Swan Hill Community Issues Group
Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (17:25): (639) My adjournment tonight is for the Minister for Skills and TAFE in the other place, and the action that I seek from the minister is to meet with representatives from the Swan Hill Rural City Council and the Swan Hill Community Issues Group with the aim to find a way to have the Swan Hill region declared as a standalone Adult Multicultural Education Services region, or AMES. AMES is a Victorian public entity that is accountable to the Minister for Skills and TAFE and the Minister for Regional Development under the Education and Training Reform Act 2006, and the minister has both those portfolios. On the AMES website it lists Mallee Family Care as the provider of services to refugees in Swan Hill, but that is not a service that Mallee Family Care is delivering in Swan Hill. The very limited support that the Swan Hill Community Issues Group gets comes from Sunraysia Mallee Ethnic Communities Council, or SMECC, from Mildura, but SMECC is finding their resources are limited and they are withdrawing support for the Swan Hill group there when it comes to delivering refugee services.
At the moment the Swan Hill issues group works out of a hall at the back of the Uniting Church. They are all volunteers that work with the refugees in Swan Hill, helping them with their employment and settlement issues, with asylum seeker programs and particularly with visas for family members to get them to come to Australia once they have the ability to do that. This group has worked tirelessly now for a decade helping refugees in Swan Hill as volunteers, and I would like the minister to meet with them and representatives from the Swan Hill Rural City Council to work through how we can actually have Swan Hill declared as its own region and get some resources to support these very worthwhile refugees in our community and take some pressure off the volunteers, who are finding the work very, very hard to continue all the time without some paid staff to support them.