Celia Hammond (Curtin, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

As someone who's been involved in higher education over the last two decades, and as someone with a personal investment in school education, I'm passionate about the education of our children and our youth. I want all of our children, all of our young people, to have access to excellent educational offerings wherever they are in this country and for this education to provide them with the knowledge, the skills and the personal characteristics to be able to find and pursue their passion in life, rise to their individual potential and contribute to society.

In my electorate of Curtin there are 54 schools with almost 30,000 children enrolled in them. There's one world-class university, the University of Western Australia, and a number of other higher education providers. Thirty-four per cent of people in Curtin engage in some form of education. Education matters in Curtin, and education matters to our government. We are demonstrating that through this year's budget, with a record $21.4 billion in funding for state schools, Catholic schools and independent schools for the 2020 school year—an increase in funding of $8.5 billion since 2013. There are two initiatives in this particular budget that I commend the minister on and which I wish to highlight.

The first of these relates to a particular passion area of mine, and that is children and education in remote areas of the country. I grew up in a town called Northam in regional Western Australia. My parents, a lawyer and a teacher, had moved there as newlyweds to find work. My mum, an English teacher, taught in the local high school, alongside many other gifted and wonderful teachers who worked in the country as part of a return-to-service program. My mum, like many others, ended up outstaying any and all requirements of the return-to-service program. She and my father ended up staying in Northam for 17 years in total. Excellent education depends on excellent teaching staff, and it depends on consistency of teachers. Turnover of teaching staff can thwart any achievements made on a year-by-year basis.

Having worked with university students for so long, I know that there are many reasons university graduates do not think about relocating to remote areas to work—isolation, fear of the unknown and the financial impost, to name a few. But I also know that many of them fall in love with these areas when they do pursue the opportunity, and they end up becoming firmly embedded in that community. What we need to do is encourage our graduates and newly graduated teachers to put aside hesitations about moving to remote areas for work. That is what this government's initiative does, remitting the debt incurred of graduate teachers who teach for a minimum of four years in remote schools, and it is an excellent initiative.

The other initiative I want to highlight relates to the arts. I'm not an active contributor to the arts. I have no artistic talent whatsoever. But I'm a passionate supporter of the arts and I believe that the arts must be embedded within our education system. If we want to ensure that our young people fully engage with education, that they learn to think creatively, that they learn to see the world through different eyes, that they learn about the world in which they live, like almost nothing else the arts have the ability to challenge, to engage and to inspire.

There are many fantastic events and initiatives in my electorate of Curtin that offer young people the opportunity to actively engage with the arts. Indeed, I recently attended a Bell Shakespeare program in my electorate, with year 11 and year 12 girls from St Hilda's Anglican School for Girls, and it was a sensational experience. Reading Shakespeare is wonderful in and of itself, but seeing a live production can be truly transformative. Our government gets it. We get the importance of arts in education. In this budget there is a $5.7 million commitment over five years to fund the delivery of arts programs, through Music Australia and Bell Shakespeare, across Australia. It won't be the hills that are alive but it will be this vast sunburnt country of ours.

As I finish, I ask the education minister—and I commend him on all the work that he's done and continues to do in education—to further outline some of the initiatives being introduced by the government in this budget.

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