Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare) Share this | Hansard source

I know. You would think this is obvious, but the Treasurer obviously does not get it. Out of school hours care is for school age children. It can be a couple of hours before school, a couple of hours after school or vacation care. It does not take a genius to work out that out of school hours care is the cheapest to provide. Family day care is pretty cheap to provide because you are not building child-care centres, it is in the carer’s own home, and we are not paying them very well. Long day care is quite expensive to provide but—guess what?—it is the type of care that parents need and want right now. There are city areas where you cannot find a long day care place and there are regional areas where you cannot find a long day care place, and this government will not invest a single extra cent in building long day care facilities or providing extra long day care places.

The reason the government have tried to con parents is that the message has finally come through to them that there are child-care shortages, that parents are crying out for extra child care that they cannot find and they cannot afford the child care once they do find it. The government were rushing around in a panic: ‘What can we do on child care?’ What have they done? They have gone for the cheap political fix. Parents around Australia will be disappointed this week because they know that the government do not value their kids or their workforce participation. The government are not interested in allowing skilled workers to return to the workforce and they are not interested in providing the child care that those workers need to work and that people want for their kids so that they get a great educational start in life.

One of the reasons these places will never be delivered is that we have a chronic shortage of family day care workers. There is a chronic shortage of all child-care workers. The minister said it himself on the Insight program a couple of weeks ago:

… right now, things like family day care are actually going under-utilised, something like 30,000 places around Australia are available and aren’t being used.

Why are they not being used? They are not being used because they cannot be delivered to parents as there are not the carers to deliver the places. Linda Latham, CEO of the National Family Day Care Council, said, ‘You can have all the theoretical places in the world, but if you can’t find carers then they remain political promises.’ I would go a step further and say they are empty political promises. These places will not be delivered because there is a shortage of family day care workers. If you already have 30,000 places in the system that cannot be delivered because of a shortage of workers, then how will taking the cap off places get more people into the system, deliver more places to parents and get more kids into care? It is the most illogical piece of policy tomfoolery I have ever seen.

I will tell you something else about why these places will not be delivered. The government have taken money instead of providing extra support for family day care. If this were their chosen method of providing child care—the method they wanted to promote to parents—wouldn’t you think they would show it some support? You would think they would help out the family day care schemes. The exact opposite is true. Over the last year the federal government have cut funding to family day care schemes by about 25 per cent, on average, nationally. The schemes which support and regulate family day care workers play a coordinating role. They offer support, training and replacement workers when the usual worker wants to go on holidays and all the rest of it. They have been cut.

Look at the Illawarra family day care scheme in Wollongong run by the Uniting Church. The member for Throsby knows all about that. The federal government is cutting this scheme by $33,000 per annum. You cannot find the family day care workers now to deliver the undelivered places in the system. What is the solution? Is it to improve the conditions of the workers? Is it to improve the support they get through their family day care scheme? No. The government’s solution is to cut the funding of the coordinating schemes. The Daylesford Community Child Care Centre, which used to offer family day care, lost about $80,000 worth of operational funding last year and was told to stop providing family day care. That is the minister’s solution to the child-care problem.

The government attempts to grab a headline by looking for an announcement that has a big number attached. It does not matter whether the places will ever be delivered, it does not matter whether parents will ever receive the help they need and it does not matter whether kids will ever get into care—look for the big number for the headline. At the same time as you are trying to con parents into believing you will do something for them in child care you are taking money off the schemes that you think will deliver the extra places. How does that work?

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