CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS
Mr BURNS (Macnamara) (17:17): We have some incredible schools in Macnamara, and last week I was privileged to go and visit two of them. One of our very best public education secondary schools across the country, Albert Park College, invited me to come and speak to their year 12 politics class, and they even invited the year 11s as well. There are some very, very smart year 11s at Albert Park College, or APC.
We spent an hour discussing some of the issues that they've been working on and some of the really difficult and complex topics that they were not only across but also asking such thoughtful questions about, and we had such a good discussion about them. Some of the topics we spoke about were Australia's role in the Pacific, our relationship and work in Papua New Guinea, AUKUS and the defence relationships that we have with the United States and the United Kingdom, and housing as a national problem.
They were very interested in the different ways in which we're tackling them. All in all, I just want to say thank you so much to the students at APC. They are about to finish their school journey, but they give me great hope for what they're about to do once they leave school.
With such analytical, thoughtful and engaged students, APC can be very proud of themselves. Also, I thought the way the students engaged with me was one of the most impressive things I've seen in a school in Macnamara. I also had the pleasure of visiting Galilee Regional Catholic Primary School in South Melbourne.
This is a wonderful school. The students there invited me to come and meet the year 6 class. They were working on their STEM projects and they wanted to show off some of the things and the work that they were doing around creating different options and different products that help people and help some of society's problems.
They broke up into groups and they each thought through the different problems that they wanted to solve and then created an application online to help solve them. Two of the groups worked on how to get young kids to become more active, and they designed these incredible applications that gave young kids rewards and were able to track the way in which they were being active and getting outside.
They could even compete with family members. It was exceptionally impressive. There was another group that created a community of people to make sure that they could participate more as people with a disability, and how they could share resources and get to know one another.
That was amazing. But I was blown away by one of the groups—a group of young girls in the STEM class—who created an application that was not only all about promoting healthy food, but also about how you could put in what was in your fridge and your pantry, and it would then spit out recipes in accordance with what you've got in your fridge and pantry. So, to the kids at Galilee: I was so impressed, and thanks for having me.