James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, take it up with the South Australian Labor government. We have this situation where, of course, that will be retaliated against, and all that means is that, while these shortages are not unique to child care or to the care sector more broadly, they are enormous challenges. What are we going to do to find the workforce we need just for the system as it is, let alone to increase the capacity of the system? The sector are saying as we speak that they don't have the ability or that the workforce doesn't exist to meet their current requirements, let alone what the new requirements will be if this policy succeeds in the way in which the government is indicating it is.

So that's an enormous challenge that needs to be addressed, and I haven't heard any really serious, credible suggestion for how that's going to occur. I'm all for training places in the various skills that are needed to provide that workforce, but I'm very concerned about where the people are physically coming from to work in all these different areas that have major workforce shortages. We've seen in the agricultural sector the government not supporting the agricultural visa, which would have brought more than 40,000 people into the country to address massive workforce challenges in agriculture. We get it. We know that that's an instruction from the union movement and that the government's not allowed to do these things. But it's heartbreaking. We know that the unions went to meet with the various embassies that we were seeking to negotiate with to have bilateral agreements on the agricultural visa, and we know that the government are not allowed to do these things because the unions won't let them. In the meantime, we have these spectacular, dramatic skills shortages across many, many sectors, and obviously the childcare sector will have an enormous challenge to meet because they don't have the workforce to meet current requirements, let alone future demand.

I'm also very curious about what's going to happen in my home state of South Australia. We're now having a royal commission to look at universal preschool in South Australia. I'm sure this wasn't just election announcement to win votes. I'm sure it was really well thought through, and the government in South Australia knows how much it's going to cost and what the impact is going to be on the childcare sector. But, if they do know the answer to those questions, they haven't talked to the sector about it. The disruption that that would cause in the sector would obviously be spectacular. I don't understand, if they did go down that path, how that would allow them to interact with the childcare system and the funding that the Commonwealth provides for child care, as opposed to what we provide for preschool, and if they're extending preschool. All those sorts of things are spectacularly complex, and I don't know, and the sector doesn't know, where that's heading, so we look forward to getting answers to those pretty significant questions.

But, with those points of clarification made, I welcome the support to meet the enormous cost-of-living pressures that are being felt by the young families of my electorate and others across the country. It is a very depressing and bleak outlook from a cost-of-living point of view in this country, whether it's electricity bills, whether it's meeting your mortgage, where it's possibly having stage 3 tax cuts ripped away from you in the months ahead—and with inflation at 7.3 per cent and on a trajectory of continuing to climb. If electricity bills are going up by more than 50 per cent and gas by more than 40 per cent, I don't see what is going to lead to inflation falling from that level for some time into the future. People's incomes are being dramatically eroded as we speak, and that is going to continue to happen into the future. Of course we on this side of the House support anything we can do to help meet the very enormous pressures that are on family budgets, and on that basis I commend the bill to the House.

Debate adjourned.

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