Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

This issue is of utmost importance to me. My electorate is 107,000 square kilometres and many of the people who live in my electorate are very isolated. I also believe that no matter where you live in this country all our children should have the same opportunities when it comes to accessing quality educational services.

I believe this should start with early childhood education. During the election there was discussion of a rollout for early childhood preschool services to all children of four years of age. One of the problems is that in isolated areas it can quite often be a distance of 100 kilometres for a child to be delivered to preschool and therefore it is impractical for those children to attend on a regular basis. But there is an alternative, and in a couple of locations in my electorate the mobile preschools are doing an excellent job in delivering quality early childhood services to isolated children. The added bonus is that besides the children gaining social skills that they might not otherwise attain, it is a wonderful opportunity for relatively isolated parents to get together and network in a social manner.

One of the organisations in my electorate that I have had some relationship with is the Gwydir Mobile Preschool, which is operated by Wendy Baldwin. Wendy and her team travel hundreds of kilometres each week to ensure that children living in isolated areas of north-west New South Wales have access to educational services. I have met with Wendy and she has told me about the families they service and the areas they cover. Unfortunately, Wendy and her team are forever facing an uphill battle as there are not enough funding dollars available to assist them with this service. There are others as well—for example the Tharawonga Mobile Preschool, in my own area of Gwydir shire, which has been operating under the auspices of the council for some time. Once again, it provides a wonderful service but it is always scratching for funding. I believe it would be a wonderful opportunity for the federal government, as part of their policy to roll out early childcare to preschoolers, to look at this mobile preschool model.

Of course, for children to get to school, access is important. I have approximately 150 schools in my electorate. I do not think there would be many electorates that would have more than that. Many of them are small, one- and two-teacher schools. I have several schools that are over 1,000 students. But many of the schools are small. And the kids at these schools get an excellent education. Quite often, the children from these smaller, isolated schools excel when they get to high school because they have become self-reliant from the individual education they get from these teachers. One of the real issues that is confronting education, particularly in my area in the black soil plains, is the state of the roads. I firmly believe there is a case to be made for priority funding to school-bus routes. For instance, at the moment I have hundreds of children right across the north-western part of my electorate, in the Moree and Walgett-Coonamble areas, who cannot access school because the roads are impassable due to wet weather.

Finally, I come to tertiary education, in the few seconds I have left. One of the great anomalies that faces kids going to tertiary education is that they have to live away from home. As a father who has just put his third child into tertiary education, I fully understand the problem that these kids face—that is, their access to youth allowance. They have to work independently for 15 months to get that funding. They do not have an option to stay at home. They have to move off and live away from home. So they need this funding. (Time expired)

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