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

I want to turn to choice in child care. In the past there has been a lot of government rhetoric about choice, such as choice of superannuation fund and Work Choices. However, it appears that when it comes to child care the minister thinks that families should be prepared to take any child-care place that is available even if a family is not happy with the quality of care that is offered, even if it is a family day care place but the family wants a long day care place or even if it is a long day care place and the family prefers a family day care place.

Labor believes that parents should be able to choose the type of care that best suits their children and that they should have a choice when it comes to the quality of care. If they believe that the quality of a service is not suitable for their child then they have a right not to take the place. So I will be very curious to know, when the new telephone line is finally set up, if that ever actually happens—and we now hear from the minister, although we are not sure whether it is an announcement or just a press statement, that figures will be collected on vacancies—whether the government will accept the situation of parents saying they want family day care for their children when there is only long day care available in the suburb as being unmet demand for child care. Will that be included in any statistics that are collected, if they are collected, or does the government believe a vacancy is a vacancy is a vacancy? Will parents be allowed to have any choice at all when it comes to the type of child care suitable for their child?

I want to turn away from child-care now and move on to Indigenous affairs, an area that I know the Minister for Community Services, who has bothered to turn up today, is very interested in. These are specific questions about Wadeye, a community that the minister for Indigenous affairs has visited on several occasions. Is it the case, in relation to Wadeye, that, since mid-2004, FaCSIA has provided no programs to target family violence on the ground, that it promised $50,000 two years ago to run a community patrol but that has not happened, and that the minister’s own department says it is not their responsibility, despite families and women being an agreed priority of the Wadeye COAG trial?

I want the minister to answer the question about how he feels comfortable with allowing his government, the Howard government, to blame the Northern Territory government and the community itself when it is the minister’s own department that has been the lead agency in a whole-of-government trial at Wadeye for nearly four years. Despite the fact that there have been 10 official and very high profile visits to the region, there has not been a single iota of improvement in the lives of local Indigenous people. It is all very well to be blaming this government or that government or the people themselves when the minister’s own department has been the lead agency in the whole-of-government trial, yet there has been no substantial improvement, as the minister himself was pleased to announce on the front page of the Australian.

Is it the case that the women of Wadeye talked about their concerns to the federal government in October 2005 and that the Howard government did nothing? Is it the case that the Wadeye community applied for a crime prevention grant in 2005 and received no response? Is it the case that the women there met again with the federal government through early 2006 and still there was no action taken on their concerns? Did the minister himself visit the community, talk up the problem and again walk away without offering any constructive solution to the critical situation there? Is it the case that the community has been asking for help, calling for help, demanding it, for at least six months as problems there have been escalating but has had no response beyond the government sending a senior bureaucrat to tell gang members to fix up their houses? (Time expired)

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