Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

'Absolutely,' he says. He'd be interested to know that Lockhart's population was 3,319. There was no childcare centre in that town, in that shire. It is a huge grain-growing area—one of the very best in Australia—which was once represented in this place by the late great Tim Fisher. It's not far from Boree Creek, a town that Tim put on the map. Of course, the Lockhart council came in to see what it could do to fill the void left by the closure of the childcare centre.

Councils have to do more and more of the heavy lifting when it comes to not just child care but the other end of the scale. Coolamon Shire has a population of 4,385. For some years, its council has provided the aged-care services in that shire, which is only three-quarters of an hour's drive north-west of Wagga Wagga, with a population of more than 70,000. But unless the shire council, which runs the Allawah Lodge, did the aged-care services, there wouldn't be any aged-care services at all. The sad reality is that, unless local government steps up to fill the void in child care, there won't be any child care at all in some of these centres the size of Lockhart. It's not right. Yet we have a government spruiking the affordability of child care. It can be as cheap as anything—it can have a zero cost—but if you don't have a childcare centre then it's of no use at all. That is the point when coalition members argue about the childcare desert.

I hear so often about the childcare desert from the member for Mallee, who represents the largest electorate in Victoria. I've heard her eloquently describe the lack of childcare services in that sprawling Victorian electorate. Then there's the retiring member for Parkes. His electorate makes up half of the landmass of New South Wales, and one of the biggest issues in that electorate is childcare access. It's not affordability. It's access and availability. When you have families desperately needing services, desperately seeking places for the ability for them to go out and work, put food on the table and contribute to the economic wealth of this nation, but they can't find placements for their children, then it is something. There is market failure, that somebody, somewhere, somehow has to address.

There are several issues with this bill, including the removal of priority access for working families. It disincentivises aspiration, it increases access without addressing supply issues—something that I was talking about earlier—and it does nothing to increase access or flexibility for families. This is the issue. It's all well and good for Labor government members to talk about affordability. Again, if you don't have the infrastructure, if you don't have the service and if you don't have the people running the childcare centres, that issue of affordability is a moot point. It doesn't address current cost-of-living pressures.

I know that yesterday Labor finally, finally, finally—I harp on that point—lifted the biosecurity tax. Some might ask, 'What's that got to do with this particular childcare policy?' The biosecurity tax was forcing our farmers, many of whom often need childcare access, to pay the biosecurity measures of competitors who were coming in from foreign countries to sit on the supermarket shelves in opposition to ours. We have been banging on about this for months, and I know that Colin Bettles from Grain Producers sat in all the second reading speeches in the Federation Chamber about this. I didn't hear a jot from too many other stakeholders—disappointingly so, I have to say—but it's the same sort of people who were yesterday praising the agriculture minister for lifting it. About time, because our farmers need every bit of help.

And they need every bit of help when it comes to matters such as this—childcare support, childcare access and childcare availability. That's the issue, that's the rub. We talk—and I listened to the member for Macquarie and the member for Cowper—about the pressures on strained families. We don't need our families to be under any more pressure, and we need to absolutely support our families as best we can, so that local government areas such as Lockhart don't have to then try to fill the void left by a centre closure, so that local governments can get on with the job of filling potholes, fixing the roads, repairing the roads, putting bitumen down, picking up the bins and organising what they do, and do very, very well. They shouldn't have to be in this space.

The bill has been referred to a Senate inquiry, with a reporting date of 21 March 2025. Let's hope it's not too late to get something positive and meaningful done in this space, particularly about accessibility and availability of childcare services in regional and remote Australia.

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