Page 152 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 December 2008
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We need to find those students and we must help them catch up with their classmates. We need to help those students catch up today, and we need to reduce the number of kids who appear with similar problems tomorrow. We must ensure that as children move through school, they all take the essential literacy and numeracy skills with them. In practice, this will mean investing in outreach and intensive learning programs for our students. It will mean speaking to teachers, parents and students and it will mean continually looking to do things better.
We have committed to a raft of measures that will ensure that every child can access the support they need to gain the literacy and numeracy skills through our ACT education system. As a Labor candidate, I was proud to support such positive vision, and now as a Labor MLA I look forward to assisting in its implementation.
A second area is health. Mr Speaker, the ACT allows for one health system rather than a series of individual area health services. As such, we are well placed to be a leader in developing and delivering an innovative health system. We can do this by developing our own health workforce and service delivery models in both the community sector and tertiary facilities. The ACT has renowned university and vocational institutions to train our future workforce. These are local institutions which can facilitate articulation across the education sectors. This will allow for more of our local community to enter training and to contribute to our health system. I see a system of education and health working together to train our own health workforce, leading to more Canberrans caring for those in need—Canberrans caring for Canberrans.
I see a system where new models of care and models of service delivery lead to improved health services through nurse-led clinics and where the whole multidisciplinary primary health care team can respond to the needs of our community, providing strong, proactive and preventive health measures. This primary health care team can offer services through innovative scope of practice—a change to meet our community needs over the years to come.
Finally, Mr Speaker, I would like to talk about the immense talent and extreme dedication that can be found within our community and the need for government to harness that talent. One of the great privileges of running as a candidate in the 2008 election was being able to witness the great work being done across Brindabella by a good many local organisations, big and small. Organisations such as Communities@Work, the Tuggeranong and Woden Valley community councils, the Lions Club and the Concerned Residents of West Kambah are just a few of the many local organisations that I had the opportunity to meet this year.
The strength of the Brindabella community is due in no small part to the passion and dedication of our community organisations. Local residents devote their time to make sure that their kids play sport on the weekend. Local residents serve on school committees. They collect money for local charities. They run local scouts, brownies and cadets. Local organisations, through hard work and dedicated volunteers, represent some of the greatest assets that can be found in our community. As a member of the ACT government, I believe we should make the most of these most wonderful community assets.
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