Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Wage Justice for Early Childhood Education and Care Workers (Special Account) Bill 2024. It's difficult to make any argument against better wages for childcare workers, and I certainly don't intend to. This side of the House will be supporting these increases. But it is worth considering in this debate how we've got to this point and, probably more to the point, what the increase will achieve, given the current economics of the nation.

This wage increase is to be 15 per cent over the next two years, with the first instalment of 10 per cent coming next month and another five per cent in December 2025. There are some conditions that are outstanding at the moment, and we're told there are more. At this stage the childcare centres and the companies that run them, the organisations, are unsure what the extra criteria will be. They know not what the changes will be, and it's supposed to start next month, in December. We can assume, maybe, that it's not 1 December. But, certainly, this needs to be in place by the middle of the month or so—six or seven weeks at the maximum. Yet the government seems to have not yet sat down with industry and worked out exactly how it's going to run.

This government has a track record of doing exactly that, of making a motherhood statement—a grand announcement, if you like—and then trying to work out the detail afterwards. Only this morning I picked up the Australian and it was telling me that the Labor government will make the decision, perhaps on Melbourne Cup Day, that the $7 billion investment in the military satellite program is to be axed. It was only 18 months ago that they made the decision. So, in 18 months, they made a decision to spend $7 billion on a new military satellite system for Australia and then walked away from it. This has the feel of The Hollowmen. They make the big, bold announcement without considering the detail of how on earth they're going to get there in the endgame. There's been a whole host of Labor policies across the board that have been in this ilk. One would think that this one will be delivered, because at the end of the day they're dealing with taxpayers' dollars and a known number of workers, but it is running it down to the line. Why on earth wasn't this work done when the policy was announced back in August so that organisations—companies, councils, community organisations—that run these daycare centres can make ongoing, concrete decisions on what they know will be the situation?

The higher wages for childcare workers and carers were announced, as I said, on 8 August. And I read in the government's notes that this program will run for just two years. Then what? What happens after that two-year period? It gets us past the next election, sure. I understand that. But what happens after that two-year period? Does the funding just stop? At this stage that's exactly what it will do, on 30 November 2026. Will the childcare centres or the parents then be lumped with this wage increase, which by then will be well and truly locked in? There won't be any going back on wage increases, and I don't think anyone would be suggesting that. But it becomes a question then of who will pay for it and how it will be paid for.

The problem when government starts subsidising anything, but certainly wages, is how they get off the sticky paper. If wage increases are not accompanied by efficiency gains, in the end it can only come out of the taxpayers' pockets and out of the industries that drive the economy. By that I don't mean to downgrade any industry but what we would have called, when we went to school, the primary and secondary industries, the ones that create wealth. A wage increase for a government funded workforce can only come at the expense of others. The problem with these jobs in particular is that this government has no focus on driving productivity at the same time that it makes the wage increases. That is dangerous for the books of Australia and our underlying success in the longer term future.

We know that the lowest paid childcare worker at the moment receives around $24 an hour, and that's somewhere less than $50,000 a year—I'm assuming a 37-hour week or thereabouts, which is $46,000 or $47,000. That's no princely sum for somebody who's well educated in their area. If we want good people to work in that area, I think we ought to accept the fact that it's got to have a higher wage. But there needs to be more focus on how child care is delivered in this nation so we don't fall into this trap of just throwing more money and not getting a different result out of it.

The rub is that while this wage is going up, the cost of living is exploding. The government has actually been forced into having to take this step because people have been falling out of child care. The cost of living is increasing exponentially, it seems. I went to a suburban supermarket the other day. It's on the eastern side of Adelaide; I'll admit that. It was $85 for a kilogram of undercut steak—85 bucks. Gee whiz! That's just about out of reach for most, I'd say. It was $16 for sausages. If people think that the cost of living's only going up by three or four per cent, have another think. The things that families buy—electricity, council rates, insurance, education—are all going up by greater amounts than the headline inflation rates.

This wage increase will be welcome, but it will be eroded quite quickly unless something changes in the way this economy is being managed. It's worth recalling that in 2023 the government put $3.6 billion into child care for reducing subsidies. The subsidies for anyone under $83,000 a year went from 85 per cent to 90 per cent. Effectively, the parent had a reduction of 30 per cent of their payment for the child care. Everyone welcomed that, saying, 'What a wonderful outcome.' But what's happened since that time? This extra $3.6 billion has gone into the sector, and the price of child care has gone up by 12 per cent. This was supposed to reduce rates for parents, so where's the money gone? We know that the centres aren't making a fortune and that it hasn't gone into profits. It's gone into the inflated costs of all the things that childcare centres have to buy, which are remarkably similar to those things that the parents have to buy—electricity; council rates; labour, in this particular case; and insurance. Most of those things are controlled or at least driven by government decisions.

It hasn't had the effect that one might have thought or that the government certainly thought, and I wonder if they're actually across their economic brief well enough to understand what they're doing with the economy generally. We've seen another announcement today about HECS debts. This is off-budget money, for goodness sake. It actually turns out to be quite counter productive to the economy and all the people that have to work within it.

They have form here in the childcare sector. During the six years of the former Labor government—the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years—there was a 54 per cent increase in childcare costs, around nine per cent a year, and now we're having a 12 per cent increase in childcare costs. Over those six years, they averaged around nine per cent a year. Whatever it is they do to child care, they certainly know how to drive the cost of it up. If we keep driving the cost of these services up exponentially across Australia—don't get me started on the NDIS, the health sector or a number of other things—Australia becomes unsustainable. That's why these are serious issues. We are not opposing this wage increase, but the government needs to better understand what it is doing to manage the economy.

There's another line in the government's statement that greatly concerns me—and I've spoken in this chamber many times about this. It says, 'This increase will not apply to family day care or home care educators.' They're not eligible. I'm here to tell you that around 30 or 35 per cent of my electorate lives in a childcare desert. It's one of the worst in Australia, and, in many of these towns and communities, family day care and home care are just the kind of child care that can be established in what I call these suboptimal populations. We know that if we have fewer than about 4,000 people in a community—if there are only 3,000 or 4,000 people in the community—a commercial model of childcare delivery is simply not viable, and yet the government seems to be completely content to allow that situation to continue.

The government has put $3.6 billion into lifting the subsidies for parents and another $4.7 billion, I think, for higher wages in the sector, but not one dollar for a new place in the childcare deserts of Australia. Increasingly, we see governments—and we also saw the Royal Commission into Early Childhood Education and Care in South Australia, chaired by Julia Gillard—recommend that early years learning from three years of age should be available universally. It should be available to every child in Australia, yet we've got all these people living in communities that absolutely cannot access any kind of child care. It's holding the communities back.

Companies can't recruit workforce to their operations, because, when a family arrives and asks, 'Where's the childcare centre?' they're told, 'Oh, we haven't got one; you'll have to take them to your own family,' and the family says, 'Well, my family doesn't live here. They live in Queensland.' It's creating a handbrake right across the economy. It's the government's role. I've said in this place many times that, in South Australia, we have a thing called rural care. It's where the Department for Education in South Australia stepped up to the plate with 18 centres across South Australia—I think 17 were in my own electorate—recognising that the best organisation to deliver child care in smaller communities is the education department. What we need is for the federal minister to speak to the state ministers about coming to an agreement about how you fill this gap. I have no doubt that, if you've got a population of fewer than 2,000 or 3,000 people, the education department is by far the best organisation to be delivering early years learning. They have schools, staff and campuses. They have administration; they have a gardener—the whole bit. It might run at a loss, but it'll run at less of a loss than anyone else doing it. That's the place for the federal government to step in and find common ground with that state government. I've got centres from all across South Australia in that boat. Towns like Wilmington, Booleroo, Kadina, Kimba—my home town—Wudinna and Orroroo are all looking for increased places or just some places in the childcare system.

This is something that I feel quite passionately about. It shouldn't be acceptable that people in the regions, in the country and in the rural areas get to pay higher taxes to fund a service that they can't access so people in the city can access that service at a cheaper rate. It just doesn't wash with me. It's like universal health care—if it's going to be universal, it has to be universal care. I know we're not going to have brain surgeons in every little country town in Australia, but how about we have doctors in every country town in Australia or we properly fund our hospitals so they can manage and not take away all the skills and responsibilities that small country hospitals have until they are very little more than aged-care services. These services are very important to these communities, but they shouldn't be undermined in their ability to deliver these services. I'll leave my comments with that.

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