Pat Conaghan (Cowper, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Social Services) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about the childcare and aged-care industries in my electorate. They're crucial services. I'd like to thank everybody in those services. They look after us when we're born, and they look after us at the end of our lives as well. But, in regional electorates like mine, the pressure points have quickly devolved into breaking points. If you were to read media reports, you would think that everything has been solved in these industries, but in fact it is quite the opposite. The crisis has not been fixed with changes to the childcare rebate system and with increases in the rate of pay for specific aged-care workers. Whilst it's very much appreciated, it didn't fix the overriding systemic causes.

Every single day I receive emails and calls describing the frustration of parents who are unable to find childcare places to allow them to go back to the workforce, which they desperately need to do in this cost-of-living crisis. They absolutely need to go back to work to adequately provide for their families. What we have seen is not a decrease in the cost of child care; the costs have actually gone up. But, regardless of whether or not the costs have gone up or down, it doesn't help if you can't actually secure a childcare placement in the first place. That is what we're seeing across the regions. I've heard stories from frontline workers, police officers and nurses who actually arrange makeshift family day care centres so that, when one is at work, the other one looks after their children and vice versa. There are other stories, like the one about a mother driving 50 kilometres from Kempsey to Port Macquarie because that's the only placement she can find for her child, but what that does is adds hours and hours of driving to her week, not to mention the cost of the fuel on top of the cost-of-living crisis.

So, after hearing all of these stories, some time ago, I had a roundtable to see if we could establish the root cause of this problem and understand what was going on and also to see if there's anything that I could do as the member for Cowper to help. However, what I heard was that, as a result of the population boom during and after COVID in the electorate, we have more families in the region than ever before. At one centre in Coffs Harbour, there is a waiting list of over 170 families vying for limited spaces. In Kempsey, over 200 are on a waiting list. I'd assumed that these centres simply needed more space. But what I found is that each centre was actually only working at 60 to 70 per cent capacity, leaving obviously 30 or 40 per cent that had potential to offer more to the community. The issue is the lack of staff. They simply cannot get staff in there. When we look at those pressures on the workforce, we quickly see the same things emerging.

Firstly, it's the churn to the NDIS. We have been talking about this for the past couple of weeks. I've spoken about it many times before. It is simply untenable. The NDIS is dragging people away from these industries because it pays more, the work is flexible and the conditions are better. We've also seen the rorts. I'm not suggesting that the people leaving the industries are rorting the NDIS, but it's completely untenable. I know we're looking at addressing this. I know we're looking at changing it, which is a good thing. The same thing is happening in the aged-care industries. People are leaving to go to the NDIS. But we're also seeing in the schools care workers going to become primary teachers because they get paid better, they don't work as much and the conditions are better. So we need to do much better for those critical workers in both the childcare and the aged-care industries.

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