Page 2414 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 13 August 2014
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This is why, Madam Speaker, I am moving this motion today: to ask Minister Burch and the ACT government to seek immediate certainty from the Australian government about what it intends to do to support education in these formative years. It is a vitally important issue to my community and to Canberra as a whole. I hope the Assembly joins with me today in urging the Australian government to recognise the importance of early childhood education and to continue funding the national partnership agreement beyond December 2014, and thus secure a strong future for our children and our community. I commend the motion to the Assembly.
MR DOSZPOT (Molonglo) (10.10): I welcome the opportunity to speak on Ms Berry’s motion, which could perhaps be best described as an assorted collection of well-meaning but nevertheless ill-timed notions associated with child care and early education. At the start, I have to say that I find it a bit rich for someone from the ACT Labor Party to imply the federal government has not communicated well with parents. Ms Berry claims the federal government has caused, to quote a part of her motion:
… great uncertainty amongst parents and educators as to the future of preschool programs in 2015.
That statement is flawed. Most glaring is the fact that it is made by someone from the same party that delivered only a few short years ago the savage proposal to close 23 schools—not just preschools but whole school systems from primary through to senior high school across Canberra—and to abolish a significant number of teaching positions along with them, all without consultation, all done without appropriate financial, social or demographic consideration. Of course, we are now seeing the results of that short-sighted planning with new schools now needed in those same areas.
If that was not enough, they then followed it up with a fortunately unsuccessful attempt to slash teachers of special education in such fields as hearing and sight-impaired education. Frankly it is more than a bit rich that Ms Berry comes in to this Assembly and tries to run a line that suggests failings from the federal government based on what is nothing more than a few loose pieces of information and phrases.
When we drill down into the elements of the motion in front us, we see a number of statements, not necessarily in any segue. There is no dispute that attendance at preschool has a significant and positive effect on literacy and numeracy outcomes of students. The commonwealth Department of Education in their submission to the Productivity Commission noted:
In Australia, research is starting to show the significant benefit of early education programs. Preschool attendance has been shown to be equivalent to 10 to 20 points in the national assessment program for literacy and numeracy, NAPLAN or 15 to 20 weeks of schooling at the Year 3 level, three years after attending preschool.
Ms Berry refers several times to the Productivity Commission. It might have been more useful had she referenced the latest work the Productivity Commission is doing in the early childhood education space. In November 2013 the federal government announced the establishment of the Productivity Commission inquiry into child care and early childhood learning. As the media release issued at the time said:
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