Andrew Nikolic (Bass, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

This MPI could easily have included words like 'sanctimony' and 'hypocrisy', given Labor's record on the economy and in policy areas like child care. Consider that we have an MPI that talks about how hard life is for Australian families when we remember that those opposite gave Australian families the carbon tax and, on average, $550 costs on each and every Australian family.

The member for Adelaide had the audacity to talk about magic puddings—but we remember that those opposite, from 2008 to 2013, produced an economy that had $200 billion in achieved deficits, $123 billion of projected deficits across the forward estimates, and peak debt rising to $667 billion. So please do not talk to us about magic puddings, Member for Adelaide, when you have that sort of record to draw on.

The member for Adelaide also had the audacity to talk about promises relating to child care. I know you will be familiar, Mr Deputy Speaker, with the promises made during the 2007 election by Mr Rudd, who became Prime Minister. He talked about grand aspirations. There was GroceryWatch to make your groceries cheaper, there was Fuelwatch to make fuel cheaper, there was child care that was going to make childcare cheaper. Everything was going to be cheaper, better, brighter, more 'Kevin'. But, as we found out, it was a government long on aspiration and very, very short on delivery. Despite promising affordable child care, childcare fees skyrocketed by 53 per cent under the Labor government. There was $73 a week extra in fees, or around $3,500 more each year for a family, using the average hours of child care. What they left behind was grossly inefficient. I have seen it firsthand. I have seen that 1,200-kilometre screwdriver here in Canberra, with the member for Adelaide turning the screws on the childcare operators, who stand there filling in regulatory forms unnecessarily rather than doing their primary jobs. As I have gone around the childcare centres, they have told me a very different story to the one we heard from the member for Adelaide here today. We saw 21,000 new regulations under Labor, many of those impacting the childcare sector.

The member for Adelaide, who brought on this MPI, failed to discuss the elephant in the room. I have an article here from The Australian. It is headed, 'Rudd government scraps promise to build 260 childcare centres'. The member for Adelaide had a wonderful little media release which said that they were going to stop at 38. The lesson that I draw from that is that you take what the member for Adelaide says, you divide it by seven, and you are somewhere close to the truth—when you think about 38 achieved and 260 promised.

When it comes to promises by the member for Adelaide and her colleagues, what we find is that Labor cut millions in funding for occasional care from July 2010. This was a cut that hit rural and regional areas particularly hard—including in my home state of Tasmania, where occasional care is often needed because of those seasonal work imperatives like harvesting and shearing. Labor pandered to their union mates, as you have heard from the minister, by creating a $300 million Early Years Quality Fund with taxpayers' money, which turned out to be nothing more than a union membership recruiting drive for United Voice. Now Labor continues their irresponsibility in opposition, blocking their own promises to pause indexation on the childcare rebate, despite banking $105 million of savings in their own election promises. They were eventually shamed into supporting their own budget measure; however, as we all know, they continue to block many, many other key savings measures across the government and particularly in the childcare portfolio. So spare us the sanctimonious MPI, Member for Adelaide, and reflect on the appalling mess that you and your colleagues have left.

I will finish by thanking the minister for repeatedly visiting northern Tasmania to consult and discuss these issues with childcare providers. Some family day care schemes have told us that they know Labor's magic pudding money would never have continued and that they are making transitional arrangements. They are listening to the minister's advice about a business development package that the government is developing for family day care services in partnership with the sector's peak bodies, and the minister is out there every day explaining how Labor's mismanagement caused this problem and what we are doing to fix the appalling mess left to us by the former government.

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