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

I thank the member for Berowra for his question. He knows, as we all do in this place, just how important child care is, particularly to allow our parents to go into the paid workforce, if they indeed want to do that. That's why, during this pandemic, we have put $3 billion of extra funding into the childcare providers to keep them stable, to keep them afloat and to keep them going, particularly for those essential workers. That's also why we announced, in the budget of this year, additional subsidies for those families with two or more children in child care. We did this because, even though the out-of-pocket hourly rate for most families is reasonably modest, when you have two or more kids in child care it can add up.

We also know that the greatest workforce disincentive is precisely when you have two or more children in child care at any one particular time. Our policy added an additional 30 percentage points of subsidy for your second and subsequent children, capping out at 95 per cent of the subsidy for those particular children. On top of this, we got rid of the overall annual fee cap, which, of course, can be a real barrier for women to continue in the workforce.

In the budget, we said that we would start this in July of next year, because that was the advice we had at the time, but we've been working very hard to see if we can bring this forward, which is what we always said. I'm pleased to tell the House that we will be able to begin this on 7 March of next year. This is great news for families and great news for businesses, because what it means is that those 250,000 families that will benefit will have an additional $700 in their pocket this financial year. What it means for families next financial year and the subsequent ones is that they will have $2,200, on average, in their pocket as a result of this policy.

What's more, it's also good for the economy. Treasury has estimated that an additional 40,000 people will work more as a result of this policy, adding $1.5 billion to GDP on an annual basis. This policy is good for families, it's good for the economy and it's good for business. It's great policy developed by the coalition. It's in such stark contrast to the reckless policy of the Labor Party—a $20 billion policy where the major beneficiaries are millionaires. It's no wonder that the Labor Party are in such turmoil, when they're eating themselves alive because they're spending $20 billion of everyday working families' money to pay for the millionaires to have their child care. They'll be getting $50,000 subsidies. (Time expired)

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