Craig Emerson (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Service Economy, Small Business and Independent Contractors) Share this | Hansard source

The Nurse Family Partnership showed positive results with improved IQ skills and language development, lower levels of abuse and neglect, improved health for young mothers and improved job prospects. So there seems to be some merit in the United States trials. Three were conducted: in 1977, 1987 and 1994. They have produced strong evidence, consistently showing the scheme led to improved health of mother and baby, fewer childhood injuries and a greater readiness for school so that, hopefully, children can go into that universal preschool year here in Australia.

I quote three figures: a 48 per cent reduction in child abuse and neglect, a 59 per cent reduction in arrests and a 90 per cent reduction in the number of people receiving supervision orders. That is the US experience. In the UK there are just 1,000 babies, and the program costs £7 million. It is a modest start, but one that we should take a very great interest in.

If we think of this purely as a social problem, I guess that is fine; but it is an economic problem too. Indeed the Nobel laureate economist James Heckman started off on other areas of endeavour but came to the conclusion that the most important contribution that policymakers could make, the greatest investment that they could make, was in the very early years of early childhood development. So it is not so much about building railways and ports, as important as those things are, but rather making a real investment in young people in those very early years. That produces spectacular returns, and importantly they are not just returns for the child or the mother but returns for society as a whole. In fact about 80 per cent of the returns from the Perry preschool program accrued to society as a whole and 20 per cent to those who are direct beneficiaries. Those returns included greater employability, less criminality, less abuse and obviously less incarceration, which is a very expensive approach. So I commend this program, the Blair program, to the parliament tonight. I hope, through the small contribution that I have been able to make here tonight in grieving for the children, that I have done just a little bit more to highlight the terrible problem of child abuse and neglect in this country. Hopefully we can do a little bit more to break that cycle of despair and misery that afflicts so many young people in our country.

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