Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Whalan Public School to see firsthand some work being done there by the Sydney Theatre Company with young students, showing them how to express their imagination, ideas and thoughts. It is a terrific program that is being run by the Sydney Theatre Company. I commend them and the school on that. After seeing that, I was approached by two students—Liberty, from class 2D, and Willow, from class 2MH. They wanted to impress on me, through two letters they provided, what they would do if they were Prime Minister of Australia. And I committed to them to read out some of their thoughts in the parliament because they had thought a lot about some of the things they wanted to do. For example, Liberty said that, if she were Prime Minister, she would want to introduce everyone from overseas to Australia. She said: 'It would make me feel like a real Prime Minister. I would show them what lamingtons and Vegemite are and how great Australia is.' She also had very tough words about people leaving rubbish around, and she wanted Australia to look better. Finally, she said she had a 'pro Lego' policy. In her words: 'Kids can build so many amazing things with Lego. It helps our minds to make amazing things. If I were Prime Minister, I'd make sure every school had heaps of Lego, just like Whalan.'

And Willow said that, if she were Prime Minister, she would make sure Australia is the cleanest place on earth. She would clean up Australia and get lots of people to sign up to make Australia even cleaner. She would make an extra day in the week, which she would call 'Funday'. That's pretty good; I think a lot of people would agree with that! On top of that, she would make everyone's birthday twice a year. I suspect that, as we get on, we would have another think about that! But when you are young you are happy to have an extra day of the year where you are celebrating your birthday. So good on her. She had some great ideas as well.

I was very grateful for the time they took to express those ideas to me. Good on them for thinking about how they can improve the country they live in.

I also recently met with residents in Shedworth Street, Marayong about—no guesses here—the terrible state of the rollout of the National Broadband Network in the area. They are relying on ADSL, which is delivering download speeds of one megabit per second. NBN is telling them it knows it is a problem but if they want it fixed they should sign up to a newsletter. 'Sign up to a newsletter' if you have a problem? 'Yeah nah,' is I think the way people would describe that. We need to see the rollout accelerated. In that area, in Shedworth Street, it is clear that there is an overhead feed of HFC. The government said this would be a fix, yet this group of 20 residents who saw me one Saturday arc clearly not happy about it. They need access to a modern broadband network, not access to more excuses by the government.