Matters of Public Importance: Education: Early Childhood Mark Latham - Leader of the Opposition

Speech

Transcript - House of Representatives, Parliament House - 11 February 2004

SPEAKER: I have received a letter from the honourable member for Werriwa proposing that a definite matter of public importance be submitted to the House for discussion, namely:

The Government's failure to implement an early childhood development strategy, including reading programs for our infant children

I call upon those members who approve of the proposed discussion to rise in their places.

More than the number of members required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

LATHAM: This is the debate the government want to have. They have not got a policy on early childhood development but they want to have a debate. In fact, something quite unusual in Australian politics has happened. Normally the opposition challenges the government to a debate, but the Leader of the National Party is getting well ahead of himself. He is not waiting until he goes into opposition to challenge me to a debate; he is doing it from government. He issued a statement last Thursday, entitled ‘Anderson challenges Latham on reading contest'. The challenge said:

If Mark Latham wants to talk about children, then we should have a full-blooded debate about it. I'll clear my schedule for him.

I cleared my schedule. I am turning up in the House of Representatives in the MPI to have the debate. So there was no need to clear the schedule. The need for the government is to actually produce a policy. Do not worry about clearing the schedule. Come into the parliament and produce a policy. This is a government that has been in power for eight years, and it has produced nothing in terms of early childhood development—not a policy on child care, not a policy on teachers in the child-care and preschool system, not a policy on reading and not a policy on parenting programs. In question time, the best the Prime Minister could do was to pull out a very slim document from four years ago that he said represented the sum total of the government's contribution to early childhood development in this country. In fact, the government has cut that strategy that he pulled out—the stronger families strategy—by $16½ million over the past two years, and the Prime Minister is so impressed by early childhood development that he will not even commit to the ongoing funding of the strategy that he tried to triumph with in question time today.

So the Prime Minister has no policy for early childhood development. He has no strategy for improving the reading capacity of parents to make reading more available in the homes of the nation. What we have got from this government is not a policy; we have got eight years of failure. In the Labor Party we are proud of the fact that at our recent national conference we produced the policy Read Aloud Australia. It is a policy that should be adopted by the government. If the government is looking for good ideas and a good, solid commitment to early childhood development, as I suggested in question time, it should adopt our Read Aloud Australia strategy.

The international research is compelling. Learning starts on the first day of life. Seventy-five per cent of a child's brain develops in the first five years of life. Half of all the developmental, including intellectual, potential of a child is established by age four. Because children develop skills in learning at an early age, we need to focus on quality education and care in the early years. Learning does not start on the first day of school; it starts on the first day of life. That is why Labor is committed to our read aloud strategy. It includes three books for the parents of newborn children through our BookStart program—a book at birth, a book available when the parents join the local library, and a book available when they finish a parenting course or adult literacy program.

The essential lesson is that you cannot start too soon. I was asked by a journalist on Sunday: ‘Why are you providing these books without means testing? Why is this a universal BookStart program?' The message for parents, whether they are rich, poor or middle income, is that we all need to start reading to infant children from the very first day to make the children aware of the stimulation of reading, to make them aware over time of the stimulation of the picture books, to get them used to the whole concept and benefits of reading and to be stimulated at that early age. As their little minds develop, they need the stimulation that comes from reading, basically from the first day, the first week, the first month. I say to parents who might think that there is time to wait and that this is the sort of thing that can be delayed to age three or four: it is true that in those early months you will feel a bit dorky holding the child and trying to get them used to the book, and there will be times when the child will grab the book and try and eat it, chew it or tear it, but persevere, because it is worth while. It is absolutely worth while to get the infant children used to the idea of reading books, and over time they will respond to that early stimulation by and effort of parents.

The second component of our read aloud strategy is an adult literacy network. There will be outreach workers in the regions of the nation working with the schools, the child-care centres, the preschools, the playgroups, the community groups, Centrelink and Job Network. Basically, anywhere in our community where parents can be identified as in need of adult literacy courses we will have the capacity to say to them, ‘Come and do a course at an adult and community education provider.' Or there might be a volunteer or a retired school teacher available to come into the home to help with the adult literacy skills. All parents want the very best for their children, but not all parents have the capacity, the confidence or the reading skills themselves to engage in reading aloud for their children at an early age. We want to make them capable. We want to give people the capacity. Adult literacy is one of the forgotten parts of our education system in Australia. Adult literacy is an essential component of our read aloud strategy.

Of course, in his press release last Thursday the leader of The Nationals, the Deputy Prime Minister, belittled this idea of parenting tuition—of adult literacy courses. He made the observation:

... it's good citizens that make good governments, not nanny-state governments that make good citizens ...

He is trying to belittle the idea that in modern Australian society we need to provide governmental programs and assistance to parents. It is further evidence of how this government lives in the past. It does not govern for the future. It lives in the past. Describing these initiatives as ‘nanny state' to try and belittle them is plain wrong. We need to face the reality in modern Australian society that not everyone is part of a nuclear family and not everyone has the networks of extended family support. I am one of the lucky ones. I know that. I live next door to my sister. My mum is around the road. We have extended family support as we balance work and family. But not all Australian families have that benefit—that support network—around them. So I urge the Deputy Prime Minister to look beyond his own circumstances and understand that in a mobile society many people move away from those networks of extended family support and that many families are broken up, sadly and, in some cases, tragically.

The reality is that it is something the government needs to respond to. We should not leave any parent in our society isolated from the goodwill of a caring community. We should not leave any parent isolated from the benefits of the support provided by government and community organisations. It might be support as simple as a conversation, where a single parent has someone who has been through the same experience to talk to about the challenges of managing, to share experiences with and to get a bit of feedback from. It can be a support network as simple as a conversation. It could make a huge difference to parents who feel isolated in undertaking the increasingly complex and challenging task of modern parenting. But beyond that simple conversation there are other things that governments can do. That is why the Labor Party is committed to nursing home visits in the postnatal period—to provide parents with the support, instruction, guidance and companionship that is needed in the early days and months of a child's life. That is why the Labor Party is committed to adult literacy courses and parenting programs—to assist parents who would otherwise feel isolated and inadequate in the way in which they could face up to the challenges of modern parenting.

This patronising view from the Deputy Prime Minister—to try and belittle parenting support as a ‘nanny state'—is totally inappropriate. I ask him to look beyond his own circumstances and understand the Australian society and community in which we now live. Any person understanding it would have good in their heart and would reach out to those parents and use the resources of government and community to provide them with the support they need. It is not ‘nanny state'; it is commonsense. It is commonsense for a compassionate government that is in touch with the needs of the Australian community. We are committed to those things in the Labor Party—proudly so.

So too are we committed to our Read Aloud ambassadors. At our national conference I was proud to announce that Australia's outstanding children's author, Mem Fox, will be our first Read Aloud ambassador. This is the demonstration effect—community leaders, authors, sportspeople and political leaders demonstrating to the rest of the nation the value of reading aloud to infant children. Politics is more than legislation. Politics is more than passing programs. It is actually the leadership of the demonstration effect. I have got to say to the Deputy Prime Minister that when he issued his read-off challenge I was very disappointed. I said, ‘The best thing we can do is have the parliamentary debate. Let's go down to a school somewhere in Canberra or Queanbeyan on a Friday morning and demonstrate as national political leaders the value of reading aloud to the rest of the nation.' It would have been a fine demonstration of national leadership. The response from the Deputy Prime Minister was hopelessly inadequate.

We need to do all these things to put in place Read Aloud Australia. We also need to work with the states to develop comprehensive neonatal screening for hearing and sight. If children cannot hear and their sight is inadequate, they cannot read, so we have got to work with the states and territories to get that right. We have also got to include literacy progress in the yellow and the blue books in various states. Book reading and literacy progress should be tracked and monitored and proudly recorded by parents—as much as all the health and developmental issues are.

On other early childhood development strategies the government are also hopelessly inadequate. They have no child-care plan, they have no plan for access and quality in our child-care system, and we have big, competing pressures. This government have cut the number of centre based long day care places in Australia by 500 over the last four or five years. We have a shortfall of 20,000 places for outside school hours care in this country. And what is the response of the government to this issue? The Treasurer made one of his social capital interventions recently. We said, ‘The big issue in child care is the fact that there might be some rising wage pressures in the sector.' He seemed to say that, by his standards, he was happy with the situation where child-care workers in this country—the custodians, the guardians of the next generation of Australians—should be paid—

Anderson interjecting—

LATHAM: It is their parents and the child-care workers. If you understand the nature of work and family, a parent like me puts a child in the child-care centre wanting good custodians and guardians for that child for the time that he is in the child-care centre. If you do not have the luxury of a nanny at home, if you do not have the necessary resources and you rely on your neighbourhood child-care centre, of course they are the custodians and guardians of your children, and you hope and pray that nothing goes wrong. You want the very best people involved in those child-care centres. And that is why the Treasurer is wrong. That is why the Treasurer is wrong to say that we should pay our child-care workers no more than $13 an hour in this country. The Treasurer is wrong in saying that our child-care workers should receive no more than garbos and other workers of that kind. They do important jobs in our society—that is true—but I say that there is no more important job in our society than being a custodian of the next generation of Australians.

So how about we have a government policy of building up the status and rewards for child-care workers? How about a government policy recognising that we want more than just child minding and that we want child development? How about a government policy that ensures that the very best educational and developmental programs are available in our child-care system? How about a government policy that does not consign us to a second- or third-class child-care system? How about a government that invests in this vital early childhood facility and service? The competing pressures are there. The government has driven down the availability of places and the government is talking down the status of our child-care workers.

It is true that there is no magic pudding; we need to invest more in child care. We need to invest more in child care to give to child-care workers the rewards and status that they deserve and to ensure the quality of that child care. We need to invest more in child care to overcome the backlog and deficiency caused by this government in affordability and access, and we need to invest more in our children full stop. That is the bottom line. Children may be 20 per cent of our population, but I say to the Deputy Prime Minister: they are 100 per cent of our future and it is about time your government started to invest in them. Stop talking about clearing your diary and all this nonsense. After eight years in government, instead of living in the past and instead of demonstrating patronising attitudes about a ‘nanny state', how about delivering a policy that matters to the next generation of Australians? How about a government strategy of making better use of our prosperity as a nation?

It is true that Australia has generated enormous wealth and prosperity over the last 20 years. I think both sides of the parliament can take credit for the emergence of a prosperous Australian economy. We on this side are certainly proud of our role in building the modern Australian economy. But it was never prosperity for prosperity's sake; it was prosperity with a purpose. Labor always wanted prosperity that was put to good use in this country, and when I look at a system where we have a deficiency in child-care provision and where we have child-care workers paid just $13 an hour I say that our prosperity is not being used as well as it could be. How about using our prosperity for the great national purpose of investing in the next generation of Australians? This is the start of lifelong learning. We can never have a learning society and we can never have lifelong learning in this country until we invest fully in early childhood development.

The Prime Minister summarised his attitude towards our children when he sat on the sideline, a negative, whingeing, carping commentator, taking pot shots at government schools. We now have the Deputy Prime Minister effectively taking pot shots at child-care workers by diminishing their role. We have a Treasurer who takes pot shots at child-care workers by failing to build up their status and role in our society. How about backing the workers and the people dedicated to the next generation of Australians; and, most importantly, how about investing in their future?

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