Getting It Right In The Early Years – Maxine McKew

Issue 2 | 7 April 2009

The Hon. Maxine McKew MP, Parliamentary Secretary for Early Childhood Education and Child Care, addressed The Sydney Institute on 7 April 2009. Before being elected to Federal Parliament, in 2007, Maxine McKew was a prominent broadcast and print journalist for 30 years. She began her address by outlining her successful campaign for Bennelong, which ousted the former Prime Minister, John Howard. Her paper then covered Labor initiatives in early childhood education, emphasising the importance of a dynamic and stimulating environment in the early years of a child’s development.

GETTING IT RIGHT IN THE EARLY YEARS

MAXINE MCKEW

It’s a pleasure to be invited to speak at the Sydney Institute in my new role. Indeed, one of the joys of life in Sydney is the lively exchange that is promoted by the efforts of Anne and Gerard. The intellectual life of a city matters and the Institute plays a vital role in sustaining that.

The title of my speech tonight refers to the “early years”. And you can’t underestimate the importance of getting it right at that critical time in any endeavour – the first years of a career, or a new career in my case, the first years of a new government, and the first years of a child’s life and education. I’m going to talk about some of these things tonight.

But before I go any further, I should acknowledge that Gerard was first in with an invitation, straight after the 2007 Labor victory, but as a newly elected MP going into government I decided on a particular course of action. For me, it was a case of head down as I got on top of my portfolio responsibilities in an area where we are determined to have a transforming effect on the lives of our youngest. And the good news is that we are in sight of realising a lot of our goals in the critical area of early childhood education. And I will talk more about that this evening.

Bennelong campaign

Gerard has asked me to talk a little about the campaign in the former Prime Minister’s seat, and I’m keen to do so before anyone else appropriates my story. After all, I’m the only person who knows what it was like to face John Howard’s Liberal machine in his own backyard – week after week, month after month – and it was formidable.

My most effective tools turned out to be the ones I’d been using for over thirty years as a journalist – listening and talking. Over the long campaign of 2007 I felt I got to look right inside Bennelong, and what I saw was the amazing, complex and stirring story that is contemporary Australia.

In knocking on doors and talking to people at the shops, I found out so much more about the real fabric of people’s lives than I ever did when accompanied by a camera and a microphone. Campaigns are as much as anything about emotion and the overwhelming feeling from people that I encountered in 2007 was a sense that we were wasting the bounty. There was unease – about the fact that we were not investing for the future, that we were coasting. People in Bennelong were not fed up with John Howard. There was no animus. But there was something more lethal: a deep sense of disappointment with a leader who had become obsessed with his own survival and was no longer talking about the nation’s future.

My campaign tapped into that sentiment early and helped secure victory in a seat that had only ever had two conservative members. But I want to stress that there was nothing inevitable about it. Indeed, when I first put my hand up, in February of 2007, and announced my candidature there were two dominant responses. One was derision. Tony Abbott called me “Madame Blow In”. Andrew Robb said “politics wasn’t about stunts”. These comments evaporated when my partner Bob and I did a simple thing.  We sold our house in Mosman and bought another in Epping and I was living in the electorate by May 2007. Not too many first time candidates demonstrate their bona fides in that way.

It was our biggest gamble but as Bob said to me, if I was going to do this I had to demonstrate that I was serious about representing the Bennelong community and that meant living in and being part of that community. Now I don’t have to tell this audience that there is nothing like a real estate story to get attention in this town. It certainly got attention in the North West. Some took bets on which house I would buy. Then, after we moved into our house in Epping, one neighbour, clearly a Howard supporter, was so disbelieving that she parked in the street for days just to check that I actually came home to that house and that it was a genuine residential address.  And so I began full time campaigning and while my opponents mocked my credentials, nobody at the Cox’s Rd shops or at Carlingford Court did. They saw a background in journalism as a perfectly reasonable entry point for parliamentary representation.

There was something else. I realised straight away that I shared the same concerns as many of the people that I met at the shops or at mobile offices. Conversation was easy, as I kept meeting people whose outlook wasn’t that different from my own. People were spirited, ambitious, optimistic, but had arrived at a point in their thinking about the nation, where they were saying “we have to do better”. This is something the Liberals never picked up on. Time after time, when Coalition MP’s mused aloud about the mood of the electorate, they would say…”but there’s no anger out there.” No, there wasn’t. But there was a big mood shift and the Liberals and the commentariat, for the most part, missed it.

Apart from the Liberals’ early derision, the dominant reaction to my taking on John Howard in his own seat was this: “My, what a gutsy move!!” I just love being patronised! Now whether it’s the Irish or the Latin in me I have no time for so-called conventional thinking. It never got me anywhere. But the “conventional” theory in 2007 was that I would give John Howard a bit of a fright, take about 2 per cent off him, then pick the seat up in a subsequent by-election. Most of the Labor Party thought this, and the Fourth Estate thought this too.

It was never my thinking. I didn’t know I would win on 24 November, but I set out to win. I went after every vote every day to win the first time. This attitude in turn drove the professionalism of the Bennelong campaign. Psychology is critical. It affects what you do, the risks you take. I encountered no apathy in 2007. Instead people were hungry for engagement. So, I built credibility day by day, week by week, and after a while a lot of people started to think there was this quite nice normal alternative to the status quo. What we were doing of course was making it safe for people to switch their vote. We were saying: it’s okay to vote Labor, your life won’t cave in – in fact it might improve.

One of the most frequently asked questions I’ve fielded since November of 2007 is this: have you absorbed what you pulled off in defeating a sitting Prime Minister? The answer is yes, because of what I’ve been saying. I won Bennelong because I listened and in the end I was seen as a credible alternative.

Incidentally, I ran an exceptionally old fashioned campaign and I’m that kind of representative. I don’t twitter or flicker and my web site is about as basic as it gets. My energy levels are sustained by the hits of Dusty Springfield, played at high volume in the car as I race from one community event to another, and a copious quantity of banana smoothies. So full of potassium and with the refrain of “you don’t have to say you love me, just be close at hand on voting day”.

I’m enjoying these early years as Bennelong’s new representative. What I have learnt, or re-learnt, is that so much of life is about the small stuff: the incremental steps, the constancy, the building of good faith. And I think that’s what we did in Bennelong in 2007 and what I have been working to do ever since.

Government response to changing circumstances

But I stress that this kind of community effort sits alongside the very big ambitions that the Rudd Government is moving on in these early years. I don’t need those fortnightly Newspolls to tell me that voters find Kevin Rudd’s leadership to be decisive and reassuring, because that’s what I hear every week from families in suburbs like Denistone and Eastwood and Epping and Ermington.

What matters, and the quality media surely knows this, is NOT the media profile of individual MP’s, but whether, as a government, we can be smart, deft and compassionate in dealing with the fall-out of the global financial crisis.

What matters is whether an electrical goods business in Gladesville can get access to credit. What matters is whether a small construction company in Epping can retain their apprentices. What matters is that self-funded retirees and pensioners are supported through adjusted payments and changes to draw down provisions. The government is acting in all these areas and will continue to respond as circumstances change.

And this brings me to an important point: It’s an extraordinary time to be in public life. There is little doubt that we are living through a period where the “state” is experiencing an exceptional revival. Just consider what we have seen in the last week in London with the G20 meeting. The conservative French President Nicholas Sarkozy initially threatened to walk out because he feared his G20 colleagues would be insufficiently interventionist. For Sarkozy, it was not so much a case of “l’etat c’est moi”, but “l’etat c’est nous”.   With agreement from 20 of the world’s largest economies, we now have the beginnings of a new political governance system for the twenty-first century.

The rules are being re-written – around probity, responsibility and community. This is, potentially, transformative change in the early years of the new century. Consider these lines from the G20 communique of 2 April:

We start from the belief that prosperity is indivisible, that growth, to be sustained, has to be shared, and that our global plan for recovery must have at its heart the needs and jobs of hard working families, not just in developed countries, but in emerging markets and in the poorest countries of the world, and must reflect the interests…of future generations.

In that statement, is the hope for children growing up today in countries where they have no guarantee of safety or promise of education. We can’t afford to let them down. “Prosperity is indivisible.” That should be the mantra for the new century.

If we want further evidence of the revival of the centrality of the state, consider too, what we are seeing in the United States. Barack Obama’s recent budget has been described as an almost revolutionary document with Washington configured as a central player in providing national healthcare, shifting the energy economy away from oil and boosting the federal commitment to education. As the Wall Street Journal commented:

The economic crisis will serve as a stepping stone to a radical shift in the relationship between the people and their government. It will bind Americans to their government in ways not experienced since the New Deal.

So given these historic moves, in the United States and elsewhere, how odd it was to hear the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Julie Bishop, tell an earlier gathering of The Sydney Institute, that Kevin Rudd should be demonised for being “an old style interventionist”. Well yes Julie, we are intervening. And it’s time to get with the strength – this was the message from the G20 last week. It’s about a sensible co-ordinated, global response to what has been a flagrant disregard for prudence, for appropriate risk-taking.

We still have a long way to go in analysing what has brought us to this point, but there is no doubt that for too long, the guardians of the global financial system were too cavalier about their stewardship. Some basic questions need to be asked: How is it that one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, AIG, became more interested in hedge fund activity? Why did so many building societies in the UK turn themselves into investment banks? How it is that ratings agencies continued to provide the comfort of AAA ratings to activity and products that no-one seems able to understand?

ABC Learning

And let me come to a domestic example that has consumed a significant amount of the Deputy Prime Minister’s time, and mine as Parliamentary Secretary for Early Childhood Education and Child Care. How is it, that the failed corporate giant ABC Learning, for so long, was unchecked by the previous Coalition Government, at the very time that it was underwriting its activities through millions every year in public subsidies? When Mr Groves’ empire, laden with $1.6 billion in debt, came crashing down in November of 2008, the chorus from the community to government, was unanimous: fix it.

The Opposition’s spokeswoman on child care, Sophie Mirabella, was also part of this chorus. There were no complex arguments about interfering with the market, just a very clear expectation by the community that the state would be the central player in securing the future of one fifth of the child care market. So if the Coalition wants to have an argument about intervention versus appropriate stewardship, let’s have a conversation about ABC Learning. The entity that was ABC Learning stands as a stark example of the failure of public policy during the long years of Coalition dominance.

We should all recall that, five months after he lost his seat at the 2004 election, Larry Anthony, former Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, was appointed a non-executive director of ABC Learning. He joined a company where the business model was elaborate and complex, the full details of which are still being pored over by the administrators and corporate regulators. But a company, which by 2008, had come to control one fifth of the long day care market and was backed by generous Commonwealth Government subsidies.

The modus operandi seems to have been along these lines:  ABC expanded by contracting developers to build and staff centres and, at a future date, if centres were meeting a pre-agreed level of performance, they were transferred back to ABC. As time went on, it appears that developer payments came to constitute the majority of the company’s reported net profit. Although, I note that ABC’s auditors were unable to finalise the company’s financial statements for 2007-08.

This suggests that the ABC Learning empire had less to do with the economics of child care and more to do with elaborate property deals. While this was happening, no-one at the Commonwealth level acted to check an organisation that was becoming a complex corporate giant. Remarkable, given the central mission of ABC Learning is the care of children. And, for a political party that has traditionally been the champion of small business, the Coalition was simply missing in action as ABC gobbled up the competition, reportedly paying over the top prices for Mum and Dad operations.

ABC became an unsustainable business based on a mountain of debt. Given what the outcome could have been last year, when ABC went into receivership – the possible loss of tens of thousands of child care places for a start – the management by the Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard and the departmental taskforce has been remarkable.

While there is still quite a way to go in resolving and restructuring an immensely complex situation, I would point to the important criteria that the government has set out and asked the Court Appointed Receiver to take into account for the sale process of the group of 241 centres known as ABC 2. The government has suggested that potential purchasers should be able to:

• deliver high quality learning and care programs in a child care setting;
• demonstrate financial viability and sustainability;
• demonstrate a commitment to professional development and training for staff.

And there are other steps that the government will be taking over time to ensure that the saga of ABC Learning is never repeated.

Lost opportunities

I’ve taken time to speak about ABC tonight because it has dominated news about child care for some time now, but in fact those headlines have stolen attention away from the new direction that is this government’s ambitious reform agenda for the early childhood sector. We need a new direction, because while we’ve had a decade of market growth, everything else that’s needed to ensure a successful and properly functioning sector has been ignored.

Early childhood was simply not taken seriously by the Coalition. Child care was treated like a cottage industry. It grew like topsy with scant attention to the consequences of that growth. Over the 11 years of Coalition government, there was no effort to streamline regulatory mechanisms so providers could concentrate on what they do best – caring for children – and there was definitely no investment in creating an Australian evidence base about infant development.

There’s a lot of work to be done. Given the scale of the bounty that flowed into the Commonwealth coffers, particularly from 2004 on, I wonder did it ever occur to the Coalition to invest in the people of this country – in their skills, in their health, in their professional training? Certainly there was no investment in much needed early childhood teachers.

Here’s the shock statistic: with more children in formal care than ever before, with around 50 per cent of mothers returning to work by the time their child is 18 months of age, the Rudd Government’s inheritance from the Howard Government is an early childhood sector where 30 per cent of staff looking after children do not have a post school qualification and only 8 per cent have teaching qualifications.

Post ABC world

We take a different view, because the research is indisputable. Nobel Prize winner Professor James Heckman and others in the field have found that children cultivate 85 per cent of their intellect, personality and skills by the age of five. Heckman found that investment in the early years is significantly more cost effective than remediation in later years. He demonstrated that early interventions for disadvantaged children increase earnings in later life and promote social attachment.

Research on the development of the human brain found that the experiences that children have in the early years of life set neurological and biological pathways that affect their health, learning and behaviour throughout their life. In Australia too, for years, Fiona Stanley, Frank Oberklaid and Allison Elliott have been telling us, that children learn more in their first five years of life than at any other comparable period.

Driven by the research findings, our commitment to early childhood learning is comprehensive and ambitious. The Rudd Government signalled this right at the start. When we took office at the end of 2007, we moved responsibility for child care from the families department into the education department, and established a separate Office of Early Childhood Education and Child Care to oversee the implementation of our agenda.

It’s been an important structural shift that few have commented upon. The post-ABC world that the government is working to deliver is a professional learning and care sphere for 0-5s with one goal in mind – that by the time children start school, they will do so as happy confident learners. This means that all children will have access to quality, affordable play based, early learning programs prior to starting formal schooling.

Between now and 2013, the Australian government is investing $3.7 billion in new funding for early childhood education and care.  We are no longer a passive player. And we are working with states and territories, and the sector to deliver on our commitments and realise our vision. For the past year we have been working hard to shift the debate from one just about cost to one that includes quality.

But, you might ask, why do qualifications matter? And ratios? And group size? We don’t even think to ask that question when it comes to our schools. We expect every school aged child to be taught by a fully qualified and registered teacher and that the school that she attends will be run by a Principal who is committed to ongoing professional development.

But for too long the view has been that caring for a two year or three year old in a formal setting is little more than baby sitting, that it doesn’t matter if different standards apply across the country and that care is fragmented and uncoordinated.

Well, I defy anyone to look at the research into infant brain development and to still hold to that view.  Only last Saturday I was at a conference in Perth with nearly 500 early education professionals and academics and we were there to hear from Professor Ron Lally. He is one of many professionals providing the impetus for the increased funding that the Obama administration is putting into early childhood. In particular, Ron Lally has been very active in the development of the Early Head Start program in the United States.

There was one simple arresting graph that Ron Lally showed us in Perth: by the time an infant is 9 months of age the development of a baby’s synapses means that they are at their peak when it comes to being receptive to language. That translates into a simple thing: you have to talk to babies.

With more babies in formal care than ever before, we need trained professionals who will provide for the physical safety of children, and for their emotional security, so that infants will then be able to discover the wider world around them. It follows that stressed infants, those who are not comforted or worse, feel abandoned, are inhibited from growing and learning.

It’s worth considering what our best do, our centres of excellence. Places like Mia Mia at Macquarie University, a community centre, or the Nedlands Early Learning Centre in Perth, a small private centre. They both follow the Reggio Emila philosophy and that means an approach that puts the rhythms of children at the heart of what they do. It’s the very opposite of what we might call the old “command and control” approach of child minding.

Nedlands has tracked the progress of the many children who have been through the centre. At school, these are the children who are easily identified as confident, as problem solvers, as empathetic and collaborative in their approach. Most importantly, they are children who know how to regulate their behaviour. They have learnt to cope with life’s knocks. It is what we want for all our children. Again to quote Ron Lally:

Infants are wired to learn, so it makes no sense to have any false distinction between care and education. Babies are bursting to learn about the world so we need carers who know how to provide an enriching, enlightening fun experience for infants.

This is why effective ratios matter. This is why qualifications matter, and this is why we are investing, as never before, in training.

What we have now, is an underqualified workforce. To turn this around, we have committed $126 million to train early childhood educators and child care professionals. We have a number of initiatives underway but I’ll just mention a couple.

Firstly, we’ve waived TAFE fees on Children’s Services diplomas and advanced diplomas and secondly, we’ve funded 1500 additional places over the next three years at universities for students studying early childhood education. Students have been very quick on the uptake, noting that there is now national leadership around the importance of the early years.

There’s another important point. The early childhood workforce is overwhelmingly female dominated. Most have years of experience and are highly committed to what they do.  But the fact is that all good, modern parenting practices encourage the active involvement of mum and dad, so it would be of enormous benefit to the sector, and to families, to have more qualified men in the workforce.

Fortunately I don’t have to go far to find inspiration or support for this theory. Parliament House now has its own child care centre which is just across the courtyard from my office. The babies room in that centre is run by a young man named Liam. This young man’s first degree was in communications, and while he was studying he supported himself by working part time in child care. He loved it so much, he gained a TAFE qualification and is now enrolled in a degree course at university. The sector needs committed, caring and qualified people, both men and women, and I can tell you this government will do all it can to encourage them into the profession.

Another major reform area will see a set of national quality standards established and this will include a more streamlined regulatory mechanism. We want to ensure consistency in the quality of care and early childhood education so that whether a child lives in Gympie or Ballarat or Fremantle, that child will experience calm, secure and stimulating care – of the type that will ensure he or she makes a happy and productive transition to school.

We are moving on multiple fronts – on professionalising the workforce, on national quality standards, on an improved regulatory framework and on an Early Years Learning Framework which addresses the important needs of infant and young children’s development. We are doing all these things, because we see investment in early childhood as one of the most important components in closing the educational gap.

Education

Of course, the educational gap is at its most dramatic when it comes to Indigenous Australia. In changing this – and change it we must – I take heart from what the Indigenous educator Chris Sarra always says – don’t settle for second best. But central to turning things around is a particular mind-set, and for me it’s this – that a child growing up in the Tiwi Islands has as much right to an ambitious and comprehensive educational experience as a child growing up in Eastwood or Epping or Denistone East.

My hope is that the transformation of the entire education sphere will be THE defining feature of the Rudd Labor Government. It will mean a year 12 completion rate for students at something like 95 per cent, not the present rate that sits around 75 per cent.

And the big ambition, which the Deputy Prime Minister has articulated, is that 20 per cent of undergraduate enrolments should be students from low SES families by 2020. If, by 2020, we have moved a long way towards closing the educational gap, then consider how well we will be set up as a nation for the twenty-first century. We’ll be a stronger country, a smarter country and, I hope, a more generous one.

Conclusion

I’ve talked about these issues at some length – the role of government, reshaping public policy priorities, particularly in child care and education, and investing in our people – because they go a long way towards explaining what has motivated me to play a role in political life. As much as anything, these are the ambitions, the sentiments that I think helped propel change in 2007, right across the country, but also, in a marvellous part of the world called Bennelong.