This year’s Budget falls short of addressing the significant challenges facing Tasmania’s volunteering industry and maintains a disjointed and piecemeal approach to funding.
As announced in National Volunteer Week, the Tasmanian Government will remove Working with Vulnerable People registration fees for volunteers in a two year pilot. They have committed partial funding of $100,000 for the Tasmanian Volunteering Strategy and Action Plan.
We need to work through the detail of this funding to understand its planned impact. No other priorities have been funded. This includes the Child and Youth Safe Volunteering Education Program, the expansion of the Volunteer Connect Service and the Emergency Volunteering Community Response to Extreme Weather Program, known as EV CREW.