Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I refer to the question of funding that the member for Adelaide just raised. I think it is worth tackling this head-on. She talked about uncertainty in funding arrangements. While the previous government certainly talked the talk about funding arrangements regarding the national partnership agreement and 15 hours of preschool beyond 2014, they made absolutely no provision for it. In fact, it is this government, the Abbott government, that is providing certainty for the sector by providing an additional $406 million to enable preschool programs to continue under current arrangements for 2015.

I would like to address a couple of the issues here. We are talking about childhood education and the development of children in their early years from both a social and an academic perspective. Certainly, we on this side believe very much that it is important to have flexible, accessible and affordable early learning and child care. To this end, we commissioned the Productivity Commission review—the largest review of its kind since the 1990s. We also had Deloitte Access Economics help inform the ministerial education council on the performance of the national partnership agreement and, specifically, the mandatory provision of 15 hours of kindergarten per week. Any future government decisions on preschool policy will be informed by these works as well as the Federation white paper.

This careful, systematic and holistic approach to the early learning and childhood sector is at complete odds with the previous government's approach. By contrast, the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government mismanaged this vital sector through ill-conceived, piecemeal and poorly implemented policies. They allowed themselves to be clouded by the shared desire to provide the best for our children, resulting, though, in policy by thought bubble and, I suspect, in the case of the one-size-fits-all mandatory 15 hours of kindergarten per week, a solution in need of a problem. It is because early childhood learning and quality child care is so important that the government must consider the taxpayer's investment in, and the regulation of, the sector very carefully to ensure that we are actually achieving defined and positive aims. Good intentions, while necessary, are just the beginning and should never be confused with good outcomes.

Labor's legacy in the early childhood and child care sector—about which we heard nothing from the previous speaker—is very poor. Childcare fees increased 53 per cent under six years of Labor. That is $73 extra a week for a family using the average hours of child care a week, or 27.7 hours of long day care. Labor's national quality framework regulatory changes cost families not an extra 57c a week but, for a long day care centre with 15 staff and 75 places, $140,000 annually. That is $2,000 per child or a massive $38 per week per family.

This experience is well known to me at a local level, as one of my local Higgins kindergartens specifically budgeted between $10,000 and $15,000 for the additional cost of implementing the national quality framework in 2013 alone. This is a huge sum for a not-for-profit community-run organisation. With regard to the mandatory increase from 12 to 15 hours of kindergarten per week as part of the national partnership agreement, the transition for many kindergarten providers was extremely costly and had a significant impact on program times, staffing arrangements, voluntary committee workloads, fees and accessibility. Again, one of my local kindergartens, in order to achieve an increase for their existing cohort of four-year-olds to 15 hours per week, had to actually reduce their total number of places for three-year-olds. This meant fewer children attending the kindergarten and therefore higher fees. However, it also meant fewer families available to support kinder through voluntary committees and fundraising activities, which are also critically vital for their viability.

The member for Adelaide's motion says that the proportion of children attending 15 hours of kindergarten per week has increased from 12 per cent in 2008 to 56 per cent in 2012. This is hardly surprising, given that the government mandated the increase. However, this figure alone is not proof of the merit of the change, nor does it necessarily justify the return on taxpayers' increased investment. In fact, it is surprising that the figure is not higher, and that perhaps reflects how difficult and how costly the transition has been. We on this side take a common-sense approach which will enable the government to consider the Productivity Commission and Deloitte Access reviews and the federation white paper with a view to maximising the billion dollar investment in the sector to ensure it is actually for the benefit of Australian families and their children, both in the form of services provided and for the taxpayer, who, whether through their taxes or through the previous government's irresponsible debt, will ultimately foot the bill.

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