I begin my remarks this morning by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the country on which we meet today, the Kaurna people, and my paying my respects to elders past, present and emerging.

Thank you Bianca, for your Acknowledgement of Country, this morning.

I also reaffirm my commitment to Voice, to Treaty and to Truth.

I wish to thank Micah Australia and Executive Director Tim Costello for the opportunity to speak to you all today. 

 

I’ve had the privilege of meeting a number of you in this room in Parliament House, and many more women through Micah delegations to Canberra. Each time I have, I have been in awe of the work and dedication you bring to the mission of improving the lives of the world’s most vulnerable women and girls.

I want to thank you for your service and thank you for inviting me to share my experiences and views with you today.

Now for those whom I have not yet met, I wanted to share a little bit about myself.

 

I was elected to the Senate in 2019, after a career spanning years of work in domestic and international public policy, with a particular focus on the education of women and girls, early childhood education and public health.

I spent five years working with our former Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, supporting her work throughout the world’s developing countries on advancing gender equality and access to school education for the world’s poorest girls.

I’ve lived and volunteered in West Africa, working with an NGO devoted to tackling child slavery and forced labour, and I’ve advised Ministers, and Prime Ministers, on matters of public policy. 

 

A little secret is, I never planned to enter public life. But after too many years lamenting the gender imbalance in leadership in our country and internationally, I figured I either had to show up or shut up. So, with my baby son Benjamin less than two months old, and with the support of some great South Australian women as mentors, I boldly put my hand up for pre-selection and now here I am, in our nation’s parliament.  

As a Senator, my mission is pretty simple.

My work is focused on the early years and in particular the first years of a child’s development, from the womb to the classroom.

I’m passionate about this area of public policy because we know that 90 percent of brain development happens in the first five years of life.

If we set children up right in these years – with the appropriate support and care for their mothers, and carers too – their possibilities are endless.

But if we get it wrong, we entrench disadvantage and lock children out of the opportunity they deserve.

In Australia at the moment, 22 percent of children start school with one or more developmental vulnerabilities.

That means we’re currently letting down 1 in 5 children just here at home.

Smashing these patterns of disadvantage is my priority as a Senator for South Australia. But it’s a global mission.

Because around the world we know that conflict, famine, insecurity, climate change and poverty are already endangering the world’s children and robbing them of the future they deserve.

The global statistics on early childhood development paint a shocking picture.

 

A 2021 study of 197 countries – which captured 99.8% of the world’s children under five – found that in a third of countries, at least 25 per cent of children younger than five years had stunted development. And fewer than half of young children in a third of the countries surveyed were receiving the benefits of early stimulation and responsive care by adults in their home.

These statistics tell us loudly and clearly that in the first five years of life, where we have the chance to have the biggest impact on the future development and wellbeing of our kids, we are failing them.

That’s why fighting for kids in their early development is my passion and has guided my career to date.

Beyond my passion for early education, I also stand before you today as a woman of faith, a feminist, a believer in social justice, a mother, a wife, and a daughter.

I’m also a woman who believes in the power of process, systems, government, institutions, and the community to drive and deliver change.

I don’t expect any of you to have read my First Speech to the parliament. But if you had, you would find me say that I came to the practice of politics, and to my own political party, because within it I found a home for the Christian values of social justice that I had been raised with.

And whilst I won’t pretend to be the most reliable member of my congregation nor a perfect Christian, it is these values which have centred me and guided me in my work and shaped my ambitions of what I can do with the tremendous opportunity I have to serve in the Senate.

These are values I know we share.

I am grateful every day for the Christian values my parents, Karen and Neil, instilled in me and my siblings as a child.

 

In addition to these values, they also taught me a very powerful lesson. And that was, that as a citizen of our world, I not only had the responsibility to know and understand what was happening in our world. But that when we saw social injustice, that our faith, and our values, compelled us to act.

From as young as I can remember, my parents were taking us to the far corners of our planet, as often as they could afford, to give us a global education.

They did this because they believed a commitment to social justice, guided by our faith, compelled us to open our eyes and our hearts to the world.

And this can be a tough thing to do. Not just for a child. But for all of us.

Because sometimes it is easier to not look.

Sometimes it is easier to not open your eyes, because then perhaps you don’t have to open your heart.

For all the light and love and beauty in our world, there is shadow and pain and waste too.

The global hunger crisis confronting our world today is no exception.

 

828 million people across our world are experiencing chronic hunger – some ten percent of our total population. 345 million of those people are experiencing food shortages so extreme that their lives and livelihoods are at stake.

And it is a fate no child should ever have to experience.

In 2011, I visited the country of South Sudan, a mere 8 weeks after it became an independent state after a terrible civil war.

My father was working with a local church to rebuild a theological college that had been destroyed in Upper Nile State, which took the better part of a day to reach by dingy from the nearest town with an airport, Malakal.

I will never forget the terrible but innocent mistake I made on this journey as we passed through community after community, when I asked why the children’s hair had yellowed.

The answer given to me was hunger – or more specifically - malnutrition. Civil war had meant for years these children had experienced chronic hunger, with one of the effects of malnutrition being a staining yellow of the hair.

Plumpy nut was the food drop product of the day at this time, a peanut-based paste that can treat severe acute malnutrition in young children especially.

And a product that was being too often sold on the black market, undermining efforts to fill tiny bellies.

12 years on, emergency food relief remains the lifeline for far too many children in our world, with 8 million children at risk of dying from malnutrition without immediate intervention according to UNICEF.

I appreciate that by virtue of you being in this room today, you are all well across the statistics and appreciate the urgency of this crisis, and understand the drivers too, the three C’s of Covid, Climate and Conflict.

And I know there exists the empathy in this room that says this is not okay – that children should never have to suffer like this.

So, what do we do about it?

As a creature of the labour movement, my answer to this question is almost always, WE ORGANISE.

The crisis is something I’ve raised with our Assistant Minister for Foreign affairs, and I’m pleased that this month he has pledged significant support to humanitarian programs fighting this crisis in the horn of Africa.

You’ll have more asks of your Government, I’m sure. And you should feel empowered to bring your ideas for change to your representatives. To advocate for change in the way I know this community of Micah women already does so well.

But we must keep advocating in our communities too.

To keep our own eyes open, even when it is hard to do so. Even when the darkness feels like too much to witness. Even when the challenge feels too big to overcome.

And to encourage our broader communities to open their eyes and hearts to the world around them too.

Because open eyes and open hearts – be they in our governments, our churches, our international institutions, or our communities – have the power to change the world as we see it in front of us.

The things that go unseen go unchanged.

And a socially just world requires so much change.

Friends, I have every confidence that by organising, and by advocating, your work will change the world, and make life better for women and girls.

I know this because women like you have been acting on their values and changing the world around them for as long as we have been recording our history.

From Mary Magdalene to Malala.

From Esther to Emmeline Pankhurst.

From the suffragettes to the #metoo activists.

 

Women like Matelia and Talicia from Samoa and Fiji, who joined me in my Parliament House Office in November, and shared with me their story of fighting for climate justice across the Pacific.

Women like Joyce, who you can see on the screen, who I met during my time in South Sudan.

Despite the horrors of the civil war just gone by, Joyce and other women from the village were immediately mobilising to upskill in agriculture, so they could both grow their own produce but also gain economic independence, and therefore empowerment, for themselves and their children.

The success of their work would fund micro loans, further advancing the economic security of other women in their community.

Joyce is just one story, though.

There are countless women, throughout our history, who have seen social injustice and refused to accept it.

Women who have rewritten the course of history because of it.

That power is within every woman. It’s within this room today.

I want to thank you again for the opportunity to speak with you today. It’s a privilege to be one of your representatives, and I hope that the work we do in our Parliament, whilst it may not always be everything you want, leaves you with more hope than despair.

Our world is a big, complex place.

Full of light, and full of dark.

I’ll continue to keep my eyes and my heart open.

And I know you will too.

Because this is how we’ll change the world, and our world needs changing.

Thank you.