Wednesday, 8 March 2023

 Tom McINTOSH (Eastern Victoria) (09:44): Recently I had the pleasure of meeting the team at Yarram Early Learning Centre. Yarram is a beautiful town which is enjoying renewed growth, and the early learning centre is providing a vital service to the community by offering child care and kindergarten, including free three-year-old kinder. To support this growth Sarah and the committee are expanding the early learning centre by constructing a modular kindergarten with two new rooms. This will allow the centre to offer extra kindergarten places for local kids. The project has received $2 million from round 2 of the 2022–23 Building Blocks capacity grants stream. A generation of three-year-olds can now access play-based learning at a critical time in their development.

I am particularly happy to speak to the government’s work in early education today, on International Women’s Day, as we know that women still do the majority of home care and child raising. I am proud our investment means parents, particularly women, can get back to work. It is a long-term investment in our people and also our state’s productivity. It means those extra hours parents work can actually go towards the family and parents can make a net gain for their time and not just work to pay kinder bills. We are building 50 new community childcare centres and upgrading current early learning centres where they are needed most. This means more jobs in construction and of course more jobs in early education, including nearby in Sale, Foster and Leongatha. This investment is a massive step for Victoria, and it ties together so many threads of what our government stands for – delivering a fairer, healthier and more prosperous Victoria, including on the ground in Yarram.