Peter Slipper (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Reading the second reading speech for the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Child Care) Bill 2009 delivered by the Parliamentary Secretary for Early Childhood Education and Childcare I was interested to see how she summed up the bill. She said:

… this bill is about administration, accessibility and accountability—what I could call the AAA rating.

That was a fairly nifty use of the English language. I certainly would not in this House want to in any way, shape or form suggest that the parliamentary secretary was less than sincere in supporting the purposes of this bill for the reasons she outlined.

When I look at what the bill seeks to do, it seems that any reasonable person would have to support the bill, and that is what the Liberal-National opposition are doing in the House today. The bill will make changes to allow the final quarterly payment of the childcare tax rebate to be withheld until a parent’s taxable income is determined for that financial year. The government has advised us that the reason for this is to reduce the number of families who are overpaid or underpaid. That certainly makes a lot of sense and appears to be logical.

The bill also seeks to align the operation of the CCR provisions with the childcare benefits in the case of a deceased individual. That means that, if an individual who received CCR payments passes on and the child continues to attend approved care, the payments can continue to be received by another approved adult who takes over guardianship of the child. Again, no-one could object to that provision.

The bill allows for those people who have been assessed at a zero rate for the CCB to request a review of their entitlements within two years of the relevant year that they received the zero rating. Where a variation to the CCB is made as a result of the review, an automatic review will be done in relation to the CCR payments. Again, that is not unreasonable.

Civil penalties are imposed on childcare operators who breach their obligations in relation to when and how they notify their intention to cease operations. My understanding is that the current provisions provide that 30 days notice be given before a centre can close. Yet, only about 14 days ago, the ABC centre at Altona North in Victoria—a centre to which the government appointed receivers and on 5 May said would remain open, with final negotiations to be completed—announced that it would close and parents were given only six days notice. So six days notice was given but the law requires 30 days notice. It is understandable that the government would seek to impose civil penalties on childcare providers who breach their legal obligations.

Logically, also, the childcare tax rebate is being renamed as the childcare rebate because the payment is now made as a quarterly payment through family assistance legislation rather than as a tax offset under taxation legislation.

I have held a view for a very long time that the cost of child care for a working person is as much a cost of earning assessable income as would be the purchase of tools by a tradesman or the purchase of reference books by an accountant or a lawyer. I must say that this is not Liberal-National opposition policy and it is certainly not government policy. But I have had a view that childcare expenses ought to be fully tax deductible and that that way there would be a linkage between it and the cost of producing the assessable income. The linkage would mean that before the income is actually assessed for tax the cost of producing that income would be taken into account and the person’s taxable income would therefore be reduced by the amount of the childcare payment.

For a whole range of reasons, including equity and the fact that there are people who are not in the paid workforce but who benefit from child care—and I accept that as well—this view of mine has not been adopted by any major political party. But I do think that as far as working people are concerned it makes a very fair case for childcare costs to be fully tax deductible and then, for those people who need child care for other reasons, the law as it currently stands could well be actioned with respect to those people. We will just have to wait and see whether anyone ever picks this up. But I find it quite amazing that many people who are in the paid workforce do not actually object to the fact that they are not receiving as a tax deduction the full cost of what they pay out. If they did not pay that out they would not be able to earn the assessable income because, in many cases, they would not be able to go to work.

Having said that, this is a bill that does enjoy the support of the opposition as well as the government. The bill includes housekeeping measures as well as amendments that the government would want us to accept as a result of the failure of ABC Learning. It is also a bit of a worry that you can have one operator who controls such a large section of the industry, as we saw with respect to ABC Learning. I suppose it does not really matter who controls the centres, but when you have a market failure, as occurred with respect to ABC Learning, clearly that has an incredible impact. We saw the action by the government, which was forced on the government, to ensure that those families who relied on ABC Learning were not left entirely in the lurch. The government, I believe, could well have handled the ABC Learning fiasco much better, but that is history—we are not discussing the ABC Learning fiasco in the debate on this particular bill. Because this bill, when you look at it as a freestanding bill, is worthy of support I am very happy to commend it to the chamber.

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