Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

TERS () (): This Saturday is likely to be the first time this parliament has sat on a Saturday for decades. It's also the anniversary of the Eureka Stockade and the birthday of my little rebel, Daisy Jane. It might shock people to learn that this week is the first time we will have spent more than 24 hours apart, which is unusual in this job. That is partly due to my amazing partner and his willingness to work remotely and work from home so we can travel here as a family, but it's mainly due the pandemic. Daisy is a pandemic baby, and shortly after being born the world started to experience this thing called COVID. Just as we were coming out of the newborn bubble we entered the pandemic bubble, and everything was cancelled. Mothers groups were cancelled, the natural things that you do to catch up post having a baby were cancelled, parliament was scaled back. The week that I was due to return from maternity leave, our parliament was scaled back.

Daisy started to go through all those natural stages in life, the developmental milestones: the smiling, the clapping and, for her generation, the hand sanitising—all the unique things that happened to our pandemic babies. She starts three-year-old kinder next year, and it's the first test that we will see in Victoria of the real impact of the pandemic. So I give a shout-out to all of our three-year-olds entering kinder next year, and to their teachers and to the year that they will have, and I hope that the impact of the pandemic isn't as bad as we first thought. (Time expired)