HANSARD
SITTING CALENDAR
SEARCH
LIVE BROADCAST
Hansard Dynamic Member Index
House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-08-29 Daily Xml
Contents
Xml

Universal Three-Year-Old Preschool

Ms HOOD (Adelaide) (14:22): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier update the house on how the Malinauskas government will deliver its plan for universal three-year-old preschool?

The SPEAKER: The Premier has the call.

The Hon. P.B. MALINAUSKAS (Croydon—Premier) (14:22): Thank you Mr Speaker, and thank you to the member for Adelaide for her important question. I can recall on more than one occasion having rather lengthy discussions with the member for Adelaide during the period 2018 and 2022 where we frequently reflected upon the challenges the state has in front of it in ensuring that no South Australian child is left behind. That interest from the member for Adelaide at the time, along with so many other members on this side of the house, helped to contribute to the policy that we took to the election.

A particularly important moment for the South Australian Parliamentary Labor Party was in October 2021 when we announced many components of our education policy that had been formulated in conjunction with the Deputy Premier and the now Minister for Education. We announced a commitment in October 2021 that, should Labor be elected to office, we would establish none other than a royal commission to provide the state government with a road map, with a clear plan, on how to deliver universal access to three-year-old preschool and better outcomes in terms of childhood development here in the state of South Australia.

Mr Speaker, it is with a great degree of satisfaction that I am able to report to the house today formally that the state government has received that royal commission report from the Hon. Julia Gillard AC, former Prime Minister of our nation. It is a comprehensive policy road map to see South Australia achieve a number of objectives, but none more important than the accepting of that first recommendation that the Hon. Julia Gillard made, and that is to have the state government set a target of reducing childhood developmental delay from 23.8 per cent that it is currently in South Australia down to 15 per cent in 20 years. We accept that recommendation and that is now our objective.

The remainder of the 42 recommendations that the royal commission gave us provide us the path to achieve that objective. We are very deliberate in making sure that we now get on with the task of implementing those recommendations, rolling out access to more three-year-old preschoolers across the state and also providing better supports for families in South Australia for what happens in those first formative days of a young person's life.

We know that on the back of this report there are a thousand South Australian young people who are born into particularly vulnerable circumstances who will be beneficiaries of the policies that we are introducing. We make no apologies for adopting the recommendations of the royal commission to particularly hone our efforts in the prioritisation of the rollout of our policy towards addressing those thousand most vulnerable South Australians.

But there are parents who will be beneficiaries of this policy as well. We know that the operation of kindy or preschool in South Australia doesn't necessarily marry up well with the modern working family's schedule. We know that there are countless parents, particularly women, who find themselves disadvantaged from being able to participate in the modern workforce of today because of the hours of that regime.

That is why we are so excited that yesterday the Minister for Education announced our first pilot of trialling out-of-hours school care in a preschool setting so that more parents have the capacity to make more choices about their working day and the care that their child receives in a better quality setting. This is a serious policy for a government that is serious about change in this area, and we are very excited to keep this house updated over the months and years ahead on the rollout of this report.

PARLIAMENTARY BUSINESS
MEMBERS
GET INVOLVED
ABOUT PARLIAMENT
VISIT
LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL
HOUSE OF ASSEMBLY
CONTACT