Maxine McKew (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Early Childhood Education and Child Care) Share this | Hansard source

There are millions of words spoken in this House every day, but today I want to put on the record the words of a 10-year-old girl called Matilda Rose Carnegie. Matilda Rose attends St Catherine’s School in Waverley in Sydney and this is part of a speech that she made to her year 5 class last week. She said:

Imagine being deaf for a day. You know how it is when someone presses the mute button on the TV, but now instead imagine they pressed it on your life. Imagine waking up and not hearing anything, not even your alarm clock or the garbage trucks at 6 am …

Being deaf is like living in only part of the world but I don’t have to live in only part of the world because I have a cochlear implant which lets me hear.

What it does is make me hear really well when there is just one person talking to me. However, in group conversations it sounds like a hundred voices speaking at once and it is overwhelming for me.

I am not asking for sympathy, instead just a bit of consideration. But at the end of the day, just like being tall, being deaf is part of what makes me ME!!

Given the clarity of that speech, I think it is safe to say that this little girl has an exceptional future ahead of her. But it did not look like that a decade ago. Matilda Rose Carnegie was born with bilateral profound deafness and was also diagnosed with mild cerebral palsy. Having navigated the medical maze, Matilda’s parents, Tanya and Mark, realised that the best way to help their daughter and many others like her was to bring together in one centre the very best of transdisciplinary clinical teams. And so the Matilda Rose Early Intervention Centre was opened, a homelike environment which helps children with multiple special needs.

The centre is funded overwhelmingly by generous philanthropic donations, but the founders acknowledge the critical importance of Cochlear’s world class research and products—Matilda Rose now wears a Nucleus Freedom implant—and the government funded Australian Hearing Services. Both will soon be relocating to Macquarie University, in my electorate of Bennelong, and will be partners in the Hearing Hub, which will be a unique facility for audiology. The combination of outstanding Australian technology, devoted parenting and an unbeatable spirit are combining to ensure that we all sit up and take notice of a girl called Matilda Rose and, hopefully, many others like her.

See this speech in context