Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

One of the best things that we can give our children, apart from a happy home, is education. It forges a future for them. It enables so many opportunities to be open to them. There are 130 schools in the Riverina electorate: 106 primary and 24 secondary. They're all providing great educational opportunities for Riverina children. There is a mix of boarding schools, Catholic schools, independent schools and public schools—all very good institutions of learning. Of course, with COVID, they've all had to adapt to new ways of learning. It has been 20 months of challenging times for teachers, students and, indeed, parents. World Teachers Day is celebrated in Australia on the last Friday of October each year. This year it lands on 29 October.

My daughter, Georgina, is a teacher, and I'm very proud of the fact that she was recently promoted to head of English in the middle school at Caulfield Grammar School. That's a tremendous opportunity for her. I know she has told me of the difficulties of teaching children, face to face. She, like other Victorian teachers—and, indeed, other teachers right across our country—has done an amazing job, being able to give that learning, either via telepresence or, now, face to face, through these challenging and difficult times. I commend teachers and I say, 'Thank you very much.'

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