Lending a hand to the volunteers

Visiting the United States in 1831, the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville remarked on the spirit of community and self help that pervaded that country.  In Democracy in America he noted how citizens came together on a voluntary basis to perform tasks which they were incapable of doing as individuals.

Voluntary effort, he noted, was preferable to government action because it was usually more effective and it encouraged the development of public virtue among citizens.

Australia's political and civic traditions, unlike those of America, are based not on freedom from government, but on the idea that government is the source of most, if not all, solutions.  Although there is an active and important voluntary sector in this country, its significance as part of the social fabric usually has been ignored.

According to the most recent data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there are more than 5,000 not-for-profit community organisations in Australia in the welfare area alone -- providing child care, aged accommodation and general services.

The Australian belief in the efficacy of government over voluntary, private effort has dominated policy discussion.  Perhaps typically, it took a sporting event, the Sydney Olympic Games, for volunteers to be recognised for their contribution.

This is the context of the controversy about Peter Costello's remarks last week on volunteers.  Instead of being praised for putting the issue on the public agenda, the Treasurer was criticised for not doing enough for volunteers.  There was a concern expressed that even by raising the issue, the Government was seeking to shirk its responsibilities.

In Australia the desire to protect the central position of the government in not only funding, but also delivering, welfare has restricted debate about the role of volunteers in the community.  In Europe and North America, voluntary effort is coming to be seen as a way of building what is now called social capital and of overcoming some of the failures of the welfare state.

Harvard professor Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone in the mid-1990s chronicled the decline of the spirit of community in the United States.  It focused attention on the decline of voluntary participation.

And according to Anthony Giddens, from the London School of Economics, the doyen of the "third way" and hero to Tony Blair:  "Church, family and friends are the main sources of social solidarity.  The State should step in only when those institutions don't fully live up to their obligations".

Costello has performed an important public service in raising the issue of volunteers.  The debate that will ensue about the role of volunteers must also involve discussion of the broader question of what is appropriate for government to deliver and what could be provided by the private voluntary sector.

As Ronald Reagan said in 1981:  "We have let government take away those things that were once ours to do voluntarily".  The question now for Australia is to decide whether some of those things that the government has taken away should be given back.

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