Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education) Share this | Hansard source

[by video link] I am very pleased to be able to get the opportunity to speak on the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Child Care Subsidy) Bill 2021 because, as most people would be aware, I'm always very happy to debate early learning and care in the House of Representatives. I am surprised by the urgency that the government is placing on this bill to get it through the parliament considering that the start date for support for families outlined in the bill does not come into effect until 1 July 2022. Yes, that's correct, 2022, after the next budget—probably after an election—is when any assistance will flow. This bill is not responding to immediate financial relief that Australians need right now and Australian families need right now. Australian families are groaning under the burden of the cost of child care. This bill, finally, is some acknowledgement by the Morrison-Joyce government that family budgets are being hammered as a result of childcare costs. But, unfortunately, this bill only tinkers, providing support for just a minority of families using the system, with hundreds of thousands of families receiving no support at all.

I note that the member for Fenner has moved a second reading amendment. This is a very important second reading amendment that does really clearly demonstrate that this government is failing when it comes to the support provided in this bill. We've had the government waste a lot of oxygen trying to deny that childcare fees are an issue. We've heard them day after day for the last three years telling Australian families that child care has never been cheaper and that the system that the Prime Minister himself designed is just fine. However, this is just not the experience, the lived experience, of families around Australia. We know that long day care fees went up by four per cent in 2020. This includes four months of free child care and then a period in which fees were frozen by the government. This was at the same time as CPI was just 0.9 per cent. The fees have hiked 9.3 per cent under the Prime Minister's new childcare subsidy in just over 2½ years, according to the most recent published data. And fees are now up 37.2 per cent since the election of the Liberal government.

The government doesn't like to talk about this data. In fact, the government regularly wants to talk about a different index. They regularly want to talk about the ABS index, the out-of-pocket costs index, so let's talk about that index. It is true that the index showed a fall in out-of-pocket costs when the new system was introduced in July 2018. But any benefit from this system has now been completely eroded just three years later with the increase in fees eclipsing the index of the subsidy, with the latest ABS figures showing that the average out-of-pocket costs are now higher for families than ever before. Out-of-pocket costs are now at a record high.

Any way you cut it—whether you want to look at the increase in fees, whether you want to look at the out-of-pocket costs—fees and out-of-pocket costs are out of control for Australian families. They are eating a bigger and bigger hole into household budgets and putting more financial strain on Australian families. It is holding families back from working. There are almost 100,000 families not working directly as a result of the cost of child care. It is hampering workforce participation. It is holding second income earners, usually women, back from working the hours they want and need.

The cost of child care is having a real impact in other ways. Research released in June by The Front Project, based on a survey of 1,700 families, found that 73 per cent of families say the cost of child care is a barrier to them having more children. Fifty-two per cent agreed that once the cost of child care was factored in it was hardly worth working. Labor knows that this system, a system that the Prime Minister designed, is not working for Australian families. That is why we've announced an ambitious plan to make child care cheaper for a million families. After months of belittling Labor's plan and bragging about the current system, the Morrison government has been dragged kicking and screaming to introduce this bill to make modest changes in just under a year's time.

Turning to the main features of the bill, schedule 1 removes the annual childcare subsidy cap from the family assistance act. So there will no longer be a limit on the amount of subsidy that families can receive in a year. The annual cap was a terrible policy. It was a serious barrier to the second income earner in a family, usually a woman, working the hours they wanted and needed. It was a terrible idea to include it in the new system and nobody recommended it. The Productivity Commission certainly didn't when in 2015 they were asked by the government to design a new subsidy system. They didn't include in it their system, so who actually came up with the idea of this annual cap, which now everyone seems to be decrying? It was the then Minister for Social Services, the current Prime Minister. Abolishing the Morrison cap is a great idea. It's so great that Labor had already announced that, if elected, we would introduce it as a policy. However, why families must wait until July 2022 for this relief is beyond me. While the government say that other changes in this bill will require significant IT changes, and that is the reason the start date has been delayed, I cannot see why they can't immediately remove the annual cap for families, as that would not require significant IT changes at all.

The amendments in schedule 2 will increase the rate of the childcare subsidy by 30 percentage points for second and subsequent children under the age of six, up to a maximum rate of 95 per cent. This measure will be implemented through a two-phase approach to ensure implementation occurs as soon as possible but allowing sufficient time for the necessary system to be built. Also, it is to ensure integrity measures are put into the new system. These changes to the subsidy do provide extra support for some families for a short period of time.

Labor will support the bill, because if the government manage to get the IT changes in place they maybe will introduce the changes before 1 July 2022, but it is disappointing that the government has not provided more support. The government's pre-budget announcement promised much, but the bill has failed to deliver. Like everything with the government, they focused more on getting the announcement right than they did on getting the policy right. They even made a childcare centre open on a Sunday to get kids playing in the background so that they could get the announcement up on Sunday night TV. The problem is that this bill will see hundreds of thousands of families not get any extra help. Three-quarters of families in the system will get no extra childcare subsidy. The government has announced a complex and restrictive policy that benefits only families with at least two children below school age in care. Parents will need a mathematics degree to understand how their family interacts with the new government system—which child will attract a lower subsidy, which child will attract a higher subsidy—and when children go to school that all gets re-ordered.

It is a pity that the government has not just adopted Labor's proposal, which would have delivered three times the boost to GDP. An analysis of the Labor and Liberal childcare policies—both of which, might I add, have the same start date, 1 July 2022—shows unequivocally that Labor's policy provides more support for more families for longer. Eighty-six per cent of families with school-aged children under six in the system are better off under Labor's proposal. Every single family with one child aged five and under in child care—that's 727,000 families—on a combined family income of less than $530,000 will receive absolutely no lift in their childcare subsidy. But they will, of course, under Labor's plan. The vast majority of families with a combined family income of between $69,806 and $174,806 with two children in care will be better off under Labor. And any extra support that the Liberals do provide in this bill to families with two children will be only temporary, as it will be ripped away when the family's oldest child goes to school. In contrast, Labor's boost in support will be provided to every child for the entire time that they are in child care—and, indeed, in after-school-hours care. We'll also get the ACCC to design a price regulation mechanism to shed light on costs and fees and drive them down for good. The Productivity Commission will also conduct a comprehensive review of the sector with the aim of implementing a universal 90 per cent subsidy for all families if Labor is elected at the next election. That is real reform. That is not just tinkering around the edges like we are seeing in this bill. Labor's plan, if we're elected at the next election, will be good for families and good for the economy.

Labor will support this bill because something is better than nothing. Anything that helps even a small number of families is worth supporting. But Labor has a better alternative. If we are elected, we will introduce a system that provides real support to families. But it is no wonder that the government doesn't want to talk about their childcare policy any more. I have not seen any press conferences or any ministers stand up and proactively want to talk about this policy because they know it pales in comparison with Labor's policy.

The government's own budget papers show that workforce participation rates will fall even after these changes. We need to get Australians back working the hours they want and need, as we recover from this pandemic, and early learning and care are such critical parts of that. We believe it, on the Labor side. But of course in the Morrison-Joyce government certainly there are some members who don't.

Now, we know that some of those on the government benches still seem to think that early education and care are just glorified expensive babysitting. We know this, because they've said it. When the minister tried to get party room approval for this legislation, we heard what the men of the Morrison government really think about childcare and women going back to work. We heard how one MP in the party room called working women using childcare an outsourcing of parenting. Another said women might be forced back to work if there was increased support for child care. We know that the women of the coalition party room had to remind their male colleagues to respect women who choose to return to work and that child care was about providing equality of opportunity for working families. They also had to remind the men that young families are under a great deal of stress and we shouldn't judge them for their choices. Well, I don't envy the women in the coalition party room, who have to, in this day and age, teach their male colleagues about the basics of gender equality and the basic real lived experience of families and what families are going through. What century are we in? It is 2021, and we have members of the Morrison-Joyce government shaming parents for using childcare and needing a reminder to respect the right of women to choose how they balance their work and family life. This is just completely and utterly archaic and shows just how out of touch members of this government are. Those who have argued that there need to be incentives for women to stay at home—which has happened in the coalition party room—completely ignore the structural workforce disincentives that they have created because of record high childcare fees.

Working families struggle every day to balance the demands of home and work. Household budgets are stretched thinner and thinner, with stagnant wages, growing costs of living and soaring out-of-pocket costs. At the same time so many parents, especially mothers, struggle internally with the competing priorities of raising their children and earning enough money to put food on the table. The very last thing that families and women need is the government shaming them and judging them for their choices. I have a message for those in the coalition, those in the Morrison government: women who work are not bad parents—they're not outsourcing their parenting.

Nobody can trust this government to deliver a childcare system that truly works for them as we emerge from this pandemic—one that truly gives choice and doesn't embed financial disincentives for actually working extra days. But those on the government benches are still, in their party room today in 2021, debating the merits of investing in child care at all. Only Labor has a plan for reform of the childcare system which works in the best interests of families and delivers real and lasting support.

So we will support this bill—a damp squib is better than no squib at all—but we think it should go a lot further. This legislation is not being enacted until 1 July 2022, and no doubt there will be an election before then. There will be a choice on the table: the Australian people have an opportunity to choose whether they will endorse a limp, non-reformist agenda of the childcare system or cheaper child care for Australian families which helps them get back to work, grows the economy and helps businesses to get back on their feet. That will be the choice. Labor stands for better child care; the Liberal Party has tinkered around the edges and has not delivered long-lasting reform with this piece of legislation.

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