Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I have become aware the longer I am the member for Parramatta that how profoundly different the experience of children can be as they approach school years and get in to school. There are almost two completely different worlds. There is the world of Westmead Public School which is one of my best schools. It is a centre for excellence, it has a great cohort of parents who are mainly double professional career families, it has a lot of skilled migrants and a strong commitment to education. You will find it is an incredibly good school with a very active P&C. The children are engaged in extracurricular activity in fine arts and high-level sport as well as their educational activities. These are kids that are in every way being given what they need to fly, regardless of what their capacity is.

There is a child I met a number of years ago when I was up at Telopea Railway Station. She first started wandering down across the train line which, at that point, did not have a gate. She would wander across that train line and across Adderton Road, which is a main road, to get a carton of milk every morning and then go back. She was about four. As the years progressed she started bringing down her younger brother, who was still in nappies, and they would wander across the train line and head down to get a carton of milk every morning. It was in a very short time that, in the only way I can describe it, they started to get the mark of poverty; that slightly grey skin and wariness in their eyes. I watched them over those two years and thought: 'This is a remarkable young girl. She has everything in her that she needs to do well in life: she's committed, she's loyal, she's making things happen, she clearly gets herself out of bed and into school uniform. She does that.' I asked her one day and she said her mum was still asleep. She was a remarkable young girl, but you know that when she reached school age she probably would not have had the parental assistance in learning to read, learning to count and all the things that parents do for you. They walk up the stairs and count and they read to you and show you, before you get to school, how to learn.

These are two completely different experiences of school, and I am well aware that we need to be working at both ends. We need to make sure that a person can stand. We also need to make sure that person can fly if they can. There has been a considerable investment in education by this government—a doubling of investment in education and some great programs that have been rolled out in Parramatta—but I would like to hear from both ministers how we are addressing the needs of both of those groups of children.

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