Emma Husar (Lindsay, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do welcome the opportunity to provide the member for Gilmore with some clarification around the 15-hour access-to-preschool program that she got quite confused, which is not part of this bill but which she just gave us a lovely five-minute diatribe on. Those 15 hours that she was talking about, the government has not actually even recommitted to, and it expires at the end of this year. So anyway, that is a great opportunity for me to take. And it is also great to follow the member for Fairfax, who proved yesterday that he was out of touch and today again has backed that up.

Being in government is about making choices. You get to choose to support people, you get to choose to be responsible and you get to choose that everybody gets a fair go.

There could be no more stark difference between Labor and Liberal than our approach to child care. To the Liberals, child care is an expendable extra and a place where this cruel, out-of-touch government can cut money and slash services to support their $50 billion gift to big business.

We are living at a time when educational attainment rates are placing us at the back of the pack, where education rankings are declining, and where educational shifts for the jobs of the future are occurring. We are also living at a time when outcomes for Indigenous children, unacceptably, do not meet the high standards we set for ourselves, as outlined in the Closing the Gap report handed down in this place just a few weeks ago. And the member for Fairfax totally missed that point in his five-minute diatribe.

So why, then, with all of that evidence and fact based information, would this government choose—they made a choice—to strip away access to child care from the children who will benefit most from access to early learning? Let us see child care for what it is. It is early education. It is an opportunity for young children to engage in learning in their formative years, to be surrounded by age-matched peers learning important social skills, stimulated by trained and skilled professional educators, and nurtured, in the absence of their parents, by those same educators, whose job extends far wider than wiping a snotty nose and simply keeping a child alive—which, I might add, is an indirect quote from someone without a clue on the value of early education: the relic that is Senator Leyonhjelm.

I personally can speak extensively as a single mother on the benefits of early education—and I hear someone slagging off over on the other side. One of my children has special needs. The time my children spent in child care was of profound benefit to them in their early years. I will take the case of my son. He was diagnosed with a raft of issues at 18 months of age. In his case, the early childhood setting provided an additional support teacher for him. He learnt so very much through the love and the support of all of his teachers, who imparted patience and their wisdom to him.

I was not working at the time. I had my hands full, so those two days he spent in child care provided an opportunity for me—as a carer and his Mama—to have much-needed respite, attend to the things that his disability prevented me from doing and have a break from the constant therapies that I provided to support him. It also provided me with some time with my other two children that was not dominated solely by his needs.

I might also say that his childcare workers in those early years formed such a great bond with our family and still remain in contact with us. They follow his progress, celebrate the mighty highs and support me through some of those hard lows. This is not an isolated story or case. I invite all of those opposite to visit a local childcare centre. In fact, there are plenty of stories out there where early education provided through child care is supporting great outcomes for many, many children.

Now, given that this government has failed to introduce a single childcare policy in more than three years—with the exception of that disaster of a Nanny Pilot Program—some might suggest that it would want to get this one right. But, instead, the policy it has introduced will see one in three children worse off—and I did not hear the member for Fairfax mention that once.

More than 20 stakeholder groups who are experts in the industry and not politicians have called on this incompetent Prime Minister to make better choices and fix the flaws in this package. Of particular concern is the cut that this government seeks to pass on to our Indigenous childcare services, which will see 20,000 Indigenous children in early education affected by this cruel and blatantly stupid policy. SNAICC has said:

These changes will diminish our kids' potential to make a smooth transition to school, compounding the likelihood of intergenerational disempowerment and unemployment. Children will fall behind before they have even started school and suffer greater risks of removal into out-of-home care.

And the member for Fairfax can wipe the smile off his ugly face, because that is just totally inappropriate!

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