Rob Mitchell (McEwen, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

One of the issues that concern me the most as a member of parliament is the cost of child care. In outer suburban electorates like McEwen, we have plenty of new families and young parents who already face tough times with high expenses on rent, electricity, mortgages and food. As a parliament we need to ensure that we are doing all we can not to increase the burden on young families, and that starts with child care. The median childcare costs for Victorian families rose to $546 per week last year at an accredited centre, the highest of all Australian states and second only to the ACT. That, I guess, fits with a federal government that has a strong record of putting Victorians last. Overall, the median cost of child care soared to $523 a week in 2020, a 5.6 per cent increase on the 2019 figures. But we have a government that has no plan to deal with this. Research shows that fee increases for child care will outstrip CPI for years to come, and that means too many expenses for local families.

There are countless people in my electorate who get in contact with me every day to say they can barely afford to make ends meet. I remember a story from a woman in Mernda who works full-time and has a three-year-old daughter and an 11-month-old daughter in child care five days a week. She is paying $700 in out-of-pocket expenses, $1,400 a fortnight—or, as she puts it, the same amount as her mortgage. She said, 'It's a broken system. We expect families to work, to try and set up their future, yet we don't offer them enough to support them properly.' I'm sure that this constituent from Mernda was relieved when she heard the disingenuous Prime Minister proclaim that, during the pandemic, there would be free child care for everyone with a job. We all remember those words at a press conference—a photo op. But, like most announcements from this Prime Minister, it was all conference and no follow-up; all pictures and no substance.

The most outstanding feature of the government's free childcare system was the number of people who actually got locked out of free child care. We have heard constantly from early learning services around the country who struggled to keep their doors open after their funding had been slashed. Services had to cut opening hours, they had to cut staff and they had to cut places to balance their books. But they didn't actually suffer a drop in enrolments; it was just that the government expected childcare educators to work for half the pay because they could not access JobKeeper.

Some of the most important people in our communities are our early childhood educators. The first people the government threw on the scrap heap during the COVID pandemic were our early childhood educators. They were happy to look after blokes like Gerry Harvey, but, for people earning low wages and working in hard conditions, minding the kids for our police, emergency service operators, nurses and shop workers, the government decided, 'No, no, you're on your own.' They were having a go, but this government left them. It just dropped them. It scrapped them. It didn't care about them. It's pretty clear that this government considers some Australians far more essential than others. The government doesn't value early childhood educators. Ensuring childhood educators are properly remunerated is an essential part of what government should be doing.

We're seeking to add technical amendments to this legislation to simplify it and to correct the mistakes made during the drafting process by a government that seems to damage everything that it touches. During the lockdowns, families have been told to stay at home, and childcare centres have remained open as an essential service for essential workers. But families staying at home were still being charged gap fees by childcare centres, as they are legally required to levy them. The minister has the ability to give centres an exemption from charging a gap fee, which the minister was forced to do during the second lockdown in Victoria in 2020. But the government has not granted exemptions from gap fees for the most recent lockdowns in Perth, Adelaide, Brisbane and Melbourne. Unbelievably, stakeholders have advised us that the minister gave a commitment to grant exemptions for these lockdowns but this was overruled by the Prime Minister's office. Think about that in the context of what we've been over in the last couple of weeks. The Prime Minister's office have been out there and were very clear to knock off support for early childhood educators. We would ask the Prime Minister when he knew about it, but, as we know, the Prime Minister and his office don't seem to talk on matters that are important.

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