Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to offer qualified support for the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Cheaper Child Care) Bill 2022. In Australia, we take for granted the fact that school is universally available to our children and families. Every child can access infant, primary and high school via the public system. Yet, despite all the evidence about the benefits, we continue to baulk at providing universal publicly funded early childhood education and care. These benefits are for both children and families, providing children with the foundations needed for their education while enabling women to enter the workforce.

For so long, increasing affordable learning and care has been in the too-hard basket. For many women, that has meant that being at home and folding the laundry is more affordable than working. Constraining women to unpaid work is good neither for women nor for an economy struggling to boost productivity. The Minister for Women has said:

If women's workforce participation matched men, we would increase GDP by 8.7 per cent or $353 billion by 2050.

The ACTU told the current Senate inquiry into work and care that there would be another 893,000 women in the workforce if they were able to participate at the same rate as men. The Parenthood noted to the same inquiry that last year the World Economic Forum ranked Australia 70th out of 153 countries for female workforce participation and that just 56 per cent of women in Australia aged 25 to 40 with young children took part in paid work.

So Australian women are the best educated in the world but rank way down the list for workforce participation. Why? Today, secondary income earners, mostly women, can lose 80 to 100 per cent of their pay for working more than three days a week. Why would you bother? Around 60 per cent of secondary-income-earning parents work part time. This bill could incentivise hundreds of thousands of parents, mostly mothers, to increase their days of work, both benefiting the economy and improving female financial independence and security.

Child care is not welfare. Early childhood care and education is not babysitting. This is economic policy. This has been central to my platform since day one, and the people of Goldstein voted for it. Treasury forecasts suggest that these reforms will generate the equivalent of 37,000 additional full-time equivalent employees, or 185,000 additional days of work. The Grattan Institute modelled 220,000 additional days of work from this reform. This could not come at a better time, amid chronic workforce shortages across the country as employers struggle for staff, while many of our highly educated female workers stay home because working is not worth their while or is not available or is not flexible enough to suit their casualised, irregular or short shifts.

This bill represents the biggest increase in affordable early learning and care since the Howard and then Rudd government reforms to the childcare benefit and rebate in 2007 and 2008 respectively. But there are pitfalls. Childcare fees have grown more than 40 per cent in the last eight years. With billions of dollars funnelled into child care, guess what happens. Fees go up, rents go up and the cost of care goes up, without transparency. Transparent pricing information is an important part of this suite of reforms. So are the ACCC review into this and the Productivity Commission's review that will report next year. We must ensure that more subsidies don't just continue to lead to higher costs of care.

But we must do more than that. I applaud the government's intent to make early care more affordable and accessible, but I also call on the government to take a brave and systematic approach to restructuring the system. One in five Australian children starts school not ready. It is two in five in country areas, and half of First Nations children. Children who arrive at school unprepared rarely catch up. This is a disgrace. A system of universally accessible early childhood education and care that doesn't penalise already-disadvantaged children by locking them out of the system because their parents don't work enough to fit the access criteria is what is needed. This bill does go some way to addressing this issue but it should go further. It should be amended to drop entirely the so-called activity test, which disproportionately affects low-income families generally, as well as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families and their children.

In 2018 the previous government halved the minimum childcare subsidy entitlement for families who didn't meet the minimum threshold for the activity test. This has had consequences, unintended or otherwise, especially for those low-income families. Data provided to Senate estimates last financial year found that in July 2018, before the changes were implemented, 54,300 families were entitled to the minimum weekly hours of care. Three years later that number had plummeted to 21,110 families, an overall reduction of 42,000 families. The tightening of the activity test had been recommended by the Productivity Commission. However, the Productivity Commission also acknowledged that it could deter some parents from taking a job with very low hours per week. Research by the Australian Institute of Family Studies has found that, while the greatest negative impact of the activity test changes has been on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families, they are also disproportionately hurting low-income families and those from non-English speaking backgrounds. Low-income families are more than six times more likely to be limited to one day of subsidised care per week, and it's a similar story for those from non-English speaking backgrounds.

This legislation is a start. But the government should consider it a launch pad to consider the structure of the system and how we value the care and education of our youngest children and the value that their mothers can add to the workforce.

There's another workforce piece. Considering existing vacancies, this reform will require an additional 16,000-plus early childhood educators across the country, especially targeted at the so-called childcare deserts where it's all but impossible to get a place. Turnover in early learning has jumped from around 20 per cent to 30 to 40 per cent in the last year. We can't provide care without carers, and this turnover is a direct reflection on the underpaid and undervalued nature of care among a burnt-out workforce. Childcare centres in Goldstein are already struggling for staff. The government has found savings in its original estimate of the cost of this program. I urge the minister to consider the value of putting that money back into the system in the form of better pay for early childhood educators, who are currently paid as much as 30 per cent less than their primary school equivalents.

There is something deeply troubling about the fact that not only are women being disadvantaged by being unable to afford care or find care places for their children but also the predominantly female workforce is undervalued and underpaid, compounding the very problem that we are here to solve: how to underpin a better future for our children.

See this speech in context