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

I rise to speak on the motion and start by noting that the childcare measures that are outlined in this were supported through the parliament by the coalition recently. I commend the contribution by the member for Moncrieff, who's also, of course, the shadow minister in this area, for some of the really concerning issues in child care that she canvassed earlier. What worries me about this motion is some suggestion that everything in child care is now all fine because of the measures that passed in that bill. That's not the case in any way whatsoever.

Like any local member, I'm regularly meeting with childcare providers in my electorate. Like any electorate, we've got different operators who have different models. Luckily, in metropolitan Adelaide, I don't have any childcare deserts—the term that is used in my electorate—though access is difficult for families in my electorate. We have issues around waiting lists and the like. But the first point that is really important is that I know there are a lot of regional areas, in particular, that have major issues with any provision of child care whatsoever. The rebate is not relevant to someone who can't access child care at all, and that's a serious equity issue that I hope the government is taking seriously and looking at addressing, because it certainly isn't addressed in the measures that went through the parliament recently.

In my electorate—and I know this is a problem nationally—all the providers say exactly the same thing when it comes to workforce challenges: they have enormous issues in attracting and retaining staff. If the forecasts of the success of this package are to be realised, and all these extra hours of work are going to be possible because all these extra people are going into child care, then I'm very worried about where the workforce is going to come from to support those extra places. This is a really serious issue. It's a serious issue across the care sector more broadly, as we all know, whether it's in the childcare sector or in aged care, disability et cetera.

The other thing that's a really dramatic challenge in those workforce areas is inflation running as hot as it is right now. Commitments around pay increases are being completely eroded by the hot-running inflation that we are experiencing at the moment. Seven point eight per cent inflation year on year is way more than 15 per cent in two years. Even if you got, over two years, a 15 per cent pay rise, which is not necessarily the proposition across all the sectors, you're going backwards in real terms if inflation is sitting at 7.8 per cent. So we've got a workforce challenge at a time when the government's own policies would see the real wages of people in these sectors go backwards. That's not going to encourage or help to address or alleviate those pressures.

We think we need a very urgent workforce plan for this sector, which, frankly, needs to stitch together a whole range of other sectors that have the same challenges, because if we don't have the workforce in place to support the childcare centres and other care requirements in our economy then all these other policies won't be able to achieve the outcomes they promise. That's not political pointscoring at all. It would be good if we could all work together on these challenges, frankly, because they are going to require some very significant lateral thinking, which is probably going to have to be tailored, particularly on a geographic basis, because I know that the challenges of workforce in some of our regional and remote communities can be very different from the challenges in metropolitan areas.

So I—like anyone in this chamber, hopefully—am very supportive of making sure that all families in this country have the best possible access to child care and that we're providing that access so that everyone who wants to can get that access and participate in the economy as they would like to. But, of course, it's not as easy as the government makes out, and we've got to make sure that some of those very significant issues around equity of access and workforce are addressed. It would be good for the government, rather than just congratulating themselves on what they've done, to tell us what they're going to do to address those problems in the future. (Time expired)

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