Thanks, ladies and gentlemen, for being here to help launch Carers Week. Thanks, everyone, for coming together in support of Australia's 2.5 million carers and the people who they care for.
It is a credit to us as a society that we do care for those who are caring for those who are most vulnerable in our midst.
I want particularly to acknowledge my parliamentary colleagues, the Assistant Minister, Mitch Fifield about whom I will say a little more later and Senator Zed Seselja, the newly-elected Senator for the ACT. It’s good to have both of you here.
I have two tasks today. The first is to help to initiate Carers Week this year. The second is to help introduce the panel discussion which will take place later on today here at the National Press Club, which I think will elucidate many of the issues which are important to carers and those they care for.
Most of all, though, it is my job to acknowledge Australia’s 2.5 million carers, those whose principal task – the task that they have set themselves in their lives – is to care for someone else, someone they love.
Carers, as we know, come from every walk of life. Every carer’s circumstance is different. But what distinguishes every carer from every other one of us is that each carer has said that his or her principal task will be to dedicate himself or herself to someone who matters; someone who needs help. This is a truly remarkable thing. It is a truly magnanimous thing.
Many of us make the decision at some point in our lives to be dedicated to someone else. When we stand up and make marriage vows or a marriage commitment, we dedicate ourselves in one sense to someone else. But most of us, when we do this, are dedicating ourselves to the good times that we are going to have with someone else. What carers do is dedicate themselves to the tough times as well as the good times, as Aunty Agnes has just helped to remind us.
Yes, there are good times in the life of every carer; times of intense satisfaction; times of intense love. But for so many carers, there are also times of intense difficulty and intense frustration. There is nothing romantic about most of the work that carers do. It often involves relentless toil and the inability to leave the person they’re caring for, even for a moment, without the risk of something terrible befalling that person.
It’s no wonder, under these circumstances, that there is such a high family breakdown rate for carers, such high rates of mental health issues, poor incomes. It is a great life, but it’s a tough life. It is a worthy life, but it is a difficult choice that the carers of this country have made and that’s why it’s so important that we acknowledge them on an occasion such as this. And yet it’s important to remember that whatever the difficulties that individual carers have and might face, carers themselves are so often inspirational leaders in our communities and in our nation at large. There would hardly be a person who comes into contact regularly with a carer who is not uplifted and inspired by the work that that carer does and by the life that that carer lives.