Page 980 - Week 03 - Thursday, 22 March 2018
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I also note that the ACT council of P&C associations in their budget submission for the 2017-18 budget put in a request for teacher librarians in every school, and I note that the Australian Education Union ACT branch has also supported this push. I remember with some fondness that my late colleague and former shadow minister for education, Mr Doszpot, was a huge supporter of teacher librarians, as he recognised the important role they play in our children’s education.
Madam Speaker, I must confess it has been some time since I have been in a library that was not the ANU law library, the Assembly library or the court library, however, some of my fondest university memories are spending quiet afternoons in the National Library working on assessments on contemporary Asian societies and politics, reading classics by Jane Austen and poems by Janet Frame when I decided to take English literature for a semester, or trawling through obscure law reports because back then, of course, the more obscure your reference, surely the higher your marks would be.
But libraries are not just for teachers or students; my father, who is an almost 70-year-old manual worker with English as a second language is still a keen and regular attendee at his local library, and he is particularly grateful for the section in that library that houses Korean books. As he is not able to easily buy Korean books in Australia, this resource is something he holds very dear to his heart as it allows him to escape into the world of fiction or to broaden his knowledge and keep up to date with the latest news or to continue his self-development by reading non-fiction books that I think popularly are considered self-help books.
One of the best things about libraries is their creativity. One such ingenious idea that was posted on my Facebook wall recently is to get children to pay off any late fees in library fines for unreturned books through reading. This is an initiative that has been rolled out at the Rockford Public Library in Illinois and Delvin-Yorkshire Public Library in the State of New York. My Facebook friend who posted it on my wall wondered whether it might be a good idea for our capital city. This initiative may have started with punishing students with reading, but the reports from these libraries have all been how pleasantly surprised they have been with children actually looking forward to paying their fines through reading. We all know that reading is good for us, and any way that we can encourage our children to do so is worth exploring.
Ms Lawder has spoken already about libraries and the important role they play in our community. They bring together the community and bridge cultural and generational gaps in ways that nothing else can quite do. I thank Ms Lawder for bringing this matter of public importance to the Assembly today.
MS FITZHARRIS (Yerrabi—Minister for Health and Wellbeing, Minister for Transport and City Services and Minister for Higher Education, Training and Research) (4.11): I thank Ms Lawder for the opportunity to speak today about the importance of libraries in the ACT. It is a pleasure to address the Assembly today about this important role, as a local member, as a member of the community, as the minister and as the sister of a librarian. Public libraries are one of the cornerstones of free, open democracies, and none more so than here in the ACT. The mission of our libraries is to ensure a literate, informed and lifelong learning community. The vision
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