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

I want to associate myself with the remarks of the earlier contributions of the members for Macquarie and Cowper in relation to the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs inquiries into domestic and family violence. This legislation before the House, the Early Childhood Education and Care (Three Day Guarantee) Bill 2025, goes to the core of families. Families mean a lot. The meaning of family is vastly different in 2025 than it was just 10 short years ago and certainly back in the sixties and seventies, when I was being raised in a family situation where my late father, Lance, worked the farm at Brucedale between Wagga Wagga and Junee and, prior to that, at Marrar. My late mother, Eileen, stayed at home, and looked after the children—five children. That was pretty much the norm: dads went out and worked and mums stayed at home. But, today, it's very different. It's very much changed. Mothers are now, in fact, in some cases, the sole breadwinner. In other cases, they're the highest-wage earner. Society has become very, very different.

I noted the previous standing committee reports and listened very carefully to the member for Cowper talking about men being the problem and men also being very much at the heart of the solution to domestic and family violence. Being a former police officer and having prosecuted cases of family violence as a lawyer, I can say the member for Cowper is very much right.

Late last year, the director of the Wagga Women's Health Centre, Johanna Elms, who I have a lot of respect for for her vision of what society could look like and certainly how Wagga Wagga could improve, organised, conducted and led a men's forum. It was held at a venue out on the Oura Road. It was to see what community leaders could do about domestic and family violence and how we could be achieving zero violent crimes against women. Ninety to 100 community leaders gathered. It was a men's-only affair. There were no women present. But Ms Elms arranged that particular forum. Everything was on the table.

I have supported the Wagga Women's Health Centre very much. My mother-in-law, Beverley Shaw, worked there for many years. I have supported that centre in my 14 years in the parliament because it has women's issues at the forefront. They were ahead of their time. They began in the 1970s, trying to get access to the pill when it was difficult to do so in Wagga Wagga. It was a very conservative city. They formed that centre. They didn't receive any funding but for some philanthropic donations. They did it on their own. I appreciate there are now calls for a similar type of arrangement for a men's centre and demands that there be state and federal funding for that. But the women, to their credit, did it on their own. This was in an era where we were just starting to have more women in the workforce.

When we were in coalition, I was very proud of the fact there were so many women in the workforce. In fact, the coalition saw women's workforce participation reach record highs, at 62.3 per cent. That was in May 2022, just before this Labor government took office. It was a big lift from when Labor had previously left office in 2013, when it was at 58.7 per cent. So it was quite a sizable and significant jump.

With this particular legislation before the House, it is interesting to read the May 2024 report of GrainGrowers. They placed as one of their main, if not top, items of importance early childhood education and care. This is an agricultural group. In that report—and I will read from it because it is fascinating to hear—they said:

Access to quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) services promotes children's cognitive and socio-emotional development, laying the foundation for academic success and fostering important life skills such as communication, problem-solving, and collaboration.

Mind you, I'm reading from an agriculture report. That's the thing here. They said:

Grain growing takes place in rural, regional and remote areas of Australia, where children and families experience more limited access to a range of quality ECEC services relative to those living in metropolitan centres, and in some instances, have no access at all.

The report continues:

Access to ECEC supports working parents living within grain growing regions by enabling them to pursue employment and education opportunities, thereby helping to alleviate workforce shortages in the grains industry and broader supply chain, and allows for greater economic productivity for our communities.

That's from GrainGrowers. You would think that a report from an organisation which has at its very heart the growing of grain would be talking about, perhaps, the instant asset write-off for harvesters, augers and silos—that happened under the coalition government—but they're talking about an early childhood education and care policy. You can see how society has shifted. You can see the concerns in rural and regional Australia about this very important policy area.

I've said so often—and you do get sneered at by those opposite, who are quick to crow about the fact that they've got cheaper, more affordable child care—that the rub in regional Australia and especially in remote Australia is not affordability; it's availability and accessibility, because in some areas you can't find child care to save yourself. Families, often led by women, and sometimes single-parent families where the mother has custody, can't get access to child care, and they are expected to put food on the table and to earn the money. Some of them are seriously super mums, and we pay credit to them.

We had a situation in Lockhart not that long ago. In the 2021 census—and the minister at the table and I have experience with the census, don't we, Member for Fenner?

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