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

I certainly do. I will then ask further questions about the national child-care management system. It is curious: during Senate estimates, we had senior government officials saying that the new management system would not measure shortages in child care, that shortages are not a problem to be dealt with by the government, that shortages are a problem that the market will solve. Very shortly afterwards, we had the minister come out and say that shortages would be measured by the new management system. In doing so he gave the impression that the department does not know what the minister is planning for this new management system and that the minister is basically making it up as he goes along—that whatever is running in the media that day as a criticism of the government is going to be solved by the new management system that the government is introducing.

On 30 May we had senior officials saying that the system will not measure demand but will simply act as a referral and information service for parents who want information about vacancies. That means that you can ring up and say, ‘I’m looking for a vacancy in a particular suburb,’ and the telephone line will tell you what you already know—‘There are no vacancies in your suburb.’ Will it or will it not provide information about where there are areas of unmet demand? Most importantly, if it is to provide the government with information about unmet demand, what is the government going to do about that unmet demand?

If this new management system says that there are whole suburbs where there is no family day care available or there are whole suburbs where long day care is not available, what measures will the government take to meet unmet demand in that area? Will it invest in setting up new centres? Will it support private operators, community operators and not-for-profit operators to set up in areas of high demand? Will there be any intervention in the market to help in those areas of unmet demand? What is the point of collecting the statistics if the government is not prepared to act on those areas of unmet demand?

I would also like to ask the minister about the PIN or swipe card that the minister has been talking about in the media recently. I am not sure whether this is an official announcement of the government or whether it is a strategic leak—like some of the other measures that the minister likes to announce and then say that they have not actually been announced. I would like to know if any work has been done on whether it will be a PIN system or a swipe card system and whether there is any information about how much this is likely to cost child-care centre operators.

Is every family day care provider in the country supposed to have some new machinery so that they can read a PIN or a swipe card? Are they going to be paying for it themselves? How much is it likely to cost every child-care provider in the country? We are talking about family day carers who are struggling to pay for the shatter-proof glass that they need to have in their homes to be able to care for children, let alone any new equipment that will read PINs or swipe cards. We also read in the Financial ReviewI guess it is another strategic leak—on 11 May that the tender for the new management system will be under way within two months of the budget. Is that still on track? Are the tender documents being drawn up? If that is the case, the government should be able to tell us whether it is a PIN card or some other system that will be used in the future.

I have one final question in this information management section. We have been told that child-care providers will be submitting information to a telephone line weekly. If they have no vacancies, will they still have to go through the motions of filling in the paperwork and sending it off to Centrelink? Will child-care providers in the areas where there are no vacancies and it is unlikely there will be any vacancies—where they have waiting lists of 200 or 400—be forced to go through the motions of filling in all the paperwork just to make Centrelink happy? (Time expired)

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