The Productivity Commission’s report (the report), released in February 2010, is an important signal that governments recognise the importance of the third sector in meeting the future service system needs of Australia. Its recommendations will, if implemented, reshape the regulatory environment for Not for Profit (NFP) sector. But it is Volunteering Victoria’s view that the report’s relevance to the issues facing the volunteering community is less certain.

Volunteering Victoria has recently focussed on understanding the relationship between volunteering and the NFP sector. This is because increasingly volunteering, in the context of economic activity, is seen primarily as an “input” within the NFP sector, rather than as a discrete community of interest with discrete needs. This “input” view is reflected in the ABS data that informs the report.

In the report, the main discussion about volunteering is in the context of the NFP “Workforce”. The primary recommendations in relation to volunteering relate to easing the burden of police checks on NFPs. While important, this is hardly the core issue for volunteering in Australia.

Volunteering is not a sub-set of NFP inputs. Volunteering stands on its own feet and with 5 million volunteers across Australia. It is the primary mechanism for community participation. In many areas volunteers in effect are at the core of community connection.

Volunteering Victoria has long been concerned with the reduction of volunteering's contribution to the community to an economic measure. This misses the actual value of volunteering to the community- the contribution to the strengthening of community, community cohesiveness, and the reduction of exclusion and marginalisation.

The report gives us an opportunity to start to define the elements of the relationship between the service delivery based NFP sector and the volunteering community. We can start to see the alignments and the differences-that which we share and that on which we are separate.

This is important because when volunteering is seen as simply an NFP input, volunteering is not really being seen at all. This limits our present and our future. It limits our capacity to define our own aims and destiny. We must promote another conversation about how volunteering should be understood and valued.

The contribution of volunteering must be understood in its own terms, not as an adjunct or input of something else. Until this happens we can’t progress volunteering position in policy and program formations. There are also practical implications from this definitional bind:

• Governments won’t properly fund volunteering if they think is free, and if it’s someone else’s responsibility (i.e.  the NFP sector)
• We can’t measure what we do if the statistical category we are placed in sees us as a component of something else rather than our own community of interest
• Development of volunteering is likely to be limited to  areas that relate to  the NFP sector-which, given the economic context, means those areas related to service delivery

Volunteering Victoria recognises that the Productivity Report is about the NFP sector. But volunteering being subsumed within the context of the NFP “business” environment (volunteering as cost element) indicates that government still struggles to understand the role that volunteering plays in building and strengthening community connection.

We look to the development of the National Volunteering Strategy to promote a better informed discussion about volunteering. But as a volunteering community we need to ensure that government understand the link between support for volunteering and community outcomes. Volunteers aren’t just an input.

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ENDS