 Thanks, Lex. And thank you so much for having me along today and enabling me to help celebrate National Volunteering Week with you all. It's great to be here and looking forward to having a cup of tea with everyone afterwards as well, I hope. I've been asked to speak really briefly about volunteering Victoria. I'll give you a bit of a snapshot of what's going on in volunteering Victoria. Obviously, you're all across what's happening in terms of CFA and probably a bit more around emergency services, but more generally. And finally, to talk a little bit about National Volunteering Week and do that in five minutes. That's me. Volunteering Victoria, we're the state peak body for volunteering. So there's an equivalent of us in each state and also there's an Australian body called Volunteering Australia. We also, as well as working together as a group, work with local volunteer resource centres which are scattered around Australia in regional and metro areas. So all those groups work closely together to promote volunteering. In terms of what we do, there's lots of stuff volunteering Victoria, a small organisation with just, I think we have about four and a half full-time equivalent staff which is all part-time except our CEO. And then we have a bit over 20 volunteers who volunteer with us regularly. We do a range of different things including professional development and support to our members who are organisations that are everything from a really small neighbourhood house to really big organisations like the Red Cross, lots of different members, to the kind of advocacy work that Lex was just saying that I do as a general basis and work with Kate and her team on that type of work as well and research. But what we like to think about the most and especially in weeks like this is our work trying to lead a movement around volunteers and volunteering in the state and being really passionate about it. And so it was great to hear what Mick said about volunteerism at the CFA and share a lot of those sentiments. Volunteering Victoria, one of the things that we have really recognised is that volunteering makes such a huge difference both in people's individual lives, so for the volunteer and also often for an individual they might be supporting or working with as part of their volunteering. But it also makes such a huge difference for the community. So we like to think of volunteering as a really practical form of social inclusion. It's really like a form of community development but one person at a time through their act of volunteering you know building a sense of community, working with each other. And we do believe and you all have seen and experienced it in your work that it has the power to transform people's lives and to transform community. So we just really like to talk about it a lot. So thank you for having me and it's great to hear about what you do. In terms of what's what's going on in volunteering I'll talk about some of the key data and just for those of you who are interested pretty much all of this is from the most recent Australian Bureau of Statistics report. They do a report every few years called voluntary work and the last one was done in 2010. So in terms of what's going on in Victorian Australia 35% of Victorians and 36% of Australians are pretty similar volunteer and that equates to 1.5 million Victorians and 6 million Australians. So that's the kind of the raw data. Some of the there's so many things you could say in that one of the things I find very interesting is you're much more likely to volunteer as an adult if you volunteered as a child and similarly you're much more likely to volunteer if your parents volunteered. So that's something you know when I think about communities and what we all do as volunteers that's really heartening when you think about the future. It probably won't surprise you that the volunteering rate in our capital cities is lower than in regional and rural areas and that's pretty much Australia-wide state-by-state breakdown that's the case and the highest number of volunteers in Australia come from the 45 to 54 age group so the sort of I like to think about as middle age age group and more women than men volunteer and in fact the highest volunteering age group are women who work part-time with young kids which is me and probably quite a few of you in this room. Busy people busy that would be part of that. Then in terms of other information about the impact that volunteering has there was some work done using some of the ABS data by Melbourne University last year and that was to kind of try and understand the economic value of volunteering in Victoria and it was estimated as being 4.9 billion dollars so huge and while that's really important and I guess you'd all know this too we like to think about the fact that volunteering also has such a much bigger social impact so the economic impact of volunteering really amazing but there's a social impact which is even greater. Where people volunteer mentioned some of our memberships people volunteer in all different sorts of ways. Parents with young kids volunteer the most at sporting clubs and in their kids sporting activities which makes sense everything to volunteering at tourist information centres, historical societies, the traditional idea of meals on wheels and of course all the fantastic volunteering that happens in the emergency services space and here at CFA so it's everything. One of the things that we think about often at volunteering Victoria is what would happen if we didn't all volunteer like we do and the truth is that there wouldn't be enough money around to pay for the things that we do as volunteers interesting to see if there was but much more importantly or more realistically what would happen if some of those things didn't happen I mean the very fundamental work that CFA does every day would not be able to happen in the way that it does now. All those community support services that we expect that people rely on wouldn't happen a lot more people would be lonely and isolated and unsafe without the experience of engagement with volunteers or the opportunity to volunteer themselves and get out of the house which is a huge benefit that older people particularly get out of volunteering that social engagement and making friendships and community sport as we know it would grind to a halt so a lot wouldn't happen if there wasn't volunteers and so it's really good to have times like now to celebrate and National Volunteer Week is one of many great opportunities to do that we've been really busy I was telling some of the others out in the kitchen before it was crazy last week and it's crazy but fun this week lots of things are going on including this morning T one of the things we've been doing at volunteering Victoria is asking leaders of organizations to sign on and say thank you to their volunteers and that's been it's just it's gone viral it's we're up to 189 CEOs or leaders of organizations have signed at this point in the week early in the week and I'm pleased to say that Mick Burke and Ewan Ferguson signed on at number 33 so they were very early adopters of the trend and to say thank you to all their volunteers so that's that's good and there's morning teas and other celebrations like this happening everywhere so thanks for having me I'm really looking forward to hearing from the CFA volunteers and hearing their stories and a cup of tea cheers