Parenting & Family Quote by Jay Weatherill

Weatherill’s line is classic political jujitsu: it takes a soft, morally unassailable idea - children - and uses it to justify hard, potentially expensive policy. By calling early childhood investment “the single most important contribution,” he crowds out competing priorities before they’re even named. Roads, hospitals, policing: all implicitly demoted. The move isn’t subtle; it’s designed to create a hierarchy of urgency that makes disagreement sound not just wrong, but irresponsible.

The subtext is technocratic optimism with a human face. “Development from the earliest age” signals the now-dominant policy consensus that early intervention yields outsized returns: better educational outcomes, lower crime, higher productivity, reduced long-term health costs. It’s a politician translating cost-benefit analysis into parental language. Notice the rhetorical bridge from “children” to “citizens”: the kid is framed less as an individual with rights than as the future unit of the state - a future worker, voter, and taxpayer whose “capacity” can be cultivated like an asset.

Context matters: Weatherill, as South Australian Premier, spent political capital on education reform and child-focused initiatives in an era when governments were pressured to prove “value” and fiscal restraint. “Health and wellbeing” and “prosperity” are paired to pre-empt the usual objection that social spending is charity. He’s arguing it’s infrastructure - just biological and social, not concrete. The intent is to make early childhood policy feel inevitable: the one investment that satisfies compassion, economics, and statecraft all at once.