Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to speak on the Early Childhood Education and Care (Three Day Guarantee) Bill 2025. I'll set out the legislation and what it is replacing, and then I'll talk a bit about our view of this and what the consequences would be on the ground. This is another piece of flawed legislation by this government that will have consequences. They may be intended or unintended, but they'll be detrimental for our country as a whole. That's the way we view this.

Firstly, the bill amends the A New Tax System (Family Assistance) Act 1999, removing reference to the childcare subsidy activity test and replacing it with the new three-day guarantee. It gives effect to the announcement made by the Prime Minister.

What was the activity test and why was it there? Firstly, what did the activity test do? It meant that parents and carers needed to be working or looking for work, studying or volunteering to be eligible for the finite—and I use that word 'finite'—subsidised care places. I note that volunteering and looking for work only counted towards the first 16 hours of your activity level. There was a whole formula: less than eight hours, zero hours; if you earn above $83,280, 24 hours; and the more hours you worked, the more hours of subsidised care you got each fortnight.

There were exemptions to that. They were carefully thought out and put into place by the previous coalition government. They were that parents and carers would be eligible for 36 hours a fortnight if they identified as Indigenous, were Parent Pathways participants and received an eligible income support payment. There were mutual obligations if you were receiving one of these payments, whether it be JobSeeker, parenting payment or special benefit, or if you had a child who attended preschool. They were designed to assuage some of the things that I think the member for Fenner was talking about and to try to get child care to the people who needed it.

To go back to first principles: why do we have child care/early childhood education? It is certainly a finite resource. In fact, the demand significantly outstrips the supply—particularly in regional and rural electorates, like the one I represent, Nicholls, where we have what are referred to as childcare deserts, and I'll talk a bit about that later. The first principles are that child care for a certain age enables working families to get back into the workforce sooner than they otherwise would, and that gives us a productivity boost in Australia. We certainly need productivity increases at the moment—perhaps now more than ever, while we've got a productivity crisis that is a causal factor of our inflation situation, which then impacts the cost-of-living crisis. Productivity is so important to us addressing that.

The childcare focus was about improving productivity—and not making a judgement as to what people want to do, but making sure that choice was respected. So if you chose that you didn't want to go back to work and you had the resources or that that was what you wanted to do, then you could do that. But, if you did want to get back into the workforce, for the variety of reasons that people have—for the extra income, or because you liked being in the workplace, as some people do more than others—then, again, there was no judgement as to that. Some people don't want to continue on with their career development as well as having children. Basically, this respected the choice of all Australians.

So the childcare arrangements that existed tried to prioritise the people who wanted to get back into the workforce—we wanted them to be in the workforce, and I'll give you some examples of that—by making sure that they were able to get their children into the finite childcare places that existed, and it has had a positive effect. When you see the childcare desert situation get worse, you can see the negative effect that has.

I sat in a park in a place called Seymour, in my electorate, having advertised, 'Anyone who wants to discuss this childcare issue and the lack of childcare places, come and see me in the park,' and I had a number of parents come and see me in that park, and we sat down and talked about things. I remember one mother speaking to me about just not being able to get the hospital shifts she wanted—she was a nurse in an already worker depleted health system in regional Victoria—and not being able to get a childcare place. She couldn't go back and do the work that she wanted to do and we needed her to do. She spoke to me about her frustration at that, and the frustration with the hospital that she worked at because they're short of workers. That's the problem that we encounter with the lack of investment in new childcare places.

What we're worried about in relation to the three-day guarantee is that, because everyone's guaranteed a place in child care, whether you're working or studying or you're not working—again, I want to emphasise that we on this side and, I think, everyone place no judgement on that. Everyone's free to live their life as they want, and we want them to have the choice to do that. But if those finite places are taken up by people who are putting their children into child care and not working, then, logically, there are going to be fewer places in child care for people who do want to work. Those people are doing jobs that need to be done.

In my own experience—we had our daughter just over 16 years ago, and then we had a son over 14 years ago—my wife and I each had careers in our own professions. I was working in agricultural science; she was working in animal nutrition. We wanted to spend as much time as we could with our daughter, when she was a baby, and there was some good maternity leave, as it was called then; we hadn't quite moved on to paternity leave, but we were able to have some good time. But she wanted to go back to work, I wanted to be at work and we faced the struggles that young families face—mortgage repayments, wanting to get ahead in the world, wanting to pay our house down and also wanting to keep moving in career progression, and wanting to balance that out with the joy and the benefit to Australia of having children, like so many families want to do. We want to make sure that choice and that balance is there for them. So we put our daughter into child care, very successfully, and then we did the same with our son. My wife and I were in the workforce, doing jobs that were incredibly important to the agricultural industries of the Goulburn Valley. Agriculture is, of course, what makes the Goulburn Valley tick.

One of the first principles is that child care is finite. I would love for everyone to have access to child care. I'd love for everyone to be given a million bucks. I'd love for this parliament to be able to give everyone in Australia everything they want. The idealists and the activists who come to this place, some of whom will never govern, often say those things. They want to give everything to everyone because it feels great. But the trouble is that we have finite resources in this country. We have finite workers. We have finite tax dollars. We've got to make difficult decisions about priorities. This piece of legislation skews the priorities in a way that, I think, will mean that people who would like to get back into the workforce, particularly in rural and regional areas, will find it more difficult because the already limited childcare industry—when I say limited, I mean limited in terms of places—will become even more difficult to access because of the three-day guarantee. I worry about the unintended consequences for regional economies like mine, where we are begging for workers. We're begging for workers to come and live in the regions.

We've got professional jobs. We've got trade jobs. We've got all sorts of jobs that are not being filled in our burgeoning economy—in places like Greater Shepparton, Seymour, along the Murray in Echuca, Cobram and Yarrawonga—and, because we've got these limited childcare places, parents are not able to go and participate in the workforce in the way they want to. I just worry this is going to make it worse. I worry this is going to make it worse, and then we're going to get a productivity hit. We can't afford another productivity hit.

People from regional Australia often talk about childcare deserts, and we don't seem to get much buy-in. Although I do acknowledge that there does appear to be some funding for new childcare facilities, I'll be interested to see how that works and whether that is focused on regional areas. I think it's been referred to a Senate inquiry and I'll be interested to see what that comes up with. I note that previous Labor governments have promised to build a lot of new facilities but have fallen short in those areas. I'll say this to the government: I would have been much more likely to support this sort of legislation had you sorted out the supply side first.

If the supply side gets sorted out, and if you can guarantee that this three-day guarantee is not going to keep any working family from being able to access child care and enable them to get back into the workforce—and I saw it on the ground. There are a range of different options, and sometimes those options require flexibility. Family day care seems to be getting harder to do. A lot of families in my electorate have been so successful with that family day care. People who had run those businesses are no longer doing it. They say that the current government regulation just makes it impossible to do that. That makes it harder.

I also think that there's a lot of opportunity around large employers in regional areas being able to set up their own childcare facilities. But, again, I'm told that that's very difficult. This place, this building, has a childcare facility, and that's fantastic. We want more parents to be able to work in this place, and I think the fact that they can drop the kids off at the creche here is great. Wouldn't it be great to have that in more locations in regional Australia?

The principle of this is that the activity test was good. People want to give everything to everyone, and I do understand that. But, when you're governing, you've got to make difficult decisions to try and prioritise resources where you get the most bang for buck. In this case, from my perspective, it's a productivity bang for buck. Do we get more productivity out of prioritising working families for child care or the three-day guarantee? I certainly think it's the former.

Again, I just want to emphasise that I don't make any judgement. I think it's fantastic if people want to stay home and look after their children. If they make the decision that the finances don't work for them to get back into work and do that, I understand that. This is about respecting everyone and their choice. But the most important thing is Australia has never needed its productivity to be increased further than now. Limiting child care for working families is a productivity-sapping measure, and I think we should oppose it.

See this speech in context