The family Holden sits in the carport most of the time these days. Jim can’t drive any more. It seems like only yesterday that is keen eyesight, agility and fast reactions were legend on West Australian hockey fields. Not now though.
Jim has always believed in staying trim and he knows that maintaining fitness is the way to go. His health carers have advised him to swim three times a week if he wants to stay out of aged care.
He’s alone and fiercely independent. But he realises that to act on the medical advice he’s going to need help from others.
Fortunately Jim is blessed with good friends. There’ll always be someone who will drive him to Albany and back so that he can swim for his life. But he’s too nice a guy to let others pay the bill. If his mates are going to drive him to the swimming pool, he’ll pick up the tab.
He consults the RAC website and finds that his near-new Holden costs him 86¢ per km to run. For him the return trip to Albany is 108km and costs $93.
Surely not! Well … he pauses to add up the costs of insurance, licence fees, depreciation, fuel, maintenance, etc. As much as he doesn’t want to believe it, he can’t find any holes in the RAC analysis.
He’s losing heart now.
He’s an age pensioner. With full supplements he receives $749 each fortnight. Six trips a fortnight are going to cost him $558 and will leave him with $96 per week for everything else.
Jim simply can’t afford to stay fit by swimming if he has to pay for the travel himself – and he certainly won’t let his mates pay. He realises that it’s not a question of who pays – the costs are real whether it’s his car, his mate’s car, a government car or whatever –it would cost somebody.
He wonders how many others there are like him in Denmark – so he digs out the Shire’s Needs Assessment Study (2009) and finds that swimming is the third most popular non-organised activity (walking comes first) and that in a population of 5,000 there’d be roughly 1100 who swam at least once per year.
If they all drove to Albany in cars like his, the community would be feeding the oil, automobile, insurance industries about $105k each year in travel alone (without car pooling) … for one trip each per year!
Just a couple of trips a month for all these people equates to $2.5M. For three trips a week … let’s not go there!
The Demark community can’t afford not to have a pool.
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