Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge that I'm coming to you from Wurundjeri country in my electorate of Melbourne. I want to thank everyone who's taken steps to make remote attendance possible as we in Victoria deal with a once-in-a-lifetime crisis.

I want to say thank you to all of the childcare workers and educators in this country and especially those in Victoria. They are on the front line of dealing with this pandemic. They are taking steps that are akin to what many of our healthcare workers, educators, emergency services workers and others are taking, where they are putting themselves in situations where they are in close quarters with people who aren't part of their family and aren't part of their immediate circle, and they're required to do that as part of their job. Anyone who's spent any time in a childcare centre will know that being a childcare educator is a hands-on job—it comes with the territory. You have people traipsing in and out through the centre every day. Those workers have not only been dealing with the stress that all of us are dealing with as we tackle this coronavirus crisis but they have also had to put themselves in situations where they have wondered: 'Are we safe? Are we going to have a job? Are we going to be paid?'

From what came as a promising start from the government, where they came out in a big blaze of glory and announced a package of free child care, we've actually seen that, for many centres and for many workers, the last few weeks and months have been a time of additional stress. They've been dealing not just with the stress that we are all feeling as we deal with the coronavirus crisis but also with the economic pressures of wondering whether they're going to have a job and what kind of support they're going to be given. So I want to say to all of those educators and all of the staff in all of the childcare centres around the country, and especially in Victoria, who've continued to front up day after day: thank you. Thank you for everything that you've done and that you continue to do. I say that not only as a representative of an area that's got some magnificent childcare centres in it but also as a parent with two children. We've all been living through this, and, knowing what toll the stage 4 lockdowns in particular are taking on small children right across Victoria and Melbourne, I say thank you to all of those people who work in child care who've been helping us deal with all of that.

As I said, the situation facing childcare centres and childcare workers was initially helped by the government—at least, in announcement form—but, when looking at how the details of the support packages actually flowed through, for many it caused an additional amount of stress and put childcare centres under some extraordinary pressure. It's helpful that in this Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Improving Assistance for Vulnerable and Disadvantaged Families) Bill 2020 the government is at least purporting to address some of those issues. But there are many things that the government could have done and could still do in Victoria that would make a huge difference to this very important sector.

When the government first announced its initial package, there were plaudits for the government finally stepping up to acknowledge free child care. On my first day of becoming Leader of the Greens, I called for free child care in this country and committed the Greens to working towards it. I didn't imagine it would come quite so quickly. I'm happy that it did, at least in rhetorical form. But, as we start to delve into the detail, we understand that this massive switch from the government to supposedly supporting free child care didn't necessarily do what it said on the tin. JobKeeper was not extended to many workers on temporary visas, and we saw that have an enormous impact at many childcare centres, because many childcare educators and workers had in fact been on temporary visas. The government's support package for child care was premised on centres being able to use JobKeeper for those workers.

When some of those workers were ineligible for JobKeeper, either because they were temporary visa holders or because they had been employed on a casual basis, that posed an immediate hit to many centres. I was talking to one centre in my electorate who said they were having to cut back on some basic essentials within their centre and were considering their viability for the future, basically because the government refused to extend the JobKeeper payment to all of the workers in the centre. Had the government done that, it would have made life a lot easier for centres. There is still time for the government to do it. But instead the government's gone in the other direction. It speaks volumes that the first area in which the government breaks its promise and starts withdrawing payments to workers is child care. For a Prime Minister who perhaps thinks that a woman's place is back in the 1950s and that women should not be in the workforce in the way they are now, I can understand, perhaps—

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