CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Ms PENFOLD (Lyne) (16:50): Just over a week ago, I attended the centenary celebrations of St Clare's Catholic College in Taree. It was an honour to speak at this event, and I want to read into Hansard a shortened version of the speech that I gave. I wrote it not only to be an inspiration to St Clare's current students but to students across the Lyne electorate.

Replace St Clare's with your own school. Replace Taree with your own town because, wherever you are, you too have a slingshot into the future you want. So here goes.

I stand here before you with immense pride to be an alumni of the school. I walked through these gates as a student from 1985 to 1989. I was an ordinary kid—shy, bookish and opinionated, not at all popular, uncomfortable in my own skin and not at all sure what I wanted to be when I grew up.

While an enormous amount has changed within me and within these grounds since my time here, I suspect something much more important has not. St Clare's has always been about more than what happens in a classroom. I'm deeply grateful for the faith based, values led education I received here—an education that did not teach us what to think but encouraged us to think for ourselves and to look at the world with curiosity, compassion and a sense of responsibility for others and to pursue our areas of interest.

I remain enormously grateful to the teachers who educated me—the professional teachers who challenged us and opened our minds, the kind and endearing teachers who noticed when someone needed encouragement and those wonderful teachers who somehow saw possibilities in us at an age when we could not. They understood something fundamental about education—their job was not to decide our future for us; it was to give every one of us a slingshot into whatever future we chose.

That is the message I particularly want to leave the young people here today: never believe that being educated in Taree limits where you can go. I've heard this message too many times, and it breaks my heart when I do. I believe precisely the opposite.

Growing up in the Manning is an advantage. We grow up knowing community. We learn that people matter.

We know what it means to belong somewhere, to look out for one another and to understand that character counts. You can walk into a university, a boardroom, a parliament, a workshop or a hospital, start a business, raise a family or pursue a dream that nobody else has thought of yet. And you can do it carrying something enormously valuable with you: a Taree education and the values of the school community.

To the students of St Clare's today: believe in yourselves, be ambitious, be curious, be compassionate. Don't allow your postcode or anyone else's expectations to put boundaries around your future and who you want to be. For 100 years St Clare's has been giving young people that slingshot into their extraordinary future.

May it continue doing so for the next 100.