Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It's been a really confusing time for parents and for early educators during this latest lockdown in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury, and I'm really pleased to be able to support a bill that reduces red tape on services in this highly complex area. As we've seen in the last 12 to 18 months, it's a rapidly changing area, where decisions get made, and parents and directors of early learning centres alike hear about them on the radio before they're given any formal notice of them.

I really want to talk about what parents and directors and early educators have been dealing with in the last six weeks within the Hawkesbury and Blue Mountains, to paint a picture of the chaotic situation that they are facing right now. I'm going to quote some of the parents who've written to me, because I think that is the most powerful way of describing the distress, the confusion, the tearing their hair out, that they're experiencing. I really want to make the point that this is not just mothers emailing me and calling me about the challenges of their children being in day care or family day care or even preschools. This is parents—mums and dads—and there are other carers involved.

The first story I want to tell is from Tristan. Tristan is like many people who are concerned about almost being pressured to send kids out to their early learning centre, even though the rest of us are being told to stay at home. He wrote to me about a couple of things, partly drawing on some of the challenges parents face in normal times. He describes the current situation as leaving families stuck in the impossible situation of having to either lose their childcare placements—placements that were difficult to get in the first instance—or be stuck paying the fees to hold the placement while their children stay at home with them. This is because the government's response during this COVID lockdown was to say to the centres, 'You may waive the gap fees.' It was not, 'You will waive the gap fees and we will help you do it.' It was simply: 'You may. We'll give you permission to do it if you want.'

I'm going to talk about it from the centre's perspective, although parents are very mindful of the challenges that their centres face. These are not places where it's just click and collect in reverse, drop and go. These are places that you've chosen and you've invested yourself in. You help them out and you care about the other kids who are there; you care about the other families; and you care about the early educators, who have your children's lives in their hands all day while you're at work. As Tristan says, 'This whole dilemma has put a serious emotional strain on families who are working from home while providing full-time care to their children.' He is also concerned about having his kids mix at a time when we're being asked not to mix. Here's his key point: 'The pandemic is not new. These lockdowns and what effects they have on Australian families and individuals are not new. The government knows exactly how this plays out every time, yet each time support is slow to come and comes with massive blind spots. But, as slow as they are to roll out support, they're lightening quick to end it.' I think that sums up this government's attitude to this sector: give as little as we need to, and take it away as fast as we can. One of the things we're very pleased to have seen—and it didn't come without fighting and calling for it and asking for it—is that, for the 42 days that families are allowed to have their child absent from the centre, COVID is not where those days are claimed from; they are separate to COVID. But it took five weeks for that decision to be made, and in that time there was significant distress about it.

I'm going to give you another example, from Amy. Her big thing was that there was this lack of information about how it was going to work. She contacted her centre to see whether she was able to have her gap fee waived, and the centre said to her that they were unable to offer the scheme due to a lack of information from the government about how it will be supported. Well, it's probably even worse than what that centre identified, and that was several weeks ago now. It's the fact that there is no support for the centres to do this. There's permission, but no support. It's an extraordinary situation for the centres that are running either as privately owned centres or not-for-profit centres. Even not-for-profit centres are in this same invidious situation about how they cover the fees and the costs without that gap fee.

This is one of the consequences of it, the financial pressure that it's put people under. And I'm not going to quote all of her, but here's Belinda's summary: 'As you can see below, I'm feeling the financial pressure as I'm paying for child care and also paying for my son to be home.' She was writing to her centre to see whether they would waive the fees, and I'm very pleased to say that after I provided her with some information she was able to have a successful outcome there. But this is not happening easily. The government has not made it easy for anyone. It is wrong to be putting these extra pressures on people. I count myself very lucky that I don't have school-age or preschool-age children at home. I think it would be one of the most challenging situations to be in, and I really take my hat off to parents who are doing that. To make it even harder for them is unforgiveable.

I want to talk about Christopher, who has also written to me about this issue. The big problem that he identified, which others have identified, is that centres had advice to do it for up to 30 July. That was up to the first wave. But then this gap emerged, and no-one quite knew what was happening after that gap. So, this is a lack of information, a lack of coordination and a lack of forward planning, because no-one's bothered to think it through. Yet, as Tristan said and as Christopher is reinforcing, this was not an unknown possibility. Christopher, again, sympathises with the centre, who, as a service, 'are unable to claim business support to cope with the offer, thereby leaving a multitude of families who've lost income having to foot the bill for a service that they chose not to use in order to abide by the health professional advice to minimise movements outside the household where possible'—people trying to do the right thing. He recognises that as a family they're at the end with what they can cut back, and the financial support around this is lacking for both the parents and the centres.

I heard a similar sentiment from another mum in the Blue Mountains. She raises this point: doesn't it defeat the purpose of sending people to work from home when we send a child out each day to mix with others in a close setting? Given what we're seeing about transmission amongst younger children, I can understand these parents' concerns. Lauren was really anxious as well. When she contacted the director of her centre when the construction industry was shut down, she was just trying to work out what the options were. The centre advised her that, due to their current family attendance numbers, they didn't feel that they needed to change the assistance. She was given a two-week credit, but they really weren't given any indication that they could access this waiver, because the centre didn't feel the need to do it. Unless we support centres, they are not going to be able to do what we'd all like to see them do. Alicia was in the same situation. The centre the children were enrolled in decided not to pass on the gap-fee waiver because the LGA is not in the hardest lockdown that Sydney has seen. Again, this left them with the choice about whether they could even can keep their children there. That's from the parents' perspective, and there's nothing in this legislation that's going to clear up any of that for parents.

I want to talk about the experience of an early learning director. Here is how much she cares about her families. She says: 'Many of them are self-employed tradies, with mums who work part-time or have their own businesses. We feel that we need to support our families who've supported us over the years. We need to take a hit as much as the next business. We're not unique. We're currently implementing the gap-free payment for our families who don't attend for the lockdown fortnight.' She knew that they'd have to reassess it because there were only such small amounts of information given. They've had nearly 20 families who've opted to have fees waived. But, of course, that leaves her with a huge gap. She says that most of her families are on a 20 per cent to 50 per cent CCS. So they're losing roughly $50 to $60 a day per child. She's down thousands of dollars a week. However, she said, 'We feel that this is something we need to do in order to support our families.' She talked about the income loss that she faces and she said, 'If we stay at our current attendance, we won't qualify for assistance'. She was really hoping that lockdown would end. But, of course, it hasn't, and it is going to go on.

I call on this government to provide much better support for our early education centres. As the member for Bruce said, these are places that we entrust our children to because we know they develop much better with the educational framework that is there. They learn by playing and they are cared for and nurtured. In the environment that we're in in the Hawkesbury and Blue Mountains, sometimes they need quite long days at those centres, because we have families who normally commute. We value what they do. Whether it's family day care, whether it's long day care or whether it's in a preschool environment, they are helping create the future generation of workers, but they are helping them have an easy way into the education system. That's how we should be thinking about this.

The disappointment with this legislation, when we move beyond a COVID lockdown environment, when we snap back to the old confusing system that exists, is due to the inadequacy of that system for normal times. The fact is that in Sydney child care is now more expensive than when the system was introduced in the middle of 2018. So, in three years, any benefit that was there has evaporated. Labor has been very clear that it believes that this system has to change profoundly. Labor wants to bring down the costs of child care and early learning and keep them down—not just have a little sugar hit and soften them but keep them down. That is why we have a plan to benefit every family across the board. Let's make it as simple as we can. We know there will be enormous productivity gains out of it. We will scrap the $10,560 childcare subsidy cap which so often sees women losing money for an extra day's work. It would have hit me as a young mum if this system had been in place. We want to lift the maximum childcare subsidy rate to 90 per cent, to actually make it affordable for families, and increase the subsidy rates and taper them for every family earning less than $530,000. I think the thing that goes with that is tasking the ACCC to bring in a price regulation mechanism that works across the board. We need to shed light on the fees. Parents deserve to know where the fees are going and how they are being used. When people talk about this as something that only affects a small number, well, they're wrong: it affects the future of every one of us. The kids that haven't started school yet are going to be looking after me in my old age. There might be some who are already at school who might have to do that! But, as we go through, that's the generation, and we should be setting the way for them.

I want to finish by quoting the CEO of the Grattan Institute, Danielle Wood, who said:

The Labor plan to make childcare cheaper will deliver big economic and social dividends.

Reducing out-of-pocket cost also improves accessibility to early childhood education and care, which is good for children, good for women's workforce participation and good for the economy. It's the policy that we need for these times, and it is the policy that parents in the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury, who want to do the best by their kids, who want to be able to afford to work and cover the costs that they face in having quality early learning for their kids, deserve, and it is exactly what Labor will deliver if we get a chance to be in government—and, my goodness, the country's going to be better off for it.

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