SA Firefighter

there's a comment in today's 'Tiser that Meals on Wheels pay their volunteer delivery people a petrol allowance, and that they are about to increase it to cover increased fuel prices. Doesn't make their deliverers any less 'volunteers' for having some of their costs met.
FACS / FAYS also pay their volunteers costs.  Doesn't make them any less 'volunteers' either.

There was a big conflab in NSW a few years ago about volunteering. One of the things which came out of it was a "Volunteer Charter", an article of which was that volunteer organisations should meet the reasonable out-of-pocket costs of their volunteers.  That big gathering didn't seem to think that meeting costs makes members any less 'volunteers' either.
So I think the claim that having our costs reimbursed would undermine our volunteer ethic is a Furphy.
cheers
AAJ

Explanation of CLI follows. Ignore if if you don't care.

*Every* telephone call is traceable.  Calling Line Identifier (CLI) is recorded by Telcos for *every* call made through their network.  They use call origin, destination, time & duration to calculate their billing, so it's very important to them.   

"CLI PRESENTATION" comes in two-and-a-half flavours.

Optional presentation - calls between 'ordinary' Telco customers - the caller can choose to present or suppress their CLI info from the called party.

Forced presentation - the calling number is always presented when making certain calls. For example, calling number is always presented to the terminating carrier when calling a customer of another Telco (so that they know to charge the originating telco an arm & a leg to accept the call).  The terminating carrier is then required to honour the caller's choice of whether their CLI may be preseented to the terminating customer. CLI used to be forced to certain 'premium dial-up services' so that they can direct their billing back through the Telco, but I'm not sure how that works now.

Calls to '000' have forced CLI presentation plus a bit extra - called "enhanced 000" or "E000".  When you dial 000, the network immediately retrieves the *street address* of the calling line from the Telco's customer database, & on answer by the telstra operator, presents it on their screen. (mobiles have their billing address presented because  there's no fixed street address to display... *Doh!*)
When the telstra operator hands the call off to the emergency service operator/dispatcher, that address data is transferred to the dispatcher's terminal. 

EXCEPT when the emergency service is the CFS.... 
As at 2 months ago when I last visited SOC, CFS had chosen not to adopt 'Enhanced 000' capability.  I don't know why not.  E000 has 'only' been around for 12 or 13 years.  I'm guessing cost to set it up.