Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm happy to rise to speak on the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Cheaper Child Care) Bill 2022. The goal of cheaper child care is admirable but, as always, the execution is really important. The electorate of Nichols is typical of many regional electorates, with larger cities, smaller townships and rural areas, with little community infrastructure. I think back to my family's own experience. Even in a city like Shepparton, which is a big population area in my electorate, there were applications and significant waitlists. Affordability is always a factor with child care, but it isn't the only one in regional communities—accessibility is critical. My wife and I were fortunate to find places for our kids, facilitating a return to work and a participation in the economy by myself and, more importantly, my wife, who is a very serious and significant professional. But many regional families are not so fortunate.

While this bill tackles the issue of affordability, the price tag of this policy has changed three times now. First it was $5.4 billion, then $5.1 billion and now $4.5 billion. Labour's $4.5 billion policy is costed for three days a week, not the five days a week that most parents work and, therefore, require care for. Labor, under this policy, will blow out the amount a household can earn and still qualify for the childcare subsidy to $530,000 in joint income. Under this bill, taxpayers will fork out an additional $22,524 dollars for a family on a combined income of $360,000 a year with a minimum of two kids, compared with just $2,488 extra for a family earning a combined income of $80,000. This isn't an attack on the aspirations of high-income households who work hard and deserve equal access to childcare support. It is, though, an acknowledgement that lower-income families, who often can't afford for one parent not to be working, deserve greater support.

In Nichols, the issue for many families is not affordability but access to child care. The Mitchell Institute's report Deserts and oases: how accessible is childcare in Australia? was published in March 2022. It shows that metropolitan-style consolidation of services is occurring in regional centres at the expense of small towns. In Shepparton, between 2.14 and 3.59 children compete for each childcare place, depending on the neighbourhood. The population centres most likely not to have any child care accessible within a 20-minute drive are towns with a population under 1,500 people, the Mitchell Institute found. It gets worse in more rural and remote communities.

The township of Tatura—a wonderful place—is a 15-minute drive from Shepparton. It's where I went to kindergarten, too. It is a great town with a strong and independent community. When the report describing childcare deserts was released, Tatura resident Jay Corrigan spoke to the Shepparton News, telling it:

I could only get my daughter in to Shepparton, which is annoying having to drive over and back,

Of course, when floods block the causeway—that linking road between either side of the river—as they did last week, even doing that is impossible. The article also said:

Report lead author Dr Peter Hurley said for many regional towns, Australia's policy approach to early learning was a complete absence of provision, especially for towns with a population of fewer than 1500 people.

In this report they are called 'childcare deserts'. I have many childcare deserts in my electorate. The absence of child care is not because there isn't a market. People in small towns and people on farms have children and they return to work, just like everyone else. There is an absence of policy from Labor to encourage viable child care to operate in smaller communities. In areas designated as inner regional, nearly 45 per cent of the population live in a childcare desert. In outer regional Australia, 61 per cent of the population live in a childcare desert. There is no joy for a huge proportion of regional and rural Australians in a bill that makes child care they don't have access to more affordable.

The coalition firmly believes in choice. Parents who work or study should be able to access care, whether through formal or informal arrangements, but there appears to be no plan to address access to care, with many parents struggling to find a place for their child, and no plan to address thin markets and childcare deserts, where there are little to no services. Equally, there is no plan to address one of the biggest issues facing the sector, the current workforce shortage and pressures being faced by educators. The headline figure of $4.5 billion sounds great. It sounds fantastic. It's a big figure. But not one single cent will be spent to create additional places or services. There are currently 7,200 vacancies in the sector and no plan to train and recruit educators. Without such a plan, the likely result of this bill will be more families competing for places in an already strained marketplace. What's the point of having lower out-of-pocket costs if you can't even get your child into care? What's the point of having lower out-of-pocket costs if you live in a childcare desert and don't have access to child care?

There is more to be done, and we need amendments to this bill that do something to address the gaps in childcare services, workforce shortages and the real prospect that any benefits delivered to families by this reform will be eroded by higher fees. There is no commitment to the coalition's Connected Beginnings program, which provides childcare access to Indigenous Australians living in rural and remote Australia. This program operates in Mildura, the only site in Victoria, and it should be expanded to other regional centres, including Shepparton, in my electorate, which has the largest Indigenous population in the state, outside Melbourne. In 2021 the coalition government provided an additional $37 million to the department of health and $42.8 million to the department of education to expand the Connected Beginnings program to a minimum of 50 sites by 2025. This should occur.

This bill will extend the activity test from 24 hours to 36 hours of subsidised care for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, and, as part of this, will introduce a new definition of an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander child. This has raised some concerns, as it doesn't exist in the family assistance act currently and it is different to the definition within the Social Security Act. It is possible that a child could be eligible under one act and ineligible under another. That's a mess that needs cleaning up.

In government, the coalition almost doubled childcare investment, to $11 billion in the 2022-23 budget. We locked in ongoing funding for preschools and kindergartens and made big reforms to the early childhood education system. Under the coalition, 280,000 more children joined early childhood education, and we made it simpler to access support, with around 90 per cent of families currently eligible for a subsidy of between 50 and 85 per cent. We support families. We support the opportunity to work and study. We're incredibly supportive of choice. If parents want to send their kids to child care, we want them to be able to do it. If they want to keep their kids at home, we want them to be able to do it. But it's not just about having the fees subsidised; it's about having the facilities that actually exist.

Under the coalition, we saw women's workforce participation reach record highs at 62.3 per cent, and long may that continue. An aspiration to heighten women's workforce participation is something we should all share and something that's extremely positive for our nation. But it's not just about saying, 'Here, we'll give you a bit of money to help with child care.' The facilities—the places—actually need to be there. This particularly affects places like my electorate of Nicholls and the electorate of Mallee. There are many childcare deserts. We want professional people to be attracted to these places because the economies are going well under nine years of coalition government.

For a variety of reasons—including COVID, but also just for the lifestyle choices and for the economic benefits and the opportunities—people want to come to regional Australia. Often they say: do you want to live in a flat in suburban Melbourne and travel to work for an hour and a half on substandard public transport or do you want to live in a beautiful regional city like Shepparton, Seymour, Mildura or Swan Hill and do some really exciting work for a region that's really moving forward? But young professional people moving to these places want to know that, if they go down the track of having a family—I've been through this myself—they can make the choice to put their children into care and get back into the workforce.

Sometimes it's not about money; sometimes it's just about wanting to participate in the exciting economy of a community like the Goulburn Valley. That was the experience for me and my wife. Sure, we wanted to earn some dollars, but we wanted to get back into agriculture and the wonderful agribusiness industries that exist in the Goulburn Valley. We could see where that was going and we wanted to be part of it, but we had to have places to put our children into care. We were very fortunate, but there were some long lists. Had we not lived in the large population area—for example, had we lived in another part of the electorate or in some of the childcare deserts in the electorate of Mallee—it wouldn't have mattered how much money we had to spend on it. We just wouldn't have been able to put our kids into care, and that would have stopped one or two of us going back to work, and we don't have the opportunity to get ourselves ahead. The great organisations that benefited from our agricultural professional qualifications wouldn't get those skills and services and we wouldn't be able to move forward. So there are a variety of reasons why we need more child care, not just subsidised child care.

I refer, again, to the need for amendments to this bill to ensure that families with limited or no access to child care, most of whom are in regional and rural communities, are afforded the same opportunity to access affordable and accessible childcare.

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