Chris Hayes (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last year the Liberal and Independent councillors in the Liverpool City Council made a decision to close down or relocate public libraries in Miller, Green Valley, Moorebank and Casula. I am happy to inform members of the House that those very same councillors have now backflipped and have used the first council meeting of the year to reverse their plan. It took months of campaigning by local residents, with the support of Labor councillors and the state member for Liverpool, Mr Paul Lynch, for the individuals in question to realise that they simply cannot take away such valuable resources from the community. What particularly ignited the local residents to fight was the fact that their views and needs were not being taken into account as there was no community consultation prior to the original decision being taken.

The result of this ballot is a true victory for local people, a triumph for common sense and, importantly, a demonstration of what a community can do through commitment and conviction. The message from local residents was clear from the very beginning: libraries are so important to local residents that they are worth fighting for.

Most of us think of a library as a quiet and peaceful environment in which to study, conduct research or attend various classes and workshops. But for some people a library is a place to have access to resources, particularly computer technology that is necessary to complete school work and other tasks such as accessing online job applications. The fact is that some parents do not have the financial capacity to provide their kids with the resources to give them the best opportunity to learn and so their best chance for the future. Unfortunately, this is a reality for many parents in some of the less privileged areas of Western Sydney.

Local libraries by their very nature are particularly significant to students, most importantly those in their final years of schooling. Allowing each student the best possible opportunity to reach their potential is a social responsibility. In some cases, providing resources in public areas such as libraries is simply essential. In areas with high levels of community housing, where most people have limited access to personal space for study, the local library takes on an even more significance. Clearly, local libraries are an invaluable space for individuals to study, to undertake tutoring and to complete work tasks in a quiet and peaceful environment with fewer distractions.

The battle to keep libraries in the Liverpool area open brought to light a number of stories from individuals whose views were clearly not taken into account by the councillors who made the decision in the first place. One particular story was highlighted by a letter from a 10-year-old girl, Zeinab Afiouni, who wrote to a colleague of mine, the Mayor of Liverpool City Council, Wendy Waller, pleading for her library not to be closed as she said it was ‘her favourite place in the world’. She said reading was her favourite activity, and closing the library would make her very ‘sad and angry’. And that was a fact for a lot of young people.

I commend the Labor councillors of Liverpool City Council and the state member, Mr Paul Lynch, for standing up for their community and assisting local residents to win a battle that was all about their kids’ future. However, I strongly believe it should not have taken many months of community backlash, media pressure and, I might add, the onset of a state election campaign to overturn the closing of local libraries. Such an anti-community initiative should never, ever have been contemplated in the first place. It was taking away something of such value to the community, particularly a community that in many instances has not been dealt the best hand in life. Local libraries are significant for everyone from preschoolers through to senior citizens. To take them away goes against common sense and any commitment to advancing the real needs of local communities. I am extremely proud of local members for what they have been able to achieve and I am extremely proud of my community for standing up for what they regard as significance community values.

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Action, Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the general tenor of this motion in relation to the role of public libraries in Australia, without having the specific knowledge to comment on the matters within the city of Liverpool. I thank the member for Fowler for his contribution to that broad space. I want to make two points in relation to libraries in Australia. The first is about the role of the library in the modern age. The traditional role as simply a conservator and lender of books remains, but in the digital age there is a dramatically different role, task, function and facility. I know this firsthand, having witnessed my young daughter at the library. She is now a prep year student, having begun primary school this year, but she had a lot of education, along with children throughout the Mornington Peninsula, in early reading and gaining a love for reading in the local library. This is not something that you would imagine or expect as a nonparent. It is something that is exceptionally important and of real value. It is about creating a culture and an environment in which children can learn to love books, to love reading and to love the world of imagination and ideas. That is fundamental to a lifetime of literacy, which is undoubtedly an almost indispensable prerequisite for comfort and achievement in modern society.

Many people have overcome the barrier of illiteracy, but it is a huge barrier. It is one of the great untold barriers. Libraries are bulwarks against illiteracy. They are a safe place where many of those who are underprivileged have a real chance to learn in an environment which is not going to be judgmental. The workplace can be frightening for people who get to adulthood and do not have literacy skills. It remains an ongoing challenge. One of the great roles of public libraries going forward is not just as a place for young people, although that is indispensable, not just as a repository for books but as a front line in the war against illiteracy for adults. It is a great social challenge.

The second element of public libraries which I want to address is in relation to one very specific issue, and that is autism. Over the course of the last few years, through people such as Helen Lloyd, a mother in my electorate who worked to provide services and raise funds for her son Jordan, I have become more engaged—as every member in this place would—with the problem of autism. I have increasingly become engaged with Autism Victoria. They service over 30,000 Victorians. There are many more whom they do not service. We know that, depending on where the definition of autism starts and ends, around 200,000 people in Australia suffer from autism. It can be deeply debilitating or it can be something that can be addressed at an early age through very targeted early intervention.

Last week, late in the week, I went to Abacus Learning Centre in Hastings, in my electorate. I worked with Michael Moore and others who are part of Abacus. They are part of the process of providing early literacy skills, early adaptation skills for preschool children with autism spectrum disorder. Part of the challenge is to ensure that there is adequate literature tailored specifically to these children and to the parents of these children. In that respect, Autism Victoria is putting together the 1000 Books Campaign. It is a campaign which I have become involved in in a very modest way. There are many others who are doing much more. This campaign is about a recognition that parents of children with autism are hungry for knowledge about something which is confronting and challenging. It can cause them to doubt their skills as parents. It can cause them to worry about the future facing their children. The 1000 Books Campaign is not about a mass of money. It is about developing a resource. We will work with the Victorian government and also with the Commonwealth government. It will be one of the two destinations for any funds that we raise in a 500-kilometre walk for autism that I am doing around the electorate later this year. Abacus will be the other recipient. Public libraries are vital in the battle against illiteracy, but the specific public library campaign in relation to autism, the 1000 Books Campaign, will be fundamental going forward.

Laurie Ferguson (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a representative of part of the Liverpool municipality—and the son of the man who left school at 13 years of age and who educated himself through school of arts libraries, which preceded public libraries, and left state parliament widely regarded as the best-read person in the New South Wales parliament—I very much congratulate my colleague for bringing this resolution forward.

The Australian Library and Information Association has heralded next year as the year of public libraries so it is ironic that this year Liverpool Council—an organisation with 6,000 members which acknowledges that in this country we have 183 million library items, 10 million inquiries a year and 8½ thousand personal computers with internet access at 7,000 libraries—a Liberal controlled council, has moved in this fashion. Like my colleague, I am pleased that they are retracting their position. But it has not been without a very significant public campaign by the minority Labor councillors in that organisation and by the state member for Liverpool, Paul Lynch.

Libraries are indeed of great value to society. The Australian Library and Information Association has cited an international survey of over 27 countries which says that where there is a book in the home there is improved educational outcomes for children, especially among disadvantaged families. As the member for Fowler said, this is an area that does have a degree of public deprivation because of public housing. It is also a high-migration area and these books are not in many homes. People depend, more than in any other area, on access to public libraries.

Libraries are also an outing for many people. They are an area where people can socially interface. They are available for family history searches and for book clubs. On a broader front, they are certainly at the cutting edge, in this day and age, of skills acquisition. They work closely with schools and they are crucial—and this is going to be a focus of next year’s year of public libraries—for family literacy and encouraging entire families to access these facilities. They are also about public spaces—meeting places where organisations that cannot afford to elsewhere can actually get rooms at cheap prices. They are also a refuge from stress for many people.

It is alright for the Liverpool city councillors, driving in their cars, to say that you can have a centralised institution which might be slightly larger, or whatever, than these four public libraries they threaten. But many people in this area do not have car transport and do not have access to public transport. There was an example given of one person who would have to use three forms of public transport to get to this megalith they were going to construct as the municipality’s loan library.

In Britain there has also been a debate about public libraries. There was a threat to 450 of them. The Guardian, the British daily paper, on 11 February this year said, about libraries:

In short, they are civilised, unlike the people who are deciding their fate.

Quite frankly, that is very true of the Liverpool councillors. There is no other place in this country where a council would sit around and come up with this kind of concept. It is the same council, which, alone in this country when everyone else was getting behind the flood effort in Queensland, wanted to play partisan politics about the raising of flood money. It was the only place I know which refused to contribute to the Queensland Premier’s flood appeal because it did not trust the Queensland government. That is the kind of mentality that we have in this council.

So I am pleased that the member for Fowler has brought this forward. It is crucial that libraries are available. I saw a figure quoted by the member for Fowler—other figures have quoted an even higher usage rate—that libraries have 10 million members in this country. Ten million Australians are members of public libraries. It is crucial that the councillors of Liverpool are held to this defeat, this backdown. I understand that they are making it slightly conditional to save themselves some face. They are placing certain conditions—that they will keep these libraries as long as this or that happens. The public has spoken. There has been a broad coalition of people throughout the municipality who have seen a very stark need for this library system and the council must be held to their word in the months ahead.

Steve Irons (Swan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support this motion by the member for Fowler, as I firmly believe in the importance of public libraries for communities across Australia. Again, I do not know about the Liverpool situation, but it is good to see that our members in New South Wales are supporting public libraries. My older sister, Lucy Irons, is a librarian and I know that the Speaker, the Deputy Speaker and I have been advocating the importance of teachers and librarians in schools. Lucy is currently employed with Vision Australia and her role as a librarian is very important to her. I remember growing up reading books around the family house because we had no television as youngsters, but our hallway was lined with bookshelves and my memory tells me that the first serious novel I read was Beau Geste. My parents joined the family up as a member of Box Hill Library and many books were borrowed in the early years of my life. I am happy to say that we also returned those books.

There are 36 public libraries in my electorate of Swan. These consist of school, university and community libraries that cater for all residents of Swan. The valuable services they offer include books for recreation and information, newspapers and magazines, reference resources including encyclopaedias and directories, access to the state library website and a range of online databases, internet facilities, large print books, books and other resources in 50 community languages other than English, resources for learning a language, community and local history information and photocopying facilities. There are resources and services for all age groups. These are all things that we find as standard that we should have access to, but a lot of people in lower socioeconomic areas just do not have the facilities or the resources to get that information.

Last year I was invited to attend the Belmont public library along with local residents on a night that was designed to promote reading and the benefits of doing so to young boys. It was good to be involved with and also witness such a worthwhile event. I, together with Sally Carbon—the well-known sportswoman, author and World Cup and Olympic gold medallist for hockey—and her husband, ex-AFL footballer Michael Broadbridge, attended this night, which was put together for the very purpose of engaging young children’s minds. It was a fantastic night and it was finished off with pizza and sandwiches which the attending young boys and parents enjoyed.

I would now like to talk about a project in my electorate at the WA Association for the Blind called Beyond Books, Beyond Barriers. The Beyond Books, Beyond Barriers library project will transform the way the association store and supply their library’s audio resources. Their current collection of books on cassette will be changed into a collection of digital, downloadable audio book files. This means that they will no longer have rows of shelving holding hundreds of different talking book containers that are ready for posting throughout WA. Instead, their books will all be saved on a large computer server. Any of their borrowers who have access to the internet and the right assistive technology will be able to search their user-friendly catalogue and select and download the books they want. For those people without access to the internet, the library will download digital books onto a cartridge and post those to their borrowers for use on a dedicated talking book player. Their books will be totally accessible for use on any mainstream MP3 player, including devices such as mobile phones and personal digital assistants. In addition, these books will be produced according to a special MP3 file format known as DAISY, which is a worldwide standard developed specifically for people who have a print disability. The advantage of this format is that, if the books are played using DAISY software on a computer or using a specialised DAISY player, added features can be used, such as the ability to insert bookmarks or to easily move around within chapters or sections of a book.

Another exciting aspect of the project is the development of a production on demand service. This service has the potential to make thousands of titles available that would otherwise be inaccessible to people who are unable to read printed materials. The service will take an e-text document from within the public domain and convert it into an alternative format of choice, including Braille, large print and audio. The documents must not have copyright restrictions, such as documents in Project Gutenberg. The audio will feature a synthesised voice instead of a human voice, but these are of extremely good quality and will continue to improve. I applaud the association for their work in this area to maintain a library service that is modern and user-friendly for those who might otherwise be deprived of the joys of our language and the written word.

On the question of funding of public libraries, in October 2010 the Western Australian Liberal minister for culture and the arts, John Day, announced that the WA Liberal government would allow the State Library to use a new more equitable funding model for determining the allocation for each local government to purchase materials for their local public libraries. This change in policy will result in an efficient allocation of public funds and more transparency in their approach and process. I congratulate the member for Fowler for bringing this motion to the House.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.