Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to follow the member for Perth and the member for Lilley today, both of whom are young parents. I'm a long way from being a young parent, and child care has changed a lot since my three children were being looked after in preschool years. As a parent, I used the family day care services as well as their grandmother and early childhood education in a structured way, but that is a long time ago now. As the member for Perth said, the crisis seems to have been going on for an extremely long time.

I'll pick up on one of the points that the member for Perth made about this government's approach to quality assurance in child care in general. When it comes to ensuring the safety and the value of early childhood education this government sees red tape in the form of compliance, and yet it sees it as an absolutely good idea for the providers to be used as a quasi-government service in getting families registered so that they can access their CCS. This is what's wrong with this whole sector: on the one hand we approach it as bean counters, trying to make sure that nobody's getting what they shouldn't get and making sure that everybody complies in terms of their ability to access a supplement; but on the other hand there is not nearly enough focus on the compliance around the quality that we are providing.

This all comes down to this government's issue that, since coming into government in 2013, it hasn't been able to put 'early education' and 'care' into the same sentence. If you keep separating these two notions and see early education as babysitting then you are not on the same page as the families who are accessing these services. Because families who are accessing early education and child care are doing so to ensure the quality of early learning for their children, as well as their ability to access employment for, in many cases, both parents.

Although this legislation is building on the childcare package in some positive ways, there are also some areas that I have concerns with—as I always do, because when this government makes steps in the right direction but builds those steps on the wrong foundations, as it has here in early education, then there's a problem. Alarm bells also ring for me whenever this government says that it's going to simplify something, because when it goes to simplify something, then we get bad news. They planned to simplify the census, and we saw how that went. They planned to simplify business tax and we remember the debacle that that was. The Prime Minister said last week that he wants to simplify the award system, making it easier for business, and we know that is code for lower wages for workers. We should always be wary when this government says it wants to simplify something.

When they introduced this package in July 2018 it was to simplify things. The simplification has seen, as we've seen from Senate estimates, families and providers experience significant delays, confusion and additional paperwork—that would be red tape—to register for the childcare subsidy, which has often resulted in families' entitlements being over or underestimated, resulting in overpayments and debts for affected families. Providers have been forced by the government to act as debt collectors—not just registration processors, but debt collectors—and, with the government commencing data matching with the ATO, families are being issued with unexpected debt notices.

We stand here to say to the government: 'Good. You've made a few changes. There are some positive things in this piece of legislation, but we have a technical issue over the 28 days in terms of the provision of ATO files and bank account details that could be very problematic for some families.' So some good points and one big negative that will be very easy for this government to fix. They're building on a system that we have found, through Senate estimates and through reports in the last three months, has not simplified the system, has made the system more complex. And not only that, in this simplification there was a promise that families would be better off and yet what we're finding is one in four families are worse off under this system.

We're also seeing an increase in costs to child care above CPI. In my electorate, there was a 5.5 per cent increase in the previous quarter in the cost of child care in an area where we have a broad demographic. For a lot of our families the median income is $52,000 a year. A 5.5 per cent increase is extraordinary. It is on this government's watch, which takes me to the other really tricky part of this. In the past week we've seen the Minister for Government Services say that in terms of Centrelink and robo-debt we're going to finally suspend the automatic data matching without human oversight in the process, and yet what we find in the childcare subsidy is—you guessed it—data matching with the ATO.

We've found, across the last few weeks, that we've got lots of families already being hit. We all saw the stories that have been run in the media. The most concerning, and out of the blocks very early, was one mother in particular who had overestimated her income by $12,000. That's a pretty good buffer. I would have thought you would have been fairly confident if you had overestimated your income by $12,000 and you'd been meticulous, as she says she was, about reporting your activity. Remember, red tape is only bad for governments. It's okay for parents; as much red tape as we can put in place for them the better. This mum estimated her income on a fortnightly basis, estimated her activity on a fortnightly basis—this red tape's good for the system—and then she found out that she had a debt notice. She overestimated by $12,000, but she was meticulous about the activity reporting.

We were told at Senate estimates that this wasn't about the activity reporting; it was just about the estimation of income. This woman got a debt notice. When she went to question this—because she's quite sure in her mind that, 'Having overestimated my income by $12,000 I better check my records'—she found that the records where she'd been reporting her income and reporting her activity hours had disappeared off the system at Centrelink. I don't know where else we can go other than this government seems to put red tape in the wrong places. Then pile everything into Centrelink, starve it of the human resources to do its job and introduce an ATO data-matching scheme that we know has failed already as a quarter of the debts people were being alerted to didn't exist. We've got a minister withdrawing that, but, in the childcare space, what does that mean? Does it mean that we're stopping the automatic data matching when it comes to the childcare subsidy? The human services minister might want to talk to the Minister for Education. They might want to figure out where they're doing in this space and do so very quickly. This piece of legislation, I would suggest, is now almost defunct, with the errors that we've discovered and with the increase in the cost of child care under this government's watch in the last 12 months. The government introduced its simplified system that was going to make all families better off, but a quarter were not better off from the day this started. Now we've got increases above CPI—in fact, extraordinary increases. We've got families being hit with debts and then being told that the debts occurred because of some glitch in the system—data going missing from the system—so families are feeling absolutely stressed.

It may be a long time since my kids were accessing early learning and child care, but I certainly remember the stresses of being a working mum with three kids under six. I certainly remember the stresses, and, as a school teacher at the time, I don't know that my lunch hour would have afforded me the time to be on the phone to Centrelink, waiting for 3½ hours. I would have had to hang up every lunchtime. I would have been trying to get on the phone in between classes—remembering that in most secondary schools where I was teaching in those days sessions were 50 minutes. That wouldn't get me onto Centrelink! Fifty minutes won't get me onto Centrelink—try 2½ hours of waiting. I've done this in my office with my constituents. I've sat with them in my office while they have been on hold, only for them to be then cut off—suddenly someone's on the phone and then the phone's dead, after a two-hour wait. Mostly, I've done this when we've been trying to sort out a debt that had been issued to them that we didn't think was real. My office doesn't need to be another quasi-government agency set up to deal with the red tape this government puts in place for parents and for providers; the government is supposed to be simplifying the system.

I also echo the words of the member for Perth on the importance of early education and child care in our society, and this government needs to come to terms with the fact that we are dealing with those two things: early education and child care. The two go together, and quality is absolutely at the forefront of this. That quality comes back to the providers and to ensuring that we've got quality on the ground and compliance in the system, but it also comes back—fundamentally in education—to the quality of the people who are working in the sector. I spend a lot of time talking to early educators, and I want to carry to this House their message that they feel absolutely undervalued. They feel that their work—the quality of their work—is less important to this government than ensuring that there are people inside the centres so that we can tick a compliance box. But it's not about quality. This government thinks that reporting against children's milestones—knowing every child in the centre and ensuring that every child in every centre is meeting their milestones on time, having targets set and having engagement and activities planned to ensure that they are progressing towards their next milestone—is red tape. This government says that the quality doesn't matter.

Yes, this government's bringing legislation into this House that will make some small improvements; but, in fact, the entire new system that they set up, that has only been running for 12 months, is being dramatically called into question in our communities as we speak today. The problem that I have with this piece of legislation is, absolutely, around the 28-day grace period that had traditionally been given. We've had some inquiries into this, and the Early Learning and Care Council of Australia explained:

Currently, families making a claim for CCS have 28 days to provide a Tax File Number (TFN) or bank account details. In the current legislation, the provision of this information is required for the individual's CCS claim to be effective, which affects their CCS eligibility. However, their eligibility is already verified, and this information is only required for the payment (and reconciliation) of subsidies. If the information is not provided within the 28 day window, a family is deemed CCS ineligible and may incur a debt with their provider.

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