CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS
Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (09:48): A hearty shout out this morning to Noreen Vu, one of the best general managers in New South Wales if not local government in Australia. She has been in the news in recent days and I just wanted to make sure she knew that she's got a lot of community support. Her family is one of the Vietnamese refugee migrant success stories.
It truly is. She's the Chief Executive Officer of Snowy Monaro Regional Council. She was, for three years up until June last year, the very successful general manager at Weddin Shire, and I want her to know that there are a lot of people out there thinking of her and for her.
I also give a hearty congratulations to Adrian Pavese, who, last Saturday, marked 700 games as an Australian football coach. The Wagga Tigers returned the favour by winning against Narrandera at Robertson Oval by 11 goals, keeping the Imperials goalless. Adrian's success story stretches back 35 years to the days at the under-11s in Griffith.
He's coached both women's at the highest level and men's as the Queanbeyan premiership coach. The influence he's had on so many men's and women's lives is enormous. Recently, it was good to be at Batlow for CiderFest, the annual event, where I helped celebrate one year as an anniversary for Dave and Mel Purcell's wonderful Apple Thief Cider House.
That is a great little establishment. That couple are great risk-takers. They have spent millions of dollars building this wonderful eatery, which is now part and parcel of Batlow, and I encourage anybody to go there and spend a day or three there.
Yass fire services are celebrating 72 dedicated volunteers who've served a combined—wait for this—1,264 years for the Southern Tablelands zone of the New South Wales Rural Fire Service. A couple there, Helen and Peter Middleton from Manton in the Yass Valley Shire, shared a remarkable 122 years of dedicated, committed service to the RFS between them. That is something to be honoured.
That is something to be celebrated. That is something to be congratulated. They are just quintessential country Australians.
To these volunteers, who don the uniform and go out—often on Christmas Day or New Year's Eve, when everybody else is celebrating—to protect, secure and safeguard our communities, I say thank you and I say well done.