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Volunteers are our organisation. The Government or a private provider couldn’t afford to pay for the service that we provide. The majority of the beaches would be unpatrolled at the weekend and at public holidays if the volunteers weren’t there. Professional lifeguards are really only paid Monday to Friday in the majority of Councils so it’s vital that we’re there providing that service. We have 63,000 volunteers in the last financial year which makes us one of the largest volunteer movements in the State, and we rescued 6,000 people last year and had 180,000 preventative actions so that basically means we prevented someone from possibly drowning or from an injury or whatever. So we’re essential, really, in saving lives and if it wasn’t for the volunteers we wouldn’t be able to do that.

I suppose we’re lucky in the fact that our patrolling members, they’re not just the guys who are on the beach; they’re such a small part of it. They’re only 18,000 out of the 63,000 and the other volunteers are doing so many other vital jobs as well behind the scenes that those guys couldn’t be on the beach if it wasn’t for them as well, so that’s like parents helping out with Nippers, doing tug of war, it’s people coaching at events, it’s the training officers or assessors or data entry people, so there’s just, there’s so many different volunteer roles within the organisation and if one of those elements was to disappear everything would not work so well.