Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I also support the member for Adelaide's amendment. I appreciate the opportunity to speak about the bill and follow the wise words of my colleague the member for Charlton and my other colleagues the member for Griffith and the member for Parramatta. I also thought the member for Lalor made a characteristically thoughtful contribution last night.

I begin my own contribution by paying tribute to childcare workers. In my own electorate, like so many of the electorates in this place, we are very fortunate to have some tremendous childcare centres full of people whose contribution and commitment to raising the next generation of Australians is faultless. On Chatswood Road, you can go past one of the centres in the morning—even before the sun comes up, if you are on a walk or a run—and see the childcare workers out there sweeping the astroturf. They are making sure they are there early enough so that when the tradie utes pull up with the young boys and girls to be dropped off to the childcare centre there is someone waiting for them and someone to care for them.

I am very blessed. I have two wonderful sisters, and one of them is a childcare worker. She used to run one of the child care centres in my own electorate, at Algester. I know from speaking to her, over the years, the extraordinary commitment of these childcare workers. Even though they are not paid a great deal of money, I know that they often dip their hands into their own pockets to pay for the crayons or the butchers paper. I know they often do special things for the kids' birthdays out of their own pockets. I pay tribute to the types of people that my sister Chelley works with, because I do know they are fantastic people. You cannot say enough about their commitment and contribution to helping raise that next generation of Australians.

In my own electorate, there are something like 11,100 families who rely on child care. There are 147 approved services and something like 9,760 families who rely on the childcare rebate, which is one of the things we are talking about today. These are good people who want to be good parents and good workers, all at the same time. They are people who are just trying to make ends meet and, quite often, that means having access to good-quality and affordable child care.

This government had two very different themes before and after the election, when it comes to these sorts of issues. Before the election, they talked about being a government of no surprises. They talked about no cuts to education. They talked about being consultative. They sent all kinds of reassuring letters to childcare centres, pretending they had no plans to cut people's assistance when it came to the childcare system. After the election, of course, a very different theme emerged.

We should not mince words about the team that emerged after the election. It really is an unfair agenda. It is a deliberate attack. It is an ambush on people who want to access that good-quality child care at affordable prices. They are people who are just trying to make ends meet. In lots of ways it was less of a budget and more of an ambush that we saw, in this place, delivered by the Treasurer in May.

The more kind interpretation of all of this would be to blame it in some way on ignorance or something like that, but the reality is that the government are not ignorant of the impact of these changes. They did not even care to ask what the impact would be, particularly on low- and middle-income families. It is unforgivable, to my mind, to think that they did not even ask any of their experts, 'What would this mean for people who are doing it tough in our community, who are trying to be good parents and good workers?' You would think that would be the very least that they could do. The fact that they did not ask for that kind of advice really does speak to their lack of care about this issue.

There are people behind every policy change that is made. Every number that is on the page of a budget document represents an impact on a human being and an impact on their community. It is crucial to understand just who this policy change proposed by the government hurts. It is not accidental; it is deliberate, it is intentional and it is by design. It is another example of the burden of this so-called budget emergency—which is a con—being unfairly borne by the people who can least afford it.

We get a bit of a hint of their thinking on some of these matters when we consider that the Prime Minister really does think that there are two kinds of women in the workforce. We know this because of his comment not that long ago which tried to differentiate women of calibre and, by implication, women who are not of calibre. This was a really Romney-like moment. You will remember Mitt Romney talking about binders full of women when he was trying to defend himself against some of the allegations made in his own presidential campaign. Mitt Romney and Tony Abbott really are Downton Abbey brothers in arms when it comes to these sorts of issues. We know that the Prime Minister has a view that there are some deserving women and some undeserving women. We know this especially in the case of the Paid Parental Leave Scheme.

I thought that those who spoke on this legislation before me did an extraordinary job of pointing to the unfairness in the government's Paid Parental Leave Scheme. The member for Griffith explained it well in referring to it as a really regressive measure. It is not fair, when you have limited funds coming into the government, when you have budget constraints, to think that their highest priority would be $21 billion so that they can give $50,000 a year to the wealthiest parents in our community just to have a baby. It is extraordinary that they would prioritise that over some of the assistance that we are talking about today. It just shows how warped those priorities are. It is not just Labor saying that and it is not just the union saying that—as important and as crucial as the union is in looking after childcare workers. There are a whole range of stakeholders who are saying that.

I want to mention again, as other speakers have, that the Australian Industry Group argued that the cuts would not be necessary if some of the expenditure allocated to the government's Paid Parental Leave Scheme was redirected. You would think that would be a no-brainer. When you look at the unfairness of the PPL and the extravagance of that scheme compared with the unfairness of some of the things being proposed here, you would think that would be a no-brainer. It was not just the AiG who opposed this bill. Early Childhood Australia, Family Day Care Australia, Early Learning Association Australia, Australian Childcare Alliance, Goodstart Early Learning and the National Welfare Rights Network have all lined up. There is a long queue of people who think that this legislation has been rushed and that it needs more consideration and that it is not right to attack people on low and middle incomes who are just trying to access affordable child care. These groups cannot understand—just like big swathes of the community cannot understand—why there is a need to rush. Why the rush, from a government that said 'no surprises'? I can shed some light on that.

As other speakers have reminded us—the member for Charlton mentioned this in his contribution—the Productivity Commission will report on some of these issues firstly in July and then I think in October. You would think the government would wait for the outcomes of that review before they made these changes. There are two reasons why they have not. The first reason is very sneaky. They have given a commitment that the Productivity Commission will come up with proposals that relate to the same sized funding envelope as we began with. They have rushed in $1 billion worth of cuts so that the envelope is substantially smaller for the Productivity Commission to report on. That would not be well known out in the community, but that is a sneaky thing that they are doing. I think the second sneaky reason is appreciated in the community, judging by all the doors I knocked on on the weekend in Meadowbrook in my electorate, plus the forum we held in Browns Plains. When people talk about this budget they say, 'What is the government thinking?'

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