Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

Can I thank the member for Macarthur for his informed comments. As someone who, unlike most of us in this place, you could regard as an expert in this field, I think we ought to take a great deal more notice of him than others do in this place. That includes the government. I want to thank the member for Newcastle and also the member for Lalor for their contributions.

I welcome this opportunity to discuss early childhood development and education. As we've heard, Labor this year announced it will introduce a new two-year national preschool and kindy program, guaranteeing around 700,000 children a year will be able to access subsidised preschool. This is the biggest-ever investment in early childhood education in Australia. For the first time, every three-year-old in Australia will be able to access 15 hours of subsidised early childhood education so they can get the best start in learning.

I want to compliment the member for Macarthur for the erudite way in which he explained the importance of this in childhood development. It seems to me that we ought to all read his thesis so we too can be informed about this issue of early brain development and learning. I say this from someone who effectively lives in a remote part of Australia but whose electorate covers 1.4 million square kilometres and 300-odd communities. A very large proportion of the people—42 per cent of that population—are Aboriginal people living in some of the most appalling circumstances in the country, who need the access that these funds will provide, hitherto not available to them because of the neglect of this government.

It's worth pointing out that, when last in government, the Labor Party put in place 38 child and family centres around the country. These were aimed at early childhood development, to look at making sure that young people got access to preschool—Families as First Teachers and a whole host of other programs. Needless to say, when Mr Abbott became the prime minister, they all went. That's an indictment, as is the government's failure to currently properly fund preschool education for four-year-olds, let alone three-year-olds. It seems to me that we have a real problem in this country if we can't, across the parliament, accept the need for addressing these issues—to deal with early childhood education—given what we know of the way in which it affects people's lives in the longer term: their capacity to acquire new information and knowledge and their capacity to learn and understand.

The member for Macarthur and I, along with a number of others in this place, have pointed out that we are advocates of the 'first thousand days' approach to early childhood development. This is an approach within Australia that has been pioneered by Professor Kerry Arabena of the University of Melbourne, and she has been instrumental in advocating, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children in Australia as well as other Indigenous populations, the adoption of a broader, holistic and cultural approach to early childhood development, including education.

What we need to understand is that there are people in this country who are working in this space and have given great thought to how to make sure that, from the time of conception—indeed, pre conception—we're working with families around the development of their young children. I want to give a shout-out to the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress in Alice Springs, which has adopted an Abecedarian model of development and growth for young kids of three and onwards, has got its own preschool and is addressing these issues we've described. It seems to me we in this place ought to be listening to the people who know. We need to make sure that every child in this country gets access to proper preschool education to set them up for life—and that's what this is about, as well as understanding the economic benefits which the member for Macarthur referred to.

We have an opportunity and we have a responsibility here. If we fail to accept the opportunity and fail our responsibility, the people who are going to suffer are the current generation of young kids and future generations, and it will be because we're too negligent and too stupid to help them realise their full potential by investing in early childhood education.

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