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deputy prime minister's speech
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Western Chances | About Us At the Business Supporter Network event, held by Western Chances on Thursday 21 August, Deputy Prime Minster Julia Gillard was our guest speaker.
Following is a full copy of her speech made at the breakfast.
| The Hon Julia Gillard - Speech
| Let me start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, the Wurrundjeri People.
And in doing so let me make the simple point that we’re never going to create a community of equal opportunity in the Western suburbs or anywhere else until we start to close achievement gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. It’s one of the key goals of the Rudd Government.
Let me also acknowledge my good friend Terry Bracks. Terry used to work for me – but this morning she’s turned the tables, putting me to work for her through this great organisation she’s helped create, Western Chances.
It would have been easy, having been given her husband back from the relentless job of being Premier of Victoria, for Terry to have quietly dropped out of public life. But both her and Steve’s continuing commitment to terrific causes – whether it’s the western suburbs or East Timor – is typical of their community spirit. So we thank Terry for her continuing involvement in the West and Steve for the support he now gives her.
The same goes to all the staff, supporters and the impressively long list of business and philanthropic donors to Western Chances.
HELPING THE WEST
People have said recently that as the Deputy Prime Minister who lives in and very occasionally runs the country from a suburban house in Altona, I’m officially now the nation’s highest profile “Westie”. It’s a badge of honour.
Although I have to acknowledge that with September approaching that title rightly belongs to Jason Akermanis.
We live in a great part of Melbourne.
With all the housing and economic development that’s occurred in recent years, the West has gone from strength to strength – all built on the region’s strong foundations of traditional industries, blue collar skills and immense community pride.
Our manufacturing, transport, housing and service industries have grown phenomenally.
Transport infrastructure has improved enormously, including Avalon Airport and the Western Ring Road.
We have a young, fast-growing, proudly multicultural population.
In fact I heard recently that 46 new babies are born every week in the City of Wyndham alone – that’s more than two new prep classes in five years from now.
And our population is increasing its education and skill levels at a steady rate – with the help of some wonderful education institutions, like our unique Victoria University, and our numerous TAFE campuses.
And those institutions are fed by a long list of marvelous government and non-government schools.
As anyone who has been involved in these schools will tell you, their students are as talented and as full of raw potential as those in any other part of the State.
Some may lack the advantages of children from other suburbs. But if we get our educational policies right, those disadvantages can be overcome.
In fact the West has some terrific schools – with a number of primary schools, for instance, in the top 10 percent in the state in literacy and numeracy outcomes.
I know the principal of Kurunjang Secondary College in Melton is rightly proud that he has not just one but two former students who are currently holders of prestigious Dean’s Awards at Melbourne University.
What that demonstrates is that if we insist on high standards and hard work, the students of the West can make it to the top.
But we have to create the culture and give them the resources and the support to achieve their best.
This responsibility properly lies with government.
But governments can’t do it without help.
It takes a partnership with the people, businesses and institutions on the ground locally.
And this is what makes supporting Western Chances so important.
THE WORK OF WESTERN CHANCES
It’s hard in fact to think of a better way to help the West than through the sorts of things that you are doing – like giving scholarships to help hard working young people stay in education and training, and like building links between schools, universities, TAFE colleges and industry.
The help each individual young person gets through Western Chances may not be huge in monetary terms – but it’s easy for us to forget that even a comparatively small grant can help a young person make a choice that can change their life. That’s the choice to stay at school, go to university or get further training.
Two recipients of Western Chances scholarships are here today:
* Carlos Sila from Kealba College – the singer who has been providing our entertainment; and
* Dragush Larti of Sunshine College who is a film maker now in his third year of film school.
And another – artist Laura Spicer who went to Kurunjang Secondary – has donated this morning’s prize.
Let’s give them a big hand.
The work of Western Chances is meeting with enormous success.
It’s given more than 1,000 scholarships to almost 700 local students.
Last year, some 90 percent of its scholarship recipients completed year 12 or equivalent studies and went on to university or TAFE.
And that’s incredibly heartening for me, because it means the participants in the program are already meeting the Government’s year 12 equivalent completions target for 2020. Western Chances is already meeting the benchmark of success.
THE IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION
The importance of this for each individual young person can’t be overstated.
As we all know, the days are long gone when a young person could leave school at 15 and get a job for life. Such a mistake now usually means drifting in and out of periods of unskilled, low-paid and insecure work. In today’s economy having a post-secondary qualification is now absolutely essential for gaining a good foothold in the workforce.
We know for instance, that having post-school VET qualifications reduces a person’s likelihood of being unemployed by 40 percent, and having a university degree reduces it by 60 percent.
And that, on average, people with post school qualifications earn more and are healthier than those who lack them.
But the importance for the economy of lifting school completion rates also can’t be overstated.
My Department for instance recently estimated that increasing the number of working age population with post-school qualifications by just 1 per cent would contribute around $8 billion dollars every year to GDP.
The Rudd Government was elected with a promise to begin an education revolution aimed at making us one of the most highly educated and skilled nations on earth. And we’re determined to achieve that goal.
We’re lucky to be starting with what is an excellent education and training system by world standards.
But the one thing holding us back more than any other is the long tail of educational under-achievement, often but not exclusively related to socio-economic disadvantage.
So if we’re going to succeed educationally we have to focus on the issue of educational equity.
With average school completion rates typically lower than other regions, the West will be one of the areas that stand to benefit.
SHORTENING THE ‘LONG TAIL’ OF UNDERACHIEVEMENT
Improving equity has to be done on a broad front.
We’re starting with the early years – because all the evidence suggests that the 0-to-8 years are crucial for developing the learning skills and capacities that can set people up for life.
By 2013, we want every four year old to be able to access 15 hours a week of quality early childhood education, delivered by a qualified early childhood teacher.
We’re also aiming to improve the capacity of our schools to prevent failure – by raising the quality of classroom teaching and by targeting additional resources to the most disadvantaged schools, public and private.
And to do this, the Commonwealth and the States and Territories are negotiating new National Partnership payments aimed specifically at raising teacher quality, improving literacy and numeracy achievement and reducing educational disadvantage.
As I remarked last week, we have to be open to new ways of improving school performance by learning from other school systems, like that of New York, which is using a rich mix of data from testing and enrolments to identify why it is that some schools succeed while others with similar socio-economic enrolments fail. I see this as an incredibly important tool for improving achievement rates in the West and other parts of Australia.
Also, the Bradley Review of Higher Education is currently considering the important question of how we get more people from disadvantaged backgrounds to university and TAFE and keep them there. There’s no point getting more young people through twelve years of schooling if we then erect barriers for them as adults.
All of these measures are part of a much wider project – which is to create individual pathways to the world of work for every young Australian in the contemporary economy.
The teenage years, as we know, are a crucial transition point in people’s lives and every young person needs to find the path that suits them.
And we’re developing a wide range of programs to keep young people interested in school and make the transition to a good job, including:
* keeping school relevant through the establishment of new Trade Training Centres teaching industry-relevant skills with the latest high-tech equipment;
* creating extra training places and apprenticeships;
* encouraging mentoring; and
* building the capacity in the careers advice sector.
A number of State and local government programs like these are already operating, involving many of the organizations and businesses that support Western Chances.
They’re getting results, and over time we expect them, along with our early learning, school and higher education programs to help lower drop-out rates and bring down the unacceptably high youth unemployment level.
Our social inclusion policies will also play a big part in this.
In the knowledge economy social inclusion and education participation are the same thing.
So our social inclusion policies, devised with the help of the members of our new Social Inclusion Board, will be examining ways to build the capacity of parents and communities to keep young people at school longer.
CONCLUSION
So, as you can see, giving better chances to young people in the Western Region isn’t as simple as increasing spending or introducing a new stand-alone policy.
It’s a complex task, with multiple causes to address. One that involves all of us.
The Government takes this task extremely seriously.
Not just because we owe our young people an equal start in life, but because it’s through improving educational equity that we can develop the full economic potential of the West.
And it’s obvious through the work of Western Chances and other organizations that the whole community of the West takes this mission incredibly seriously as well.
Western Chances is an organization I can strongly endorse and I urge all of you to continue to support the great work it’s doing.
Thank you.
| Reproduced with permission from Deputy Prime Ministers Office.
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