Page 1810 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 April 2009
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In the ACT we are doing our part. Our schools are more sustainable than ever. CIT now offers courses and diplomas in renewable energy, ecology and environmental management and sustainability. The University of Canberra is introducing a sustainable building and construction course into a number of their degrees—something all kids can benefit from.
We also support a dads, children and play program which help dads with ideas support their son or daughter’s development by playing with them—again, something all kids can benefit from. From child friendly planning to green-collar jobs, from healthy lifestyles to helping dads play—all this is practical help to all Canberra’s children and young people.
We also provide practical support for children and young people right across the age range. I know that the evidence tells us that early intervention is the most effective way to help our children. Early intervention is morally right. But we cannot ask little children to help themselves. Early intervention is economically right, and as the Nobel Prize winning Chicago economist James Heckman puts it:
The most economically efficient way to remediate the disadvantage caused by adverse family environments is to invest in children when they are young.
That is good economics, good morality, good, progressive Labor policy.
In the past four years the government has worked resolutely in the area of early childhood services, investing in the health, development, education and wellbeing of young children; recognising the effectiveness of early intervention programs that focus on young children and responsive support to their families. It is this early intervention philosophy that drove the establishment of the groundbreaking child and family centres at Tuggeranong and Gungahlin. The child and family centres provide an integrated one-stop shop model of service, delivering universal and targeted services to families through purpose-built centres at Gungahlin and Tuggeranong. And we hope to expand these early intervention services further.
Our care and protection professionals are responsible for protecting children in extreme situations and trying to keep children out of those situations. It is not easy and sometimes it is traumatic, but it is what the community expects. Our care and protection professionals are doing a great job. I cannot begin to thank them enough. They know better than I what a tough job they do. They are special people. And as a community we are particularly privileged to have the support of so many care and protection professionals recruited from Ireland and the United Kingdom in the last few years.
I want to take the opportunity of this statement today to send two very simple messages to those special people: first, thank you. Thank you for moving your whole lives across the world to help our city’s kids. Thank you. And secondly, sorry. Sorry you have been dragged through the mud by the puerile opposition politics of the past 72 hours. Sorry.
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