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Legislative Assembly
 
EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

18 June 2020
Motions
Frank McGuire  (ALP)

 


Mr McGUIRE (Broadmeadows) (21:06): The first 1000 days are critical in defining what happens in your life. That is the assessment from one of our leading institutions, the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, but it is also the lived experience of my Irish mum, Bridie Brennan, from Boyle. She taught us all to read before we went to school, and she did that with the understanding that as a young girl she was taken out of school and had to be a farmer from a really young age and take care of her younger siblings. It is the classic eldest-daughter story that happened right through Europe during that time, and shows insight and maternal wisdom to make sure your children get a great start early in life. This really defines the social determinants of life: lifelong learning for skills, jobs and meaning, and then you look at the health aspects as well and how they are so important. Then the third part is how you connect the disconnected, and technology is a critical thing that we have now and a great tool to actually do that with. How do you use technology for the public good? These are issues that I am committed to pursuing—the social determinants of life—and I am delighted to be able to make a contribution in government.

The next issue we need to look at is place-based disadvantage. I want to acknowledge the minister at the table, the Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change, for her commitment to suburban development and for giving me the opportunity to chair the revitalisation board in Broadmeadows. This is really important to actually draw a lot of these themes together. The minister grew up in Fawkner, just down the road, in a migrant family, and look at what she has achieved. It is this deep understanding about why this is important, this lived experience of how you need to bring these threads together. And that is what we have been able to do—to establish that it is critical that prosperity and opportunity be connected up and that talent is not defined by where you come from. This is a critical thing, but too often opportunity is.

I want to acknowledge the contribution from the member for Ivanhoe on this and how he talked about Heidelberg West and the long fight that he has had there to actually address these matters and to bring them to the fore. This is really what we need to do to assess where disadvantage is. We know the postcodes of disadvantage, so how do we turn them around and make them postcodes of hope? That is the whole strategy for how we bring these themes together. So where is your lifelong learning, your skills and your jobs, and how do you reinvest in these communities? If you look at three-year-old kindergarten, that is a critical point in this pathway to the future. It is about how you actually get to these children at this point, because if you follow what happens with children and their graduation, if they cannot read very well or they are not good at social interaction, they end up being put at the front of the classroom, they end up then dropping down and they end up then getting into a whole pattern of social misbehaviour, and then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is really what is important about this initiative from the Andrews Labor government, and it fits within this bigger picture.

The member for Burwood gave an erudite exposition on the history of kindergartens. But it is really about the commitment to make it happen. That is the point of what the Andrews Labor government has done and delivered, and that is the critical investment for our future. Three-year-old kindergartens will result in the largest expansion of kindergarten infrastructure in Victoria’s history. It is estimated that the sector will need almost 1000 new or expanded kindergarten facilities. The government will be working alongside service providers to implement this nation-leading initiative. It is a fantastic investment. The government is working in partnership with all the sectors and services to build, expand and improve early years infrastructure and deliver an investment of almost 1000 new and expanded kindergarten facilities across the next decade.

What is necessary as well is the constancy of purpose, to be able to make sure over time that these key initiatives are delivered. The latest budget includes $473 million for early childhood infrastructure. This will support the sector to invest in new and expanded kindergarten facilities, particularly where they are needed most. That is what I am saying—going into these areas of disadvantage and actually saying, ‘Here’s how you get your hand up in life. Here’s how you get the key connector into education, to be able to get that love of learning, to be able to evolve, to be able to get a better chance in life’, and probably most importantly to deny that miser fate so that it does not matter where you are brought up.

We have got the Attorney-General here, the former Minister for Health. She totally understands the social determinants of health. I have had the privilege to work with the minister on these matters. It is how we bring them together and it is what the social infrastructure is: how you establish these hubs and how you connect out into the different parts of the community to bring together the neighbourhood houses, the kindergartens and the schools and how you actually show people that this is the way through and this is the way to a better opportunity in life. Particularly in the era we now live in, how we harness technology for good—there is so much about technology that we are still having to address. We surrendered our privacy to social media, but how do we now harness that? How do we actually look at what is happening to these children as they go through these various stages? We know where the tipping points are and what is going to happen.

So this addresses inequality at a critical level, at a really important point. You can see what happens when kids get the chance and the difference that it makes for them. That is why this motion is important. That is why this initiative over a long period of time is vital to change these aspects. The department has continued to work on the assessment of early learning infrastructure and workforce to provide a comprehensive picture of the capacity of existing services to take on three-year-old enrolments.

Every kindergarten and long day care service in Victoria, and that is around 2700 in total, have been asked to take part in a survey about their existing capacity. This we should harness and connect up with the Generation Victoria project—the GenV project. This is another fantastic initiative—in the last state budget $173.5 million for medical research. This is going to be a world-leading survey of children from birth all the way through to look at how the health aspects work for the social determinants of life. That will be able to see their predispositions for everything from obesity to allergies and to really help at that level as well.

This is what Labor in power does best, to bring these things together, to coordinate and to actually make sure that people are included rather than excluded. This is the proposition on how we can harness technology in a new and better way. In the last term we put through a bill in this house to enable the various departments of government to talk and communicate better between each other, to break down the silo mentality and the turf wars and the institutional ego and all the other barriers so that we can actually, as I say, use technology for good. We have seen it used in some appalling ways, particularly politically, but that is a story for another time. But if we are looking at how we use the digital tools that we now have, how you can directly connect and follow each individual, give them some benefit, stay with the families who might be in crisis or going through a really difficult time, give them the value and the hand up when they need it most, make sure that the schools are not just saying somebody would talk too much or whatever—we are actually analysing how we give them a better education and bringing all of that together. One of the key points is that it starts with three-year-old kindergarten.

I commend this motion to the house and the effort and commitment from the Andrews Labor government.