Richard Marles (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last Wednesday I had the pleasure of visiting the prep classes of St Mary's Primary School in my electorate. There, amongst a group of five- and six-year-olds, I had the pleasure of talking to them about my recent visit to the Square Kilometre Array telescope site at the Boolardy station near Murchison in outback Western Australia. I was able to tell them about the array of dishes that is in place there now and has already discovered millions of new galaxies. I was able to talk to them about the 130,000 low-frequency antennas that will be established at Boolardy station and will enable us to see across the 13.5 billion light years of the universe. I then asked the group whether or not they had any idea why this was all being done in the middle of the desert, and one of them immediately said, as quick as a whip, 'Because nothing gets in the way out there.' And they were absolutely right.

After that, together we watched Dr Shannon Walker, an American astronaut, read from the International Space Station a book called Give me some Space! by Philip Bunting. There was a buzz around the classroom as they saw Dr Walker floating before she started to read a book which was, in turn, floating right in front of her. All of this was part of the National Simultaneous Storytime event, which is held annually by the Australian Library and Information Association. This year's event, specifically, was made possible by the Australian Space Agency and the Office of the Chief Scientist. Indeed, Dr Walker, in reading the book, acknowledged that there was a particular significance for those viewers in Australia to her reading of this book.

These kids were among 1,980,280 kids from 33,000 locations around the world—in places such as New Zealand, Thailand, the UK, Canada, Singapore and Vietnam—who shared in this reading. It was a wondrous thing to look at the wonder in the eyes of those kids as they listened to Dr Walker talk about a story from space while, in the process, relating her own experiences of space. In the eyes of a five- or six-year-old, all of this was inspiring. I have to confess that, through the eyes of a 53-year-old who was watching, I too was amazed at the fact that, in this day and age, kids can be in prep school and have a lesson taught to them from an astronaut circling the globe as she was.

I particularly want to give thanks to the deputy principal, Marie Monea, the prep teacher, Raquel Bowman, and the principal, Annice Lappin, for allowing this to occur. This is really important because we've seen a decline in the number of students studying STEM in this country. Inspiring kids about science is how we arrest that decline.