Tony Pasin (Barker, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Infrastructure and Transport) Share this | Hansard source

The single most important issue facing the Australian economy today is the need to increase our productivity. I can't think of a more important public policy area than child care to address the need for increased productivity.

In this public policy space, there are effectively twin challenges. There's the challenge of affordability, but there's also the challenge of accessibility. It's important that we balance both, because, for reasons that I'll explain shortly, you can have affordable child care in communities, but if there is no childcare facility then you really have no child care.

Those opposite have lauded what they've been able to achieve. Their announcement of $4.7 billion is a significant investment. But, as the member for Bennelong said, this was about making child care cheaper—that's their objective—for people earning up to $500,000. It hasn't made child care cheaper because the cost pressures have meant that the increased subsidies have been more than obliterated by increased costs, but I don't want to talk about affordability. I want to talk about accessibility.

I want to take up a challenge that the member for Solomon issued to me before he left the Federation Chamber. He asked: 'What did you do?' I'll tell the member for Solomon what I did over the course of the last term. I've got to take you to the regional communities of Lameroo, Pinnaroo and Karoonda. They're small settlements in South Australia's Mallee. Prior to the work that the former coalition government did, child care was delivered in those communities. It was delivered out of the back of a car. It was termed 'mobile child care.' It did half-a-day a week in one community, and, if you were lucky it was two half-a-days a week. It doesn't sound like the child care you know in metropolitan centres and these other places. It's very hard to plan your work life around a half-a-day a week of kids in child care. What I did was work with the local communities to deliver facilities: a facility at Lameroo, a facility at Pinnaroo and a facility at Karoonda for—wait for it—five-day-a-week child care.

Those opposite talk about workforce shortages. This employment places were filled by—guess who? People who could put their children in the childcare places we built. So that's what we did. We built facilities. We focused on accessibility and balanced that against the need to ensure we had affordable child care. Those opposite, by putting all their eggs in the affordability basket, have turned their backs on the nine-million Australians who live in a childcare desert. 'It's not me,' I say to the member for Spence. It's a report prepared by the Mitchell Institute. If you think you know more about child care than the Mitchell Institute, then you have unfortunately misunderstood how much you understand.

The reality here is we've gone from mobile child care in the back of a car—which I don't think is the kind of child care you'll find at Gawler—to a full-time service. And do you know what? We did more than that. Through our actions in Barker, we forced the Labor Party to match our commitment for a childcare facility in Barker. The only funding allocated to a childcare facility anywhere in Australia through the 2022 election campaign was because I had announced $1.8 million for a childcare facility at Kingston in the south-east, a facility that had been campaigned for for 30 years and for which the advocates had been very active on Adelaide radio. There's the key: Adelaide radio. And, lo and behold, within a couple of days the then shadow minister came out and made an announcement, which I was happy to hear, of $1.8 million for the Kingston childcare centre. But here's the sting in the tail from the members opposite: because of the delay in rolling out that funding, the cost of that project has ballooned by more than the $1.8 million and, as a result, we're now stuck back in that childcare desert.

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