisations know what the challenges of this area are. A couple of hours earlier today I launched a new national programme which for the first time enable the Federal Government to directly fund local community organisations that have particular crime prevention programmes that they think are going to work in their community. That is the sort of programme that would be open to the surf life saving movement if it thought it had something that was of particular value to a community and the point once again is that we're saying to local organisations what do you believe is the best way of tackling a social ill or social shortcoming in your area and both of these programmes that I've announced, the funding of today, are about your movement reaching out, especially to the young of the community, and providing them with education in relation to beaches and schools and also encouraging them to get involved in volunteer efforts and mentoring and all the things that help to keep our society together. So both of those announcements are of course in addition to the grant of $2,500 that Senator Kemp recently provided from the sports leadership grant to boost leadership opportunities for women in the surf life saving Central Coast. And I want to also congratulate surf life saving Central Coast for being named the 2004 New South Wales branch of the year of the recent surf life saving New South Wales awards of excellence for best practice management.
Jim has told me of your movement, of its success, of its outreach to the local community and I congratulate you, I pay tribute to the broader Australian movement of which you are very proudly a part, you have served our country well, you've looked after our young, you've looked after all of us so well over the years and as somebody who took his family to various beach holidays over a period of 20 years to places like Hawksnest, we got to know the local surf life saving people and we greatly admire the work they did and the peace of mind that they bring, particularly to parents with young children, is incalculable and I thank you for that and the resources I've announced today couldn't be going to be a better cause, (inaudible) use it wisely and could I just finish by saying Jim Lloyd does lobby very hard and he lobbies very effectively and he's a good bloke.
Thank you.
[ends]