Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to endorse this MPI put forward by the member for New England. The member for New England outlined a particularly fabulous initiative at the University of New England, the QuickSmart program. I was pleased to hear the Parliamentary Secretary for Employment indicate that the government will be looking very closely at that. He is spot on when he says that literacy and numeracy ability from preschool, not just school, is a critically important indicator of how well our young people will do throughout their education. For those who have the added burden to carry—although sometimes it can be a joy—of distance or remoteness or disability or language which means that they have a little bit less of a head start in life, it is important that we intervene with such programs. It is good to see our university sector doing more than its core business and actually getting out and being a driver for community and economic development in our regions.

On that point I want to give a bit of a pump to my own University of Wollongong and to inform the House that the University of Wollongong has a Graduate School of Medicine. This Graduate School of Medicine was established specifically to service regional, rural and remote Australian students. It is an attempt to address the shortage of doctors in rural and remote areas. It is a really good initiative by the University of Wollongong, which decided in setting up a medical school that they did not want it to be the classic sandstone university medical school. They wanted it to be one that would provide GPs to rural and regional Australia. It would take the students from rural and regional Australia, support them through university and have them linked to do their professional practice back with hospitals, GPs and primary health care providers in their regions. While they are studying they are engaged in their learning and practice back in the regions that we hope they will return to. One of the big challenges for rural and regional areas is getting those sorts of professionals who are so desperately important to communities to come back. Indeed the Illawarra region experiences this in areas like the Shoalhaven, which struggles with a similar sort of demographic to that which the member for Lyne was describing. Sometimes we get over the hump of getting those young people into the courses and then lose them to the city, which is not what we want. This Graduate School of Medicine has been set up specifically to assist young people to continue to network and engage with their home town or the region of their home town and to have a commitment to go back and work in it.

I was interested that the member for New England mentioned the National Broadband Network in passing as an important aspect of education. One of the things they have done is set up a very high-tech lecture theatre—which I toured with our minister for health—where every student is set up like us in this chamber: they all have microphones and they all have cameras on them. There is a classroom at the main base, at the Wollongong campus, and then there is another one at the Shoalhaven campus. So students from the Shoalhaven enrolled in the medical school do not have to travel every day up to the Wollongong campus; they can go and sit in this lecture room, watch the lecturer, watch the demonstrations. They can press a button when they want to talk and ask questions, and the lecturer actually turns to a part of the room where they are indicated. So it is completely interactive. It is quite amazing to see what technology can do in terms of getting that learning out of the centres to regional and more remote campuses. Perhaps I should invite the member for Lyne to come to Wollongong and talk to the University of Wollongong about setting up a satellite campus in his area and using some of this technology.

Of course, that technology does rely very heavily on having good-quality broadband rolled out across the nation. People say to me, ‘The Broadband Network—surely that’s just about surfing the net and game playing; it’s all a bit irrelevant to the realities of life.’ But it is not. It is going to be a critical factor in driving both economic and community development across Australia. Developing a national broadband network is as important as when we built the road and rail links to our rural and regional areas. And I think it is going to be particularly significant for educational opportunities.

The parliamentary secretary talked about visiting classrooms, as we all do. Some of the things we see now are those interactive whiteboards rolling out, young people with laptops—

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