Harry Quick (Franklin, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

As the longest-serving member of the Standing Committee on Family and Human Services, I have much pleasure in speaking to yet another report put out by this marvellous committee, chaired by the honourable member for Mackellar, Mrs Bronwyn Bishop. The good thing about this committee—I think it is the best committee in the House—is that we tackle the real issues, issues that impact on each and every family in Australia.

So many committees talk about esoteric things, but this committee in its report talks about work and families—something that is impacting on every family right across the nation, from southern parts of Tasmania to the Northern Territory, where we visited the defence forces. Because of the excellent work of the committee and the superb work of the secretariat, we saw it warts and all. No-one escaped our scrutiny. We put out a report and, sadly, I think it was fobbed off by the government. In marginalising the report the government said, ‘The recommendations really aren’t worthy of consideration.’ To my mind, we have been given a bit of a bum steer.

When you talk to constituents in your electorate, you find that they are under pressure to pay the mortgage. There has been a move to part-time work and the casualisation of our workforce. There is an emphasis on children staying at school longer in order to get qualifications. You virtually need to complete year 12 to become a hairdresser. Once you could leave school at 14 or 15, get an apprenticeship and be set for life. The priesthood is about the only occupation where you are guaranteed to be there until you die. Everything else is part-time, casual or contract work. Families are under enormous pressure to pay for their house, establish their family, establish a job and develop some credit rating so that they can go along to the bank and get their lives organised.

I want to cite one example. We have all been given an extra staff member. We have four now, so we have flexibility in our relief budget. I am using my extra position to enable someone that I taught in grade 6—God knows how many years ago—to get back into the workforce. Jo-Anne Munro—or Jo-Anne Leslie as she is called now, since she married—has three young children. She decided she was going to stay at home and provide her children with the resource of having a mother on hand. But the pressure on the family and the decline in the number of hours her husband was able to work meant that, like all families, they required extra income to buy a few extra things, perhaps a second car to enable her to have some flexibility.

Because her husband is working, Jo-Anne does not qualify for support under Job Futures or Job Network, so she is on her own. She has to organise a new set of clothes and is coming to work for me a couple of days a week. She has not been in the workforce for over six years. There is no support. She has to organise child care. Once we had the JET program where, if you were returning to the workforce, there was some capacity for government agencies to at least assist you and find some child care. She lives in a far-flung region of my electorate and has to have a second car to enable her to go to work.

With the privatisation of child care, we now have a situation where, as she is interested in work, she has to organise child care and transport. It is all based on her children because she does not want the kids to be latchkey kids. She wants to be there to pick them up after school. I have arranged for her to have flexible working hours to give her that capacity. But then she comes up against the childcare bureaucracy that says: ‘If you only want a couple of hours here and a couple of hours there, we’re not really interested. It’s either half a day or a full day. Take it or leave it.’

Luckily in Tasmania we have not been inflicted with what I call the mainland disease. We have community based child care in Tasmania. It is wonderful because there is that understanding—being community based—that you ought to have the capacity to be flexible. They have some places to enable that to happen. In Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth they are not interested. ABC, or whatever they call themselves these days—they are a multimillion-dollar concern gobbling up childcare centres all around the world—are in it for a buck.

One of the key things in our recommendations is that we ought to bite the bullet. Because each family is different, there ought to be different scenarios so that families can have the capacity to be productive. Joanne has not been in work for six years. She is working around her kids; she is trying to stabilise the family and give them some additional things. It is a totally different situation from that of the lawyers we met in Sydney who are earning six-figure sums. They have different needs and capacities. They might be interested in tax relief. All that Jo-Anne wants is the opportunity to gain some capacity to get back into the workforce and earn a few extra dollars while ensuring that her kids have the same sort of mothering that they had when she was at home, while allowing her to have that wherewithal.

This report, like all other reports, is pretty bipartisan. We had some disagreements about Work Choices, AWAs, certified agreements and the like, but I think that, deep in our hearts, we were of the mind that we ought to provide each and every family, either the mother or the father, who wants to get back into the workforce with the capacity to do so. Whether it is an au pair or a nanny in some of the affluent suburbs of Sydney, whether it is tax deductibility or whether it is having flexibility in child care, all of these things ought to be made available. I am not too sure how we should do it, but for goodness sake, in this day and age we ought to be able to come up with some recommendations. I think we have done so.

As I said at the outset, I think that with this report it has been a matter of saying, ‘It’s all too hard; it’s not in the great scheme of things.’ Within the guts of this report I know there is the wherewithal to sort this problem out once and for all. If we do not sort it out, even though unemployment is down to 4½ per cent or whatever it is now, we still have tens of thousands of people who are not working at 100 per cent capacity. They want to do so; they have to do so. We heard evidence of the pressure on families to pay the mortgage, and of families breaking up because of the conflict over the capacity of one partner or the other to earn enough money to pay some of the ridiculous mortgages in the five big capital cities.

I am disappointed that more speakers, apart from those of us who are members of the committee, are not going to speak on this issue. I think that each and every member, all 150 of us, ought to be talking about this. If I could do a quick headcount, I would like to know how many of the 150 members have even bothered to read the report. We have been wandering around the country, as this wonderful committee does, taking evidence from the high fliers, from our military, and from people with basically the seat out of their pants. They are all crying out for solutions. I would urge each and every member who is not on the committee to read this wonderful report.

The committee secretariat are present in the gallery. I mentioned earlier in my speech how much we appreciate the wonderful work they have done—above and beyond the call of duty, as always. To James and the secretariat, I say thank you from the bottom of my heart. This will be my last year in this place. As I said at the outset, I am the longest-serving member of this committee. I have appreciated the camaraderie and the way you have supported us. To the chairman, I say: well done. I know you have had a few black marks against you. We have not always agreed. But, as I said, this is a wonderful report and it ought to be implemented. There should be an onus on each and every one of us to ensure that all members read it and try to ensure that something is done in order to get families into work and being productive.

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