Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very proud to be standing in the House today defending family day care from the savage cuts that have been implemented by this government. I want to start by saying how angry I am on behalf of my community, and the families who live in Hotham, for the $1 billion we are seeing cut from child-care supports in this country and, specifically, the $157 million going right to the heart of the family day-care provision.

For those in the community or watching at home who do not know, family day care is the provision of day care in the setting of someone's family home. It is usually a mum whose own children have started school. The mum takes in kids, using her vast experience in child care and early childhood education, and looks after other people's children from that community.

You can imagine, from what I have described, that two of the most fantastic things about family day care are the flexibility that mums can provide, when they have just a family home and a small number of kids to look after, and the affordability of it, which is important to so many families around the country.

What this cut being implemented by the coalition means is that a family with a child in family day care will see costs rise from somewhere around $1,200 to $1,800 a year. This is a serious amount of money. It is the sum of money that will drive a lot of families accessing family day care to cheaper alternatives.

I am particularly passionate about family day care because we have used family day care in my family. I work odd hours as a member of parliament. My partner, at the time, was working shift work and we had a little baby. We used family day care because of the benefits that made it such a great care option for so many families. We needed someone who would be able to look after our child, a little bit, out of hours. Our son at the time was very young, and we really loved the idea of him being looked after by one carer in someone's family home.

It is for these reasons that there are thousands of families right across the country who are relying on family day care to fit in with their needs. What we are seeing today is that flexibility and affordability being cut and under attack by the cuts being executed here. It is pretty concerning, because we are getting mixed messages from this government. It is not, though, the first time we have seen it.

We saw the minister on television yesterday talking in very soothing tones about what he is planning to do on child care. At the same time, we see cuts. The minister talks about the need for flexibility and affordability, yet he makes a cut of $157 million to the most flexible and affordable type of child care in our system.

Family day care is good for families. Gone are the days when people had one person in the household working from nine till five and the other person staying at stay home looking after the kids. Families do not look like that very much anymore. What we see is people working very unusual hours. With the increasing casualisation of the workforce in Australia, lots of families are having to deal with situations where parents work on the weekends or after what would be normal working hours. We also know that the majority of Australian families now see both parents doing some level of work. This is why we see a growing need in the community for flexible and affordable child care. Yet what are the government doing? They are making cuts to the very type of child care that people have a growing need for.

Family day care is great for Australian women. We know that there are lots of mums who want to go back to work once they have had their children and we should be trying to help them do that, if that is what they want to do. We know that under today's child-care settings a mum who goes back to work on the minimum wage full-time will earn somewhere around $3.50 to $5 for every hour she works. At the very same time, this cut is seeing the cost associated with going back to work increase—effectively, we are making it harder for mums to go back to work when they want to do that. This is absolutely moving in the wrong direction, and that is why we oppose it.

We hear rhetoric on the other side of the House that these people care about families, but what do we see in their actions? We see them cut the school kids bonus, out-of-hours care, child-care rebate and family tax benefit—and try to put a new tax on going to the GP. Now there is $1 billion of cuts in child care. They have lost the trust of the Australian community. We do not trust them on these child-care cuts.

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