Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The early years are so important, and you see from the speeches on the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Building on the Child Care Package) Bill from those on this side of the House just how passionate members in this place are about investing in our next generation. Early learners are shaping their brains when they walk into those childcare centres, those kindergartens, those schools where they get that first sense of their own self-worth and the confidence that will drive them through the rest of their life. They're preparing for a future, and I think what always hits me is that we're trying to educate these children for a future that most of us in this place don't even understand what it will look like. If we walk into an early childhood centre today and say, 'Here's what it will look like when you go for your first job'—we don't have an answer for that. So I think that gives you a sense of how important the work that educators do on a daily basis in giving young people all the life skills that they need to get through whatever the world is going to throw at them.

But those early learners are actively involved in shaping what sort of a future they want, and I'm thinking in particular of the kindergarten students at Perth College in my electorate. They have been running a two-year campaign to reduce the amount of plastics in their local community. They have been researching the oceans and the impacts of plastic. They've been talking to local cafes and encouraging local business owners to switch from plastic straws to paper straws. They've got their parents lobbying, and they asked me to come and speak with them so that they could lobby me. It's fair to say that they were some of the more convincing lobbyists I've seen in my time. As a result, I wrote to the Prime Minister and said, 'This is what Perth College is doing, and this is what the kindergarten students want.' To the Prime Minister's credit, he wrote back and was very appreciative of the work that those young people have done. For me, it shows the power of early learning, the power of integration, the power of showing young people that they do have a voice and that they are valued. The thing that gets me when we talk about legislation like this is that it doesn't truly recognise the value of those young people. I want to say to the teachers at Perth College, a fantastic school in the Perth electorate, that it was so great to be part of the student-led campaign on eliminating plastics. I'm sure that, by the time those students are in the workforce, their mission will, hopefully, be close to complete.

When we all talk about early childhood education, we have to think about our own experience. As the member for Lilley said, it isn't a well-integrated system. It is a system that you battle with no matter how lucky you are in life because it's poorly designed. It's as simple as that. Jess and I use an early learning centre for Leo three days a week. My mum, Wendy, does Thursdays, and whenever there's a peak point of stress in our lives Leo's nanna, Diane, comes from Brisbane to Perth. It's for that reason we don't have a spare room; we have Nanna's room.

We are very lucky in Australia that we have some amazing artists who appreciate the value of early learning. It is the Teeny Tiny Stevies that help us pack away our things every night—sometimes with more success than at other times. It was Justine Clarke who taught us a banana is a banana but that if a butterfly was really made of butter, its wings would melt in the sun. And Bluey doesn't just do a great job of entertaining Leo; he does a great job of teaching Jess and I, in that never-ending piece of learning, how to be great parents.

In Australia we are, on the whole, a lucky country, and we do have a very good education system. But I'm a bit sick of talking about the childcare crisis. When the member for Lilley said 'the childcare crisis', I thought, 'We've been talking about the childcare crisis for a decade.' It's not because it sounds good or because people are trying to score political points; it is because there's an actual crisis. Parents can't get their kids into early-learning centres. If they get their kids in, it costs them a fortune; it costs them up to a third of their salary just to have their child in a learning environment in Australia. It is absolutely ridiculous. This legislation doesn't do any of the hard work, any of the hard thinking or any of the heavy lifting to actually fix our childcare system in this country. It doesn't support our educators. It doesn't recognise that families are at their wits' end when it comes to child care. I am absolutely sick of talking about the crisis, but just because I'm sick of it doesn't mean there isn't one. There is a huge crisis. We don't have good enough integration with schooling. We don't have proper professional pay and recognition for our educators. We have our subsidies centred around the activity of parents rather than the interests of the child. We have no way for families to do proper cost control; indeed, the government's approach is, 'We'll just send them a debt notice at the end of the financial year.' Seriously!

We talk about where Australia ranks in international rankings. We're sort of hiding in the comfortable middle. We don't want to be at the top. We don't want to be the highest funder. We don't want to have the best student outcomes. We don't want to have the highest-quality pay and conditions for educators. We just hide in the middle. I'm sick of hiding in the middle on things that are important, like education.

For all that's wrong in the early-childhood sector, there are some things that are good. We have the National Quality Framework, making sure that every parent has some level of assurance that, when they take their child to a recognised centre, their child is going to get a quality education with a standard curriculum that is focused on that particular child's needs. That's all delivered—and this is the other great thing about our system—by trained, qualified early-childhood educators. Our educators are the real light in this system. They make sure everything else works for parents. For many of us, they spend more waking hours with our children than we do. They are truly some of the heroes of the Australian economy, and I say thank you to every single one of them.

When it comes to the specifics of this bill, while it's clear I would like it to go a lot further on basically every possible metric, Labor recognises that it does have sensible amendments that make accessing child care easier for many Australian families. But the amendment that families are no longer able to register for the childcare subsidy without immediately providing their tax file number and bank account details is very short-sighted. The government removing that 28-day grace period will achieve very little other than pain. The Labor Party is concerned about this change and the childcare sector is concerned about this change. Worst of all, it will disproportionately affect the families and, most importantly, the children who benefit most from early-childhood education.

We know the sorts of circumstances that lead to people not having access to those things—fleeing domestic violence, fleeing natural disaster, loss of employment and other crises that happen in someone's life. To deny a child the right to an education because their parents can't do the paperwork is just wrong. We should indeed look at what we do in the education system and see that as the model for everything that we build in the early-childhood space. A school will take a student because that child has value, not because of what their parents do or don't do. Removing the 28-day period, blocking vulnerable families, is wrong—28 Days was a terrible movie; 28 days is a terrible policy when it comes to child care. When you think about the implementation of this system—the new bureaucracy—the approach of this government is to cut red tape with one hand and create it with the other.

I was lucky to visit, with the shadow minister for education last year, the Leederville Early Childhood Centre—I think it is run by Goodstart and my apologies to the Leederville team and Sally at the centre, if it is not, but I'm pretty sure it is—as they were rolling out this new system. There were delays in being able to register parents and there was conflicting information from different parts of the bureaucracy about what information they had to be collecting. There was no recognition of the huge workload that this had put on centres transferring the work that the government was requiring onto these non-government and private sector organisations. At the time, as many of us will remember, it was a bit of a mess. Thankfully, because early-childhood educators and those that run centres are some of the most resilient people that you'll meet, it kind of just worked. I don't think that was because of good policy design, it's because the people at the coalface of this sector do just make things work.

There have also been many families who have struggled with the childcare subsidy and struggled with getting what they are entitled to from the government. I will tell a story of Yelda and JP, who contacted my office. People don't come to a member for parliament's offices because everything is well; they come because something is not clicking within the bureaucracy. They had been struggling with the Department of Human Services for some months as they were being significantly underpaid for their childcare subsidy payments. When they had contacted the department, the only fact that they were given was there was a technical issue. That was it. That was the explanation: 'We can't tell you what you're owed. We can tell you there's a technical issue.' They were promised, of course, that it would be rectified. They waited: one month, two months, three months—big technical issue!—four months, five months, six months, seven months. On the eighth month, the technical issue—which I imagine was just poor policy design, which is a huge technical issue in this place at the moment—was rectified, and they finally got their payments. How many other Australian families are dealing with this on a daily basis or, indeed, being underpaid, because they just can't stand the pain of dealing with Department of Human Services? It is a department that, I might say, also could do with a few extra staff, and maybe some of these 'technical issues' would actually be resolved.

We've had about 10 years of major reform, and I think, if we're going to get to where we need to be as a country, we're going to need probably another 10 years of major reform. This morning I helped to launch the State of early learning in Australia 2019 report. I think it's sometimes like saying, 'I believe in climate change,' in that you have to state these really blatantly obvious things just to start the conversation. But it highlighted the 'long-term benefits of early education for children'. We're still having this fight and trying to justify that this is important for young people. The report had many interesting facts but I'm just going to quote a few things. It does note that we haven't realised the benefits of providing early learning for all children in this country. It noted that we are not distributing across key equity groups the benefits of early childhood education. It noted that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, children from low socioeconomic areas and children with a disability are not getting equitable access to early learning. And it noted that we do have structural factors and policy settings, differing across jurisdictions, which hold back our ability to effectively roll out quality early childhood education in all parts of this country. There were some hard truths in it. For my state of Western Australia, it noted that the highest proportion of early childhood education care services receiving lower ratings or working towards the national quality standards was in Western Australia. That's not good enough. But we need to be honest about where we're at and where we want to go.

The critical work that is done by educators in the sector is well-known. I think we should also place this in an international context though. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals say universal access to early childhood education should be something we strive to achieve by 2030. Now, Australia is a pretty good country; I'm pretty sure we could get there earlier than 2030 if we wanted to. The Sustainable Development Goals state that by 2030 'all girls and boys should have access to quality early childhood development care and pre-primary education' so that they're ready for primary education. And that's where we get to this discussion about the two years of preschool funding.

If the reports of a week ago that the funding for four-year-olds might be on the chopping block, that would just be absolute madness. It would destroy the educational opportunities that young people have. It will cause havoc for families across this country that rely on that funding to help them balance their budgets. And it takes us in the wrong direction. We should actually be talking about how we fund three-year-olds to get into that education environment. It is such a positive start for young people to be able to have that opportunity.

And, in terms of what we pay versus what we get, it's a transformative investment. We know that the first thousand days make a huge difference. There was some research from the Telethon Kids Institute that said the cost of late intervention—that is, acting too late; trying to fix these things up because we were too tight, too scared to spend a little bit of money when children are young—is $15.2 billion every year. Children and young people experience serious issues that lead to crises, lead to law enforcement, lead to challenges with child protection that, had we invested earlier, could have been prevented. I'll leave my remarks there.

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