1200 words (12 minutes reading) by Colin Weatherby

A recent article in the Melbourne Age by Alan Attwood, entitled ‘Red tape’s strangling volunteering – creating more casualties than you’d think’, is timely in drawing attention to a growing problem in Victorian local government. Risk aversion and red tape are making it difficult for people to volunteer in their own community or even get a job at their council. This focus on playing safe seems to be counterproductive.

As Sidney Dekker and Georgina Poole point out succinctly in ‘Random Noise – Measuring Your Company’s Safety Performance‘, most organisations don’t exist simply to be safe; they exist to provide a product or service. It is unfortunate that many councils seem to be starting to think otherwise. Dekker uses the term ‘safety theatre’ to describe the superficial and often misleading efforts that organisations put into safety. I can’t help thinking that some of the risk management red tape making volunteering more difficult fits that description.

Attwood is a well-known journalist and writer. I have heard him speak at Literary Festivals and he has been pragmatic and realistic. His article is an expose of the problems he experienced in volunteering for councils in Melbourne. It is worth reading. In it, he says there are now too many barriers to people ‘lending a hand’ based on his experiences volunteering in community transport and meals-on-wheels delivery. He also interviews the head of Volunteering Australia (VA), Mark Pearce and draws on VA research.

Attwood says he was ‘sacked’ by one council when they accepted Federal government funding for community transport, which apparently required a more ‘professional’ service than volunteers could provide in driving other community members to their medical appointments. Sometime later, Attwood happened to be asked to drive the CEO of the very same council to the home of a meals-on-wheels recipient as part of the council’s “annual hands-on day”. It is a revelation that managers must spend one day getting personal experience of the services they are responsible for providing. Attwood asked the CEO about the volunteers in community transport, and was told…

 “Letting us go was a shame, but councils can’t say no to money”.

This seems to be false logic. As Professor Joseph Drew has pointed out, councils need to learn to say no to accepting money from other levels of government because it always increases their costs and makes them less economically efficient. Every dollar of grant funding requires additional expenditure from the council that is more than it would otherwise have spent. Then there are the other non-economic impacts like the ones Attwood describes for both the helpers and the helped. These impacts were the topic of a recent paper written by Cormac Russell from the Asset-Based Community Development Institute. In it, he says…

“Post-industrial societies often lack the social embeddedness that citizens require to fully participate in the civic, environmental, and economic life of their communities. Such erosion of the social fabric represents a social and health hazard. Growing awareness, among clinicians and their health allies, of this social malaise and its correlation with poor health outcomes has led to an increased focus on population health and community approaches. It has also given rise to some new health programmes aimed at demedicalising and relocating the emphasis towards socialisation, such as social prescribing, which is concerned with referring patients into community-based activities.”

Cormac Russell  (2020) Community Medicine, Vol. 1, Chapter 1, pp. 1-12

Drew in his 2022 book ‘Saving Local Government – Financial Sustainability in a Challenging World’ talks about the principle of subsidiarity and that services should be delivered by the individuals and organisations closest to the service demand and in the best position to meet that demand effectively. He says that even the most efficient councils will be unsustainable in the long run if they provide services that are outside their remit. Instead, he says councils should stay out of the road of the ‘lesser’ associations (i.e. the smallest level of competent association) such as families, local communities, businesses, social groups, religious bodies and political associations. Drew says councils should not interfere with lesser associations and instead should seek to support them.

Unfortunately, the opposite behaviour seems to be prevalent. I recently met with a colleague who told me of a First Nations person employed by a not-for-profit who couldn’t be hosted from a council’s premises because they didn’t meet the council’s entry requirements. I know of another colleague who gave up attempting to be employed by a council because of their invasive pre-employment privacy conditions. In his article Attwood notes that Volunteering Australia say formal volunteering by non-English speaking people is lower than ‘informal’ volunteering (more about this later). I am not surprised. The online forms are complicated and difficult to understand. I have seen some that ask for documents that are not even issued to citizens in Australia.

It is easy to forget about the community, and its needs and expectations, when the organisation’s focus is on things like avoiding obvious waste, not making public mistakes, and demonstrating you are being safe. No one wants to get into trouble. I have overlooked community in my own work. Recently, I was gently reminded of this by a colleague when I was describing a ‘modern’ public infrastructure service as one where the council is in touch with asset demands in real time and able to flexibly deploy resources in response to them. It was all internalised. She pointed out that the community must have a role to play in delivering the service for it to be a truly modern service.

At this point in my story, I am starting to doubt that any Audit and Risk Committee has audited the barriers that the emphasis on risk has created, which prevent people in the community helping themselves and create new risks. This must be limiting opportunities for people by having to meet these new and arduous standards. Instead of helping people to help themselves, councils and their peak bodies seem to be putting their effort into making the case to be able to charge people more taxes to do the things people might otherwise do for themselves if the council wasn’t stopping them. Watch this video for an insight into this sort of thinking. It is from the current inquiry into the sustainability of local government in Victoria.  

It is not all doom and gloom. Some councils have tried to help the community in helping itself. The Wigan Deal is founded on shifting demand away from the council and onto the community and voluntary, community, faith and social enterprises. The council uses asset-based community development principles to empower and support the community. In comparison, some councils in Victoria seem to think their role is to intervene to protect the community from itself.

On that note, Attwood finishes his article with a discussion of “informal volunteering”. I have renamed it ‘guerilla volunteering’ in the spirit of guerilla urbanism. Perhaps a better label is surreptitious volunteering because the community takes matters into its own hands without seeking permission.

“Informal volunteering”, for which no police checks or ID will be needed, may also be a fancy term for what generations have simply regarded as helping others – especially within families.”

Red tape’s strangling volunteering – creating more casualties than you’d think

Attwood cites VA research in 2022 that showed just over 46 per cent of people had ­volunteered informally in the four weeks leading up to April 2022. A much higher figure than volunteering formally (nearly 27 per cent). I don’t think anyone would argue with the need for sensible checks and balances when people volunteer to help others. The question in my mind after reading Attwood’s article is, has anyone checked the checks and balances lately?

Finally, the good news is that Alan Attwood says he has a spare seat in his car where the council CEO sat.