Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party, Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for his question. As the member is no doubt well aware, there are 8,280 children from 5,950 families who attend 100 approved childcare centres in his electorate. They are the people who will be subject to all of the benefits that we can offer them if we can find a way to pay for improved child care and improved weekly payments for child care—a simpler system. The reforms in FTB that are before the House will pay for that improvement in child care for the people in the member's electorate.

What the member may also know is that, when the Productivity Commission inquired into this very issue, they found 165,000 respondents in Australia who explicitly stated that they wanted to work more but that there were disincentives to do so. They are the 165,000 Australians for whom members opposite have no plan. They are Australia's forgotten people. They are the people who want to re-engage in the workforce, who want to work more and who want the benefits of the childcare package that we wish to move through this parliament, but members opposite wish to stop the mechanism for paying for those benefits. The very, very old-fashioned view held by members opposite does not accord with the way in which modern Australian families improve their circumstances.

If you look at 2011, there are some excellent datasets kept by the ABS on maternal workforce participation. In 2011, about 54 per cent of mothers were engaged in the workforce. In 1994—not that long ago—that was only 40 per cent. There has been a 14 per cent increase in maternal workforce participation. These are the people that the coalition seeks to assist by finding a way to pay for reformed and better child care. These are the people that members opposite have absolutely no plan to assist. With the reforms to FTB that are before the House, families with children under one year will get an extra $1,000 from 2016-17—that is, 1.3 million families from 2016-17 who will benefit from that extra $1,000. About three-quarters of the 1.6 million FTB-A families plus 22,000 disability support pension and youth allowance recipients will be $10 better off a fortnight—all of them better off a fortnight. Families with incomes between $65,000 and $170,000 will be $30 better off a week in terms of their access to child care. Supplements will be phased out, and that is the way that we will pay for these very, very important reforms.

These are people who have worked out what has been known for a very long time period of time, which was the subject of longitudinal studies in the United Kingdom, the key factor in raising the living standards of low- to middle-income households over the last 40 years has been the entry of women into the workplace.

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