Thanks to the Minister. Very briefly, a comment, this will be my last comment hopefully on ECD, early childhood development. The premise that junior kindergarten is the way to go rather than focussing on zero to three, I know the Minister is aware that this is a contention here. Particularly on the claim that because services for zero to three age classes are fragmented, is a great leap and highly debatable, huge assumptions made there and I totally disagree with that. I think we are missing the boat. There is little evidence that the
issues we are seeing can be addressed through junior kindergarten nearly as much as a coordinated effort in the early, early years. I’ll leave it at that. That’s my strong belief and I believe I can back that up with evidence.
I’m just wondering: I see the Aboriginal languages section of this division is very important and I have spoken out consistently in favour of that work. I just want to point out to the Minister what I think is a kernel and that is a TED Talk by a lady, I think her name is Patricia Kuhl, entitled “The Genius of Babies.” In that 10-minute TED Talk, it demonstrates, with massive amounts of data, that the window of opportunity between the ages of five and seven months, a five to seven-month-old human being, is absolutely amazing for picking up language and providing the basis for the rest of their life for multiple languages. So I would love to see the department take advantage of that opportunity, realizing that the department is not delivering all the programs, but this would be important information to get out to our partners and to use to guide at least the significant amount of our funding on languages. Can I just get a brief comment from the Minister on that? Mahsi.