Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to rise to speak on the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Child Care Subsidy) Bill 2021, and I'm pleased to follow the member for Mallee and commend her on raising the issues around child care in her community. I was also pleased to see the member for Curtin speaking. I'm pleased because it means that the women in the LNP, the women in this government, who were elected to represent their communities here, are feeling confident about expressing the needs of families in their communities. I join them to put some context around the childcare situation in Australia currently.

As everyone in the chamber knows, I'm the member for Lalor. That means I represent the outer western suburbs of Melbourne, specifically the local government area of Wyndham. In my electorate there are 13,380 children under five years of age attending child care. There are 5,810 above five years of age accessing out-of-school-hours care. That's a total of 19,190 children covering 14,350 families. We're a very young electorate. We're an electorate where couples are raising their children. They're attracted to our area by affordable housing. There are 157 childcare services in the electorate and they've all been confronted by a three per cent increase in fees from December 2019 to 2020.

Wyndham is home to the most children in child care and to the most families accessing child care in the country, and we're home to the most services. So those here can imagine that this is the pointy end, if you like, of my interests in serving my electorate. I'll mention the member for Mallee and the member for Curtin, because I think that context is really important. We need to understand, as the member for Curtin outlined and the member for Kingston certainly outlined, the potential economic flow-on effects of better child care in this country—of more affordable child care and more accessible child care in this country. We know that at the moment there are barriers in our childcare system that are stopping some parents from working more days. They're stopping some parents from working at all and stopping families from making decisions that would assist to set them up. I want to add to some of that context.

When I was first elected, I took a phone call from a member of my community who had just got off a train at the Werribee station. He was in the car. The train had been late and there was some congestion around the station. He was in tears because he knew that he had missed the six o'clock deadline for the pickup at child care. He was in tears, saying to me, 'Something's got to give, Jo—something's got to change.' Our families cannot continue to live under this kind of pressure.

I want to talk a little about that, because it is personal, it is social and it is economic—not just for the country but for every family accessing this service. Families in my community are leaving home and commuting, either in their cars or using public transport, often for over an hour each way to access work. If we add to that the drop-offs and pickups at childcare centres and schools for out-of-school-hours care then we have very, very long days. And that all comes together.

So I'm standing here today, talking about a piece of legislation that the government is bringing in. Let's face it, all of the women opposite and everyone in this chamber should be stopping by the member for Kingston's office to thank her, because one of the things this piece of legislation does is that it plans to abolish the annual subsidy cap. It is the member for Kingston who has driven that in this place. It is the member for Kingston who determined to take that to a Labor caucus, which has meant that the government has met that same standard—although we're disappointed that they won't be doing that for another 12 months when, potentially, they could do that today and bring some relief to families in electorates like mine and electorates across the country.

But I'll go back to that small context: we're talking about families under enormous pressure. Potentially, there are two parents working—perhaps both full-time. Often in my electorate both are working full-time. They're dropping kids off, doing the commute, doing their day's work, coming back, doing the commute and then picking kids up. They're leaving in the dark and getting home in the dark, potentially hitting the household at 6:45 in the evening to prepare the evening meal. On top of that, they're reporting—on top of that, they're constantly assessing. They're reporting: projecting their incomes then reporting on what their actuals were, stressed about whether they'll meet that cap and stressed about what the costs are—stressed by a three per cent rise in my community in childcare costs since 2019.

Add to that the pandemic. Add to that what families in my electorate went through when the government was very, very slow to recognise that there was an issue, that when we went into lockdown families weren't using childcare services because they were at home with children but were paying gap fees for a service that they weren't using. They were at risk of going over the number of days that their children could miss child care without losing their place due to illness or another reason. The government was incredibly slow to act.

In Victoria, again, they cut our childcare centres off JobKeeper. This is a government that truly needs to get a clear focus in this space, because of its importance to all the families that we all represent here. It's a government that doesn't need to look at one electorate or one region or one area; it needs to look at this system and what it is not delivering to our families.

The piece of legislation we're looking at today obviously does some good things. Its biggest flaw, however, is that it's putting off the start day until, potentially, after the next election. We welcome some of what's in this legislation, but other parts of this legislation just seem absolutely crazy. We're going through a whole reform, we're reforming a system, and we're told that it can't happen until 2022 because the government need time to fix the system, to support changes to the IT system. In fact, what they're putting in front of us is more complex than what they're changing. What they're putting in front of us is a tweak around the number of children per family. What Labor's going to take to the next election, what our policy is on the ground now, would service many, many more families and would make child care more affordable for, potentially, 90 per cent of the families in my electorate. Yet we're going to sit here, the government's going to pass this legislation and we're going to implement these changes in 2022 post the next election—and they just don't go far enough in the first place. They don't make it accessible for as many families as needed. They don't make it affordable for families that need it.

The government are doing something but they're not doing what the system requires, and they're certainly not doing what families in electorates like mine require. And families in my electorate won't be surprised, because they can put all sorts of things together in this bubble. They put their daily life and transpose it across this government's decisions. The man in the car park running late to pick up his child from child care at six o'clock can also look at the fact that this government hasn't made one significant contribution to car parks at train stations in my electorate, and he might wonder why this government made commitments to car parks at train stations in other electorates in Melbourne at the last election. He may wonder why this government is not bringing into this chamber right now legislation that will change his life—legislation that could be enacted quickly and would mean he wouldn't be worried about reaching the cap.

Remember, that person who I spoke to that night is not very likely to have children in child care anymore. He may, however, have children in out-of-school-hours care, which this government hasn't addressed in this legislation at all. It's as if children turn five and go into school, and life stops at 3.30. Many, many families in my electorate access out-of-school-hours care. Most of the school in my electorate operate out-of-school-hours care to support the parents of the children they're educating through the day, to ensure that children aren't left at the gate at 3.30, to make sure that until six o'clock in the evening—when parents finish that long commute back to my electorate—their children are supervised, cared for, watered, fed and stimulated. But this government has nothing in this legislation to support the parents who rely on out-of-school-hours care.

To me, we can come into this place and we can all put the figures up about how many parents this part of it's going to help, how many parents this part of it's going to help and what percentage it all comes back to. But, ultimately, this legislation does not go far enough in terms of creating economic opportunity, creating economic stimulation and increasing female workforce participation. This legislation does not do what Australia currently needs. It won't serve many in my community. What will serve people in my community is if, at the next election, they vote for an Albanese Labor government and deliver the member for Kingston's reform package, which will certainly deliver to the families in my electorate—every single one of them.

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