Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I'm happy to make a contribution to the member for Kingston's MPI. I sat with the member for Kingston when we were looking at the budget in detail up in the Federation Chamber. I heard some great questions from the member for Kingston but not a single answer from the minister opposite. So it's great to have a 10-minute discussion about child care here today, because he somehow managed to avoid answering the member for Kingston's questions up in the Federation Chamber.

But let's get some facts out there because there was quite a lot of hot air and bluster flowing around for the last 10 minutes. No. 1: Australians pay more for child care than basically any other country in the world. That's a fact. So we know more needs to be done. Fact No. 2: the coalition's childcare policy was designed by then Treasurer Morrison, now Prime Minister Morrison. It has his fingerprints all over it. The system, designed by the Prime Minister, is his baby, so to speak, when it comes to child care.

The facts are that childcare costs are out of control, as touched on by the member for Kingston. They have basically increased by three times CPI: over the past 12 months childcare costs soared by 3.7 per cent, compared to a CPI increase of 1.1 per cent. We know—the economists tell us; not the so-called inner-city people that the minister was talking about but the Business Council, economists—and every sensible person knows, we need to get more people into the workforce. What's holding them back? Childcare costs. So the business groups, the economists and the other experts are all calling for an urgent reform of the childcare system that the Prime Minister gave birth to—and I do apologise for that metaphor. KPMG has estimated childcare reform could generate between 160,000 and 210,000 additional working days a week. That's 30,000 to 40,000 full-time jobs. We know that there are considerable pressures on the economy. We know, as The Front Project report says, there are fewer people having babies. It's a barrier to having babies. According to the 1,700 families surveyed, 73 per cent of them say that childcare costs will result in lower birth rates.

What are we doing about these issues? We've got the borders closed. We've also got no international students flying in, which used to be a pathway for educated, trained-up people to join our workforce. We'd harvest other countries' brightest people. We'd bring them in, put them through our universities and get the benefits of them in the economy, especially for tourism and all sorts of things, in the workplace, like picking fruit on their holidays. Those people aren't coming. The international students aren't coming in, because the government has completely stuffed up the quarantine program. We've got the borders closed, so we can't harvest the intelligent people from around the world. We know that the Canadians, the United States and the British are taking our international students, what used to be our third biggest export.

So what do the economists say? We need to get more people into the workforce. That's where the productivity game will come. We're not going to have a population increase. Remember the last few budgets? There has been a baby boom predicted in every single budget under those opposite, and we've got the actual birth rates going down under the coalition, under the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government.

Mr Tudge interjecting—

Can you stop please, Minister? I'm trying to concentrate here. What do we need to do? We need to get more people into the workplace. What's the vision from those opposite? I've seen disused service stations with more vision than the Prime Minister. Fair dinkum, we really need to get the people who can go out and work right now, who are keen to work right now. They're the people could who generate GDP growth of between $4 billion and $11 billion per annum, if we reformed it right. This Morrison mess, if we worked on that—

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