Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Nick Xenophon Team) Share this | Hansard source

Child care is an important service in our society. While traditionally viewed as a mechanism to help parents re-enter the workforce, it has evolved to meet the early education needs of children. We know that those early years are crucial in a child's educational development and, by extension, crucial to Australia's future. This is why reform of the sector is so critical.

While I and my NXT colleagues have spoken about the importance of these reforms and the benefits they will bring to thousands of Australian families, I think it is clear that there are still commonsense changes that need to be made to ensure that all families are supported. So, like the shadow minister the member for Adelaide, I have concerns about where the budget-based funded childcare services will fit under the new package. These include Indigenous services and remote services, which differ in practice from traditional childcare models, as well as mobile childcare services, which the member for Indi mentioned. They are particularly valuable in regional areas. For many remote Indigenous communities, budget-based childcare services operate in a different manner to other childcare services due to the fact that they cater directly to the community's needs. Many of these centres run youth programs for children, and, while they do not fit perfectly into the childcare funding model, the positive impact on their community is significant.

As the member for lndi mentioned, there is also concern about mobile childcare services to ensure that children and families in disadvantaged regional communities have access to high-quality children's services. These services are invaluable for those living outside of the cities for whom the closest permanent childcare centre may be hours away. I will be seeking assurances from the government that these services will continue to be funded under any new scheme. I will not allow regional Australia to once again be ignored when it comes to making policy decisions.

I want to briefly talk about in-home care and the fact that it appears to have been ignored in this new package. In-home care services support a very small part of our population; they are targeted towards rural areas where no other service is available and to families with children or parents who suffer from disabilities and/or terminal illnesses. The services can also assist shift workers whose hours preclude them from using regular childcare services. For all the good these reforms will do, we cannot allow for some of our in-need families to be ignored and miss out. I call upon the government to address this issue as a matter of priority.

But perhaps the biggest issue for reform is the government's handling of them. It is unfortunate, and in fact it is quite devastating, that we are still talking about the government's childcare bill, almost three years after the reforms were announced. Trying to ram through the reforms as part of the omnibus savings legislation is simply poor policy and it is bullying policy—let's be honest about it. I believe that every bill should be negotiated on its merits. Once again I encourage the government to show some leadership and allow this bill to be debated on its own and promptly. These measures were introduced in 2014 and three years later we still have no reform. The children who were crawling babies on budget night in 2014 are unlikely to ever see the benefits of this long-promised package. They are likely to be in primary school by the time it is enacted. Their families have waited in vain for four long years. Its implementation has now been pushed back to July 2018.

Tying child care to family tax payments is a furphy. Let's be clear, the savings for this have already been identified within the childcare-spending envelope. The government already has secured $950 million in savings from its reforms to crack down on child swapping—and good for them for sorting out the rorting. This week it has announced a further $250 million in savings by cleaning up family day-care rorting. These two measures alone account for almost all of the required spend on this new reform package. So why do we need to continue to attack the family budget and pit family against family for something that has already been paid for?

Let's be honest: if the government is interested in prioritising and increasing workforce participation for parents, these reforms would have been presented to the parliament in 2014 and 2015 and they would have been brought on for debate and passed in 2016. Implementation would not have been pushed back a further year. And so once again I urge the government to work with the parliament to secure these reforms that are so vitally needed across Australia.

See this speech in context