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

Today I would like to draw to the attention of the House a remarkable program launched recently in my electorate, an initiative administered jointly by the Smith Family and UnitingCare Burnside and to be generously funded over the next three years by Shell. The program is called ‘Let’s read—helping your child with early learning’ and involves the distribution of free materials to parents, including instructional DVDs and recommended reading lists, to assist parents in helping their kids with literacy before they start school. The program is the second in a series of three programs. ‘Helping your child with primary school’ was launched early this year and a third one, ‘Helping your child with high school’ is still to come.

I was pleased to be invited to launch the program because there is no better way to ensure that all doors are open for a child than to make sure that they get the parental support they need to get those early literacy skills early in life, and there is no faster or more efficient way to leave a child behind than to let them reach school age without basic reading skills—and children are being left behind. While children in middle-class families, for example, may get up to 1,500 hours of one-on-one reading before they reach school, children from disadvantaged families may receive as few as 25 hours of one-on-one reading with their parent before they reach school.

In my community too we have special difficulties with parents and grandparents whose command of English is not so good and refugee parents who are learning English at the same time as their children but whose children will grow through those early years faster than their parents can gain the skills they need to read with them in their new language.

When a child is not given the basics at an early age, that child will pay for that—and so will all of us—for the rest of their lives in wasted potential, higher risk of poverty, greater dependence on government and a loss of quality of life that comes with opportunity and access to the world that education and a love of knowledge gives us. Children’s lives do not wait for adults to get it right, and today we see the most community minded and caring people in our community working to give parents the best chance of getting it right for their children at the most crucial time in those very early years.

UnitingCare Burnside and the Smith Family have launched a wonderful program, giving parents the tools to help them teach their children and giving them the knowledge of how to do it. Parents will be able to give their children the best possible start in life. The parents of more than 1,400 preschool children are expected to benefit from this program in my electorate alone. I commend UnitingCare Burnside and the Smith Family for launching this vital program for the children in my electorate and I also commend Shell Australia for generously funding the program over the next three years.