Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last Friday I visited Albert Park Kinder to visit my friend Jenny and all the brilliant educators at that centre. Albert Park Kinder is an outstanding local facility that is all about quality education and is one of a handful of such preschools with an excellent rating from the Australian Children's Education and Care Quality Authority—the highest rating a service can achieve under the National Quality Framework.

This visit was extra special because we went on a walking tour to the Garden of Eden Nursery in Albert Park. It was there that the children taught me about the different plants, where to find them, how to take care of them and which ones we were going to take back and plant in the tree garden at the Albert Park Kinder.

Albert Park Kinder has been a brilliant community preschool in council facilities since 1948. Albert Park Kinder is also one of the many early education and childcare services offered in the City of Port Phillip which are currently under review of council run and owned facilities and services.

I stand with the Community Alliance of Port Phillip, and all concerned families, in supporting the value of these outstanding local early learning services. This is about the fair delivery of essential services open to all and they deserve to be spared from council cuts and privatisation. We are lucky to live in a state that values and invests in early childhood learning—free three-year-old kinder—even if our federal government won't. Now is the time for council to keep investing in our early education, just like Albert Park Kinder, and not to be closing them down, because our parents and our kids deserve nothing less.