Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Those opposite are interjecting from the background. Child care is something that people in my electorate certainly know about, with the 1,200-place shortage in long day care that we have in the city of Port Phillip. This motion proposes 15 hours of play based learning per week for a minimum of 40 weeks by a qualified teacher, extra financial assistance to build additional childcare centres on primary school grounds, more fully funded university places in early childhood education and the introduction of 50 per cent HECS remission for 10,000 early childhood graduates working in an area of need and supports the transfer of responsibility for early childhood education and child care to DEST and a new office of early childhood education.

Child care is an area where there are clearly inequities all over Australia. I know in my electorate that there is an acute shortage of spaces. We have a problem with high real estate prices and even many private childcare operators are unable to set up in that area because the cost of capital is too high. Of course, the federal government has neglected its responsibility for capital funding in this area for a long time. In the mid-1980s, with various schemes that the Labor government had, a lot of community based child care was set up with federal funding and buildings were established. Nothing has been put into them since then.

In some areas of the outer suburbs, we have private child care, such as the ABC group, opening and shutting according to demand in particular suburbs. I noticed in the Herald Sun the other day that a lot of parents were very agitated about the fact that the only resource that they had in their area was commercially based child care, but because it was run on commercially based decisions, when enrolment slipped below 50 per cent of the places in that childcare centre, they closed down the entire facility. What would happen if we did this with schools? If school enrolments dropped in some suburbs, would we close the entire school and expect the children to go off somewhere else?

I suggest to the parliament that early childhood education is as important as school education and we certainly have to do a lot to assist those who make contributions to our society by taking the relatively poorly paid jobs that we have in child care at the moment. There are some excellent ideas in this dissenting motion, such as the 50 per cent HECS remission for 10,000 early childhood graduates and extra financial assistance to build childcare centres on primary school grounds.

In my electorate, far from the blame game that the member for Mitchell talks about, the state government has taken the initiative of building a childcare centre on the grounds of the Elwood Primary School, which is to be called the Elwood hub. That will do what the former Leader of the Opposition, the current Leader of the Opposition, the member for Adelaide and all of us on this side want—and that is to stop the dreaded double drop-off that parents have to face, racing off to one part of Melbourne or Sydney and then racing off to another. So that they can productively participate in the workforce or in other areas, these mothers and fathers are all trying to get their kids to different places in time.

It is a very important, positive and constructive idea that the opposition has had: at many primary schools around Australia, where mothers or fathers are dropping off their kids to early education, they can drop off the little ones at the childcare centre in the area, or the same building, at the same time. At the Elwood hub this is going to be done very successfully. There are 90 full-time, long day care centre places being built. It is an example of the state government working with the City of Port Phillip to make up for the inadequacies of the federal government. The federal government has put no capital expenditure into this centre and has not addressed the issue of the crying need in the inner and middle parts of the cities of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane for child care—long day care in particular—that parents are facing. I commend the member for Adelaide for this excellent and detailed policy idea. (Time expired)

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