Alan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Youth) Share this | Hansard source

We won't be supporting Labor's amendment to the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Child Care Subsidy) Bill 2021, which, in effect, brings into primary legislation an automatic system of a applying gap fee waiver where this power currently rests in ministerial rules. I don't deny what the shadow minister is trying to achieve here. The reason why we haven't put this into legislation is that at the moment it can rest with the ministerial ruling, which enables greater flexibility to be applied to take into account the particular circumstances of each lockdown in each jurisdiction. As members would be aware, every lockdown has had its own unique attributes. Sometimes they're for a very small number of days. Sometimes they might start out as a week and go longer. Sometimes childcare services are closed from day one and other times they're not. By enabling this flexibility we can properly adjust our settings to both ensure families are spared their cost and ensure the viability of the sector remains strong. We've got to achieve those two objectives.

In New South Wales, we actually introduced the gap fee waiver at the same time as business support was put in place. When services waive the gap fees, it does start to place financial pressure on businesses and their viability, so we deliberately aligned those two things, and I think that made sense to maintain the viability of those services. I'll just point out briefly to the shadow minister and to the House in general the supports that we do have in place, particularly in New South Wales, which is going through a more extended lockdown period. There are three important features of the support that we are offering—support for the families, support for the businesses and indeed support for the childcare workers.

For the families, we are allowing services to waive the out-of-pocket costs and we've extended the number of days families are allowed to keep children absent before they lose access to the childcare subsidy. That decision was just made recently. For childcare businesses, we have partnered with the New South Wales government to facilitate very quick support through JobSaver to help businesses meet payroll costs if they've experienced a 30 per cent decline in their revenue. As members may know, this provides 40 per cent of those payroll costs, if there's a 30 per cent decline in revenue. Then, for the childcare workers—and this is a critical workforce for Australia, for our economy and for parents, and we thank them very much for the great work that they do—where a worker has had hours reduced, they're eligible to apply for a COVID disaster payment, which is worth up to $750 per week.

As you can see, we've got a three-pronged approach to the support that we're providing to the childcare sector—to the families, to start with; to the businesses, to ensure their viability; and to the workers, to ensure that they are looked after as well and can stay connected to their businesses so that we don't lose those very important workers for this very important industry. That's what we have in place. I appreciate the arguments that the shadow minister articulated, but I think it's important we maintain that flexibility in this particular area, and that's why we won't be supporting the amendments.

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