Mal Brough (Longman, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Greenway for her interest in the families of her electorate and the important issue of child care. I can inform the House that, since the Howard government came to power in 1996, we have doubled the number of child-care places, raised spending to some $9.5 billion over the forward estimates and taken the number of outside school hours places from some 72,000 to 285,000. We announced in the last budget that we would continue to roll out further outside school hours places and, in addition to that, we have of course introduced the 30 per cent child-care rebate.

I am asked by the member for Greenway what the alternative policies are. There are alternative policies that have been cobbled together in the last few days during the Commonwealth Games and announced by the Leader of the Opposition. After the rock show which was the member for Hotham’s preselection, we had all the disturbances in the Labor Party—that is an understatement—so the Leader of the Opposition rolled out a child-care policy. When confronted by Alan Jones as to how this policy came about, the Leader of the Opposition said, ‘Well, actually, Alan, you threw a challenge out a few days ago and we took up the challenge.’ So here is child care, this challenging issue which is fundamental to so many Australian families, and the Labor Party cobbles something together in two to three days. It sounds like the last election when, in response to 80,000 outside school hours places and a 30 per cent child-care rebate, the Labor Party’s answer was, ‘We’ll give them 8,000’—fewer than 10 per cent of the places was their response. An element of the Labor Party policy was to establish child-care places in state schools.

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