CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr BUTLER (Hindmarsh—Minister for Disability and the National Disability Insurance Scheme, Minister for Health and Ageing and Deputy Leader of the House) (17:05): Meals on Wheels Day was on 26 August this year. We celebrate this day on the final Wednesday of every August and recognise all that it delivers to more than 200,000 older Australians. I had the great pleasure of visiting again the Port Adelaide Meals on Wheels.

At the risk of being parochial, I want to give a bit of a shout-out to the Port Adelaide Meals on Wheels because it was the first Meals on Wheels service in the country. The legendary Doris Taylor, a great South Australian, created the Meals on Wheels service in the 1950s. As a Labor Party person, I'm also pleased that she recognised the talent of a young lawyer, Don Dunstan, convinced him to join the party and then twisted his arm to run for parliament in Norwood in South Australia.

He went on to be quite an extraordinary premier of that state. But Doris's lasting achievement is this Meals on Wheels model. It not only provides really nutritious, tasty meals to a couple of hundred thousand older Australians every single day; it brings extraordinary social capital through the work of tens of thousands of volunteers who give their time, who give their love, who drive the meals around and who engage with those older Australians in an extraordinary act of volunteering.

I again spent some time serving meals at the Port Adelaide Meals on Wheels service. I spilled corn everywhere, and I apologised to the Meals on Wheels supervisors there for my sloppy serving. Regina, who is affectionately known as the princess of the Port Adelaide Meals on Wheels, exemplifies the spirit of tens of thousands of volunteers who work in everyone's electorate in about 590 services across the country.

She has been volunteering there for nine years, which is a relatively short time in a service that has people who've done decades, but I'm sure she'll do many more years to come. She rules there with an iron fist—or maybe it was just me that she deployed the iron fist to. The team there provide a beautiful environment for people to come and volunteer and increase the social capital of our community and 590 other communities around Australia.

I was there to talk not only about that service and its amazing history going back to the 1950s but also about our decision as a government to decide to retain the Commonwealth Home Support Program as a standalone program in an ongoing way. That will ensure that Meals on Wheels services can continue to be block funded and continue to deliver the service that they have built up an extraordinary reputation for for over 60 years.