Thank you. I'm very pleased to be here with you for this very important event. We have all just come from the child-care centre part of the building and why we are doing what we are doing today was all so clear in what we saw. We saw kids playing, interacting, adventuring, exploring, their eyes alive and always engaged.

This is what early learning and child care can be and the exciting part, of course, is that in five years or ten, it will be so much more and better in ways we can't even imagine. It will be better because as parents, as citizens, as business people and media, we will see the possibilities of it and we will push to make it better. No longer a patchwork of good and bad and non-existent, it will have the understanding and ambition and sense of importance to all of a real early learning and child-care system.

A year ago, despite the near heroic efforts of so many in the child-care community over so many years, not much was happening to drive this system forward. Not much was foreseeable in the years ahead. Then came the campaign commitment made in last June's election. Then came last February's federal budget. And now, today. The key has been to give early learning and child care a push—$5 billion over five years—but crucially, with a goal, the right, ambitious goal to create a national system of early learning and child care, to set it in motion, to give it a chance. And that is what we have done today.

Prime Minister Martin, I hope you are proud of what you have done. Premier Calvert, Minister Crofford, for being so helpful, so determined and smart through every step of the way, I hope you are proud of what you have done. Today is a good day, a good day for parents and kids, a good day for those who have been involved in early learning and child care, often for decades, who have stayed with it because they love seeing kids develop and learn and grow, who love to see the light go on in their eyes, and who have stayed through it, through struggles and difficult working conditions at times and low wages, because they believe in it.

And it is a good day in another way. In politics—and I have learned the hard way—there is noise. And somewhere in behind the noise, there is the prize. And the challenge is not to be distracted by the noise, but to work over, under, around, through the noise, however, whatever, to get to the prize. Today is a reminder of why any of us get involved in politics. Today is a reminder of why politics matter. Thank you.

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