Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Social Services Legislation Amendment (Omnibus Savings and Child Care Reform) Bill 2017, otherwise known as the omnibus bill. For more than three years, the only childcare program that this government put in place was the nanny pilot program, which in itself was ill conceived and poorly executed. But this is a vital area. We are not just talking about babysitting that allows mums or dads to go back to work. This is about how we educate young minds so that they are ready to thrive by the time they get into the school system.

This education needs to happen in a number of ways. It is not easy. It is not surprising that the other side have found it a really challenging policy area. But there are few things that need to be taken into account. It needs to recognise the value and importance of the educators who are caring for our children. It needs to be done in an affordable way so mums and dads have the ability to be in the workforce. We agree that it is not easy to get it right, but this government have chosen to come up with a package that will leave one in three families worse off. They have taken all this time and the best they could do was a package that leaves one in three families worse off. You need to be pretty clever to get it that wrong!

What is really awful about the way this government are pushing through this change is that they are tying it to a swathe of cuts to family and pensioner benefits. I will talk about those in more detail later. Let's first talk about some of the flaws of the childcare package. The member for Barton has so eloquently spoken of the hypocrisy of what we heard in the closing-the-gap speeches only a week or so ago and what we see here, because the changes in this childcare reform threaten to close Indigenous and remote childcare services. We are worried about the impact on mobile services in rural and remote areas. The subsidies for these programs have effectively been scrapped, and there has been no guarantee given that services will not be forced to close. Nobody wins when some children are disproportionately disadvantaged. If we fail to invest the funds at the early childhood level, we will pay a much bigger price further down the track. This is a poor element in the childcare reform package.

One of the other key problems in this proposed legislation lies with the new activity test for subsidised care. It is a complicated test that has been brought in. It removes the current entitlement that all children get two days of early education. Remember that this is not child care on its own; it is education. This is not just paying someone a pittance to babysit. We know the developmental stuff that happens in this phase can change a child's educational future. I wish we knew that when my children were that age. We know that 150,000 families are going to be worse off. The new test halves the subsidy that many families can access and removes eligibility completely for some children with non-working parents. If the parents work casually or part time, their children's chances of accessing stable, subsidised early education will be seriously under threat with these changes. This is exactly the section of the community where we can break intergenerational cycles through early education that then gets followed throughout school. That is the reason we need the Gonski reforms to be continued. It is because we can build on this and change a child's future.

The Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales summed it up really well. They said:

… the new, three-tiered activity test introduces a level of complexity never seen before in the Australian childcare system.

No-one said the system was too simple. That is not what these reforms are about. The system was always complex. But here we are: we have legislation that introduces a level of complexity never seen before. The Social Policy Research Centre at the university notes:

… the Bill introduces provisions that will increase the complexity and reduce accessibility and affordability for some of the most vulnerable children and families.

What kind of reform is that? It is the opposite to the sort of reform that we need.

We know that 90 per cent of a child's brain development occurs in the first five years of life. Children who attend quality education do go on to do better in school. They do better in employment and they do better in life. Certainly, if I had young children, I would prefer them to be starting school with the cohort of children who had been in good quality early education. That takes some of the differences out that you see in a kindergarten class once they hit school. That is going to make teaching easier for teachers. It is going to mean the kids all have a better chance of success.

Early education should be recognised for its ability to help in solving social problems. I think that is what the other side failing to understand. They are actually creating problems further down the track with this legislation. There is clear and long-standing research to show that vulnerable and disadvantaged children have the most to gain from early education. We do not want to see those children worse off.

Let's talk about the implications of how this new activity test plays out. Does it make it easier for parents to work? That is, supposedly, one of the objectives of this package. Well, in fact, the new activity test will make it harder for many parents, particularly those who, as I mentioned, are in part-time or casual jobs, and especially for those who are trying to get back into the workforce. It puts parents in, as the shadow minister described, an unfair catch 22. They are not going to be able to get work because they cannot get child care, but they are not able to get child care because, guess what, they do not have work. It hardly sounds like a solution to any problem. Parents getting back in the workforce actually need to be able to say to their employer when they can work. They need to know with certainty what access they will have. This activity test means that parents will actually have to be worried about whether they meet the work requirements. So if you are casual and you do not get as many shifts, will you suddenly lose eligibility for child care? These are criticisms not just from Labor. This new activity test has been criticised by just about every reputable organisation that works in this field—everyone from UnitingCare, Mission Australia, Anglicare, United Voice, The Benevolent Society, the Early Learning and Care Council of Australia, the Australian Childcare Alliance and Early Childhood Australia. So you do not actually have to take my word. These are the experts, and that is what they are telling us.

So those are some of the flaws with the actual childcare reform. But I want to spend the next few minutes thinking about what price is being paid by the rest of society for this childcare package and, for the same people who may get some benefits from it, what price they are paying at a different part or a different phase of their life. For a start: the loss of paid parental leave when you have a baby. It stands to reason that before you have a child going to child care you actually have to have the baby. I spoke to one mum out at my mobile office in Glossodia this weekend in the Hawkesbury in my seat of Macquarie. Having looked at these changes, she is thinking of trying to bring forward a pregnancy to a time before she is really ready to have a second time. She has a beautiful baby. He is not even one yet. She is about to go back to work and she is worried about the timing of the second baby. She wants me to keep her posted on the passage, or not, of this omnibus bill. That is the sort of impact you have on women when you say, 'We are going to take way your paid parental leave.' She works for an employer where it has been negotiated that the employees get paid parental leave. That is not an entitlement that they were just given; that is one that they negotiated and bargained for. Now, the threat is that that will be taken away, so she will miss out on the full entitlement that she has had with her first child. We are talking about something that will leave her potentially $5,600 worse off. And, more to the point, it will mean she is not at home as long to do that really crucial first few months—ideally, 26 weeks, and even better if it is longer. I think the government probably does not realise the sort of impact it is having on women by attaching this paid parental leave exclusion to this bill.

The paid parental leave should not be traded away. It not only benefits the mother and the child, and the rest of the family, but actually benefits us all. You have 70,000 new mums who are thinking, 'I'm not really keen on what is being proposed here.' The other things that are being taken away, of course, are family tax benefits. In my electorate of Macquarie, around 8,500 families receive family tax benefit part A, many of whom will be worse off by $200 per child. Around 6,500 Macquarie families will lose $354 as a result of the abolition of the family tax benefit part B end-of-year supplement. They might not be big amounts for the people opposite, but that is the sort of stuff that allows you to send your child to a music lesson or do those swimming lessons that are so vital. It is that little bit that just gives you a difference between bare necessities and something that really enriches your life. I think it is quite cruel to tie this childcare reform to those sorts of savings. We are talking about a family with two children and a single income of $60,000 being $750 worse off a year. You tell me where those families are going to get that money from. They are certainly not going to get them by working an extra shift on a Sunday, thanks to the cuts to penalty rates. So you are making it harder at every turn for these families.

The other cut that we are seeing in this bill is the cut to the energy supplement for pensioners, people with a disability, carers and Newstart recipients. Scrapping the energy supplement to new pensioners is going to be a cut of about $14 a fortnight for single pensioners. That is $365 a year. For couples, we are talking $550 a year worse off. Again, these may not be big amounts to those opposite, but they are significant to people on lower incomes.

One of the moves that horrifies me is the forcing of young jobseekers to wait five weeks. Like other speakers, I think that by the time a young jobseeker goes onto Newstart they have probably run through all their savings. They are holding out and looking for work for as long as they can before they need to go and seek government support. I really fear for those young people. I have children in their twenties. I look at some of their friends. They do it tough. They do not have savings. This is going to make their lives even harder, as will the cuts to support for young people, where the 22- and 24-year-olds will be pushed from Newstart onto youth allowance, thereby losing around $48 a week. I have to tell you that I have a 25-year-old and a 22-year-old, and their landlords do not make an adjustment to their rent on the basis of their age. Funnily enough, their food does not cost less either, nor do their clothes. Their phone bills are not reduced because of their age. This sort of cut is very arbitrary and likely to cause real pain.

The other thing that will affect people in my electorate is the cut to migrants' pensions for migrants who spend more than six weeks overseas after working a lifetime here and then taking a well-earned rest in their mother country. In my community there is a Maltese community, and they have raised with me that it is not unusual for people to spend an extended time with family in Malta having spent decades in Australia and, finally, when they retire and go onto a pension they might just have the time away from work to be able to do it. They do not necessarily have a lot of money, but they can stay with family. These cuts means that after just six weeks overseas pensioners who have lived in Australia for less than 35 years are going to have that rate of the pension cut. That is hurting migrant families and migrant communities. All of these things might not sound like they are a lot to those opposite, but to my community they are painful cuts.

We are really happy to work with the government on child care reform. That is what this bill was meant to be. It is vital that we get it right. To say that we can afford to give multinationals $50 billion tax breaks, but the only way we can pay for child care increases is by making lower- and middle-income Australians pay for it in some other way, just does not cut it. These are choices that this government is making, just like they are making the choice not to protect penalty rates. This is an entirely a choice, and it will hit women particularly hard. When the government re-introduced the child care changes they claimed it would cost $3 billion. Now it is actually only costing $1.6 billion, yet they are keeping their unfair cuts and tying it to the NDIS. They do not need to. There is an opportunity to get reform right here, and we would be happy to help.

See this speech in context