Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare and Early Childhood Learning) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Family Assistance and Other Legislation Amendment (Child Care and Other Measures) Bill 2011. The intention of this bill is to improve the effectiveness of the recovery of fee reductions, enrolment advances and business continuity payments paid to approved childcare services. Currently, where financial recoveries need to be made, these are for the most part offset against subsequent payments of fee reductions, enrolment advances or business continuity payments made to the service. Amendments made by this bill will enable recovery of these amounts also by way of set-off from any payments made to services through the childcare management system—that is, from acquittal payments made to services under the CCMS Act and from payments made to services under administrative (that is, non-legislative) schemes.

Under this government, significant debts have been raised, especially when childcare providers were transitioned to the CCMS system by the Department of Employment, Education and Workplace Relations, otherwise known as DEEWR. DEEWR officials in 2010 budget estimates indicated this debt to be in the vicinity of $70 million, with around 6,000 childcare providers owing a debt to the Commonwealth as a result. My understanding is that the department is still in the process of recovering these debts. However, discussions with providers have indicated that they are surprised at how tardy the recovery effort has been to date. I suspect that the Australian taxpayer would be quite mortified to learn of this unaccountable delay.

This legislation will assist in the recovery, and one can only hope it will (a) decrease future debt accumulation and (b) speed up the recovery process. These are, after all, taxpayer dollars that are sitting idle.

Amendments are also included in this bill to enable the recovery of those amounts from the same range of payments to be made to another approved childcare service operated by the same operator. The schedule 2 amendments seek to allow for greater clarification of when exactly a service has stopped providing care to a particular child, as this determines when childcare benefit is no longer payable. Each child is permitted 42 days absence from care in a given year. However, in circumstances in which it is clear that the service has ceased caring for the child, this bill will allow the minister to specify through a legislative instrument the exact circumstance of a child's absence from care. This will then ensure cessation of the childcare benefit.

Further amendments proposed by this bill will allow the secretary the discretion to cease advance enrolment payments to businesses that have notified their intent to close. This will reduce the debt to the Commonwealth where previously advance enrolment payments were paid up until the business ceased operating. In addition, the bill enables for the greater sharing of relevant protected information between departments where expressed or implied consent has been granted. The purpose of these amendments is to allow information collected by Centrelink on approved childcare services to be shared with the relevant state and territory regulatory bodies under the new education and care services national law. The coalition believes that these amendments make for a more cohesive system, unlike other policies of this government that actively seek to increase the workload on childcare providers by overwhelming providers with baseless paperwork and bureaucracy. In short, the coalition have no issue with this unremarkable piece of legislation before the Main Committee today. We take great issue with the government's management of the childcare industry and the nation's children and will, of course, have much more to say about that in the future.

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