Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

That is a very good question and I will be answering it for you, actually. Thank you very much. Obviously in this House yesterday and in recent days we have been discussing the government’s commitment to making a difference in child care—making a difference on affordability, accessibility and quality. On a day on which the only themes apparently tying together the questions from the opposition are hypocrisy on the one hand and confected outrage on the other, I think it is a good day to remind ourselves about the facts in the area of child care.

On the question of affordability, the demand side, government’s assistance to working parents, this is a government that has budgeted for, and is going to deliver, an increase in the childcare tax rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent, a benefit that is not income tested but will be available to working families using child care from 1 July and which will mean more relief for them—more dollars in the purses and wallets of Australian working families. What do we hear from the opposition on this area? Absolutely nothing. Had they been in government, of course, this measure to assist working families would not have been delivered.

Then there is the question of transparency. The government is going to ensure that parents can access a website that tells them about fees, availability and quality. According to today’s opposition, transparency is something that they do not believe in; transparency is something that they do not care about. This is where the hypocrisy comes in, because of course the former minister for families, Mr Brough, when he said he aspired to introduce a national childcare management system, said the aim of it was to provide the best information on childcare supply, usage and demand data that had ever been available in Australia for families. Those who used to believe in transparency apparently now do not believe in transparency. But the one thing we know about the former minister for families and community services, Mr Brough, is that he never delivered what he promised to deliver, and it falls to this government to make sure that working families have this information.

And then there is the question of the supply side. Yesterday I talked in the House about the government’s plan to ensure that there are up to 260 new childcare centres around the country. What do we hear from the opposition? When the present Leader of the Opposition was asked, ‘What would you think about the idea of government setting up government funded childcare centres in the vicinity of private centres which have increased their fees by too much as a means to put pressure on them?’ he said, ‘It sounds like an expensive waste of taxpayers’ money to make a political point.’ New childcare centres, new places and providers selected on the basis of a track record of affordability are things that the Leader of the Opposition is not committed to. He wants to make sure that working families around this country cannot find child care when they need it.

And then there is the question of the broad hypocrisy of the opposition about these issues. Now, apparently they feel the pain of working families. The Leader of the Opposition is so overcome by this emotion from time to time he can hardly move. But I and I believe many members in this House would recall a time when the present Leader of the Opposition sat on this side of the parliament. When he did sit on this side of the parliament, he used to sit with the former member for Richmond, Larry Anthony, now replaced of course by the Minister for Ageing. Larry Anthony was in fact his junior minister.

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