Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Gippsland’s speech was almost so agreeable I am tempted to yield my time on the floor to him. I do thank the member for New England for bringing this MPI to the chamber. As other members have remarked, his MPIs always lift the level of debate in this chamber away from partisan bickering towards bipartisan agreement, which is always a good thing. It does disturb me, however, that he has scorecards, so I hope I pass the test.

It is great to see a local member—and I got an eight!—from the country with an independent spirit bringing forward a program like QuickSmart for government attention. I think that it is terribly important, and I note particularly the remarks that the member for New England about self-esteem. Self-esteem and the way children feel about their education is almost as important as their inherent intelligence and their grades. If you read books like Emotional Intelligence by a person named Goldstein, there have been a number of tests run in the United States which basically prove that test scores dive once children’s self-esteem is shattered. So it is a terribly important debate that we have here and one that I think we all agree with and will find little partisan bickering to interfere with it.

In the short time I have I want to talk little bit about some of the government’s programs and the local approaches. I want to relate three government programs to three of the country towns in my electorate, including my old home town of Kapunda where I went to high school and from which I commuted to university as an 18-year-old. The programs are Computers in Schools, science and language centres, and the Drought Assistance for Schools program. I think that what these three towns prove is that the national program the government has put in place has a disproportionately positive effect in country towns, that it helps country towns far more than it would help the city even though the benefits are great in the city as well.

In terms of the first round for Computers in Schools, two country high schools—two out of six schools in the first round—Clare High School and Riverton High School, received computers. There were 110 computers to Clare High School and 73 to Riverton. In round 2, of the 13 schools six were from the country including my old high school of Kapunda—which was Sir Sidney Kidman’s old home—which received 93 computers. So you can see that that there is a disproportionate effect in country towns.

The same is true of science and language centres. My electorate received 13 science and language centres for high schools across the electorate. They include Clare, getting $1.8 million for a new science lab—and particularly important in Clare given it is one of the greatest wine producing regions in the country—and $1.2 million for Riverton high school. In Riverton they nearly did not put the application in. They were so surprised when they won it. They got $1.2 million for a language centre and it is the biggest thing that has happened to that high school in quite some time. Unfortunately, my old high school at Kapunda already had a new science lab provided by the Rann government and that is a good thing.

In terms of the Drought Assistance for Schools program, it is a particularly important program because drought does attack a community’s foundations—it rips the guts out of a community and tends to overshadow everything. We know it has an impact on school communities. Nothing would affect a child’s self-esteem like being excluded from a school excursion or not being able to get textbooks because the child’s family was in a business or on a farm that was affected by drought. So this is a particularly important program. We have allocated money for schools—$715 million—and we have given discretion to the schools to allow them to make decisions about whether they help individual families or whether they help the whole classroom.

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