Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the tone that the minister has brought to the debate today. I know that the shadow minister supports this tone of engagement, because the minister is right that Australian families, Australian parents, care about outcomes, not political games here. It is in our overwhelming national interest, however, to encourage as many women as possible to return to the workforce after having children. The evidence on how to make this happen is clear. Unsurprisingly, when making a decision about whether to return to the workforce after having children, Australian families get together and they weigh up the costs and the benefits of that decision. They look at how much they would earn after tax from returning to work, and they weigh that against how much they would have to pay for child care in order to do so. In this respect, the Grattan Institute has noted:

… there is very good evidence that the major influences on female workforce participation are marginal tax rates and the net costs of childcare.

It is not rocket science. However—and we should bring this to account in a spirit of engagement—during the last five years the focus of those opposite in this area has been on an expensive and inefficient paid parental leave scheme, against overwhelming evidence that the big game in female workforce participation is child care. Frankly, it shows how out of touch the Prime Minister was with how parents and families make decisions about how to care for their children and how to return to the workforce.

In 2009 the Productivity Commission noted, in its report Paid maternity, paternity and parental leave, about paid parental leave:

Full replacement wages … would be very costly and … would have few incremental labour supply benefits.

Similarly, the Grattan Institute has made it clear:

… international experience suggests that government support for childcare has about double the impact of spending on parental leave.

We hear now, however, that the government wants to start to engage with the main game and is seeking the support of the Labor Party. This is welcome news and we welcome the spirit of engagement. We welcome the government to the real debate that parents and families care about in this space. We want to work with the government to reform this sector so that Australian families will be better off and so that children can get the best start in life.

We will work constructively on any measure the government comes up with to repair the damage caused by their last budget and we will do it in good faith. We say this because this is a debate that we in the Labor Party have been having since Whitlam. Whitlam was the pioneer of federal involvement in early childhood development. He recognised the importance of supporting community childhood centres and introduced the Child Care Act in 1972. Since then, Labor has introduced fee relief for parents under the Hawke government as well as the childcare rebate and the National Quality Framework, a very important part of this debate in ensuring the quality of care and the developmental effects that our children are getting out of their time in child care.

We are willing to work with the government but we want to work towards bettering our system, not dismantling it. We will hold the government to account for their cuts to child care in the last budget and we will also resist any attempt by this government to further attack the essential services that Australian families rely on. I know that the Hobsons Bay City Council in my electorate met on Tuesday night of this week to discuss ways to meet the shortfall in government funding for family day care services. The options were not pretty; and, as the largest provider in the area, it spells danger for families in our local community.

While we want to work with the government towards a better childcare system, we cannot forget that the government has cut $157 million from family day care services. We cannot forget that the government has cut $450 million to outside school hours care. We cannot forget that the government has cut $105 million to the childcare rebate. We cannot forget that the government has cut subsidies for early childhood education degrees. We cannot forget that the government has cut federal funding for all Indigenous child and family centres. And we will not forget that this government has cut, in total, $1 billion in childcare funding. So we welcome the government to the real debate in this place, and we hope that they enter the debate about funding changes to our system to enable women to return to the workforce so that we can lift our female workforce participation rate up to the higher levels amongst OECD countries instead of the lower levels we have today. And we hope they will support efforts to fund a system that supports quality and investment in our children and investment in our human capital for the next century—investment that will particularly bring disadvantaged families and children along to try to bridge the gap of disadvantage that we currently see in the system.

I say this very genuinely: the minister is right that families do not care about the politics in this place. They care about outcomes for parents, for families and for children. We will engage in this debate in a spirit of good faith and will seek to deliver an outcome, in partnership with the government, that meets these principles.

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