Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

CHESTER () (): I do take great pleasure in joining the debate this morning. I want to focus my remarks very much along the three key themes of accessibility, affordability and choice. Across this chamber, I have no doubt whatsoever that there is universal recognition of the value of access to child care. There would not be a member in this place who doesn't see the value in having better access to early childhood education to give our young people the best possible start in life. But the question around access is an important one. I fail to see how those opposite can come in here after almost three years and feel confident in lecturing people on this side of the House about the question of accessibility, when not one of them has bothered to listen to the repeated feedback they've received from rural and regional families, from rural and regional members of this place on this side of the House. I see the member for Nicholls here nodding his head and the member for Braddon nodding his head. So to come into this place and have the member for Blair claiming to be a rural and regional member of parliament, when his seat is at best suburban—it is on the periurban interface with Brisbane in South-East Queensland—and lecturing us about rural and regional accessibility to child care after 2½ years is completely ignoring the fundamental question for a lot of our families.

The problem with the direction taken by the government in this legislation is that allowing, or providing for, a minimum of 72 hours a fortnight access to subsidised child care doesn't mean anything if you can't get one day's access to child care. If there is no childcare centre, having three days provided in the suburbs, I'm sorry, doesn't help you at all. That is the fundamental problem—the disconnect in this place. We have members opposite who come in here and yell abuse at this side of the chamber, telling us how we don't know anything. But they never stop to listen to the lived experience of people in rural and regional communities.

One of our biggest challenges in our rural and regional communities is attracting and retaining a workforce for critical areas like health, education, child care, police, paramedics, nurses—you name it. We can't get them to come to regional areas if there isn't access to affordable child care in the towns where they want to be posted to. I can't tell you the number of times I have had conversations with small-town community leaders in my electorate about the paramedic they tried to attract to the region, or the teacher or the nurse, and the stumbling block was the fact there was no child care available to them.

The reason why this access issue has become even more critical is because, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, we all need to understand that the vast majority of families need at least 1½ incomes, possibly two full-time incomes, to be able to pay their bills. So how can those opposite come into this place and lecture members on this side of the chamber who represent rural and regional communities, who live in childcare deserts, who have not seen a single improvement in the last three years addressing this problem, while the Labor Party has continued to inflame the cost-of-living crisis for families in our regions?

On the issue of accessibility, those opposite have failed to address the fundamental problem for a lot of rural and regional families. On the question of affordability, another key theme in child care, we need to ensure that families, right across Australia, are in a position to have their child go to a good-quality childcare centre, if required, but also to be able to afford to pay the bills. I do accept those opposite have worked in relation to increasing the wages for childcare workers, which has been a benefit to a large number of workers in the sector. But one of our problems in that regard is that the centres, where they do exist in regional communities, simply can't operate at full capacity because they can't attract the workforce. Again, there are accessibility issues. I say to those opposite that, with the cost of child care increasing by 22.3 per cent since Labor came to power, this is a piece of public policy that still requires an enormous amount of work. I urge those opposite to work in a bipartisan manner with the coalition to address issues of accessibility and affordability.

Finally, I want to refer to choice. What those opposite don't seem to understand is that individual families, particularly in our regional and rural communities, have different requirements for the early childhood education sector than, perhaps, many of our suburban cousins. I don't pretend to come in here and lecture the member for Jagajaga on the needs of Heidelberg or Ivanhoe, because I don't have a lived experience of those suburban areas. But I will come in here and talk about the needs of my community, where we have people working on farms, sometimes in quite remote locations. We have a disproportionate number of small-business owners in our communities, where you may have a husband-and-wife or family team working together in a small business. We need choice when it comes to child care. We need choice in this sector where it may be more appropriate for some of our rural and regional families to access in-home care, which is subsidised to some extent. We need more support for kinship care. A lot of families in rural and regional communities are relying on other family members to take up the care burden.

Why is there only one government sanctioned form of raising a child in Australia—that being institutionalised child care? What about the families who would prefer to be in a position to care for their own child for longer in their own home? Why have we got ourselves in a position as a nation where we seem to discriminate against those families who would prefer, with a little bit of help from the government, to look after their own children in their own home for longer. It'd be a lot cheaper than subsidising their child care. I don't come in here lecturing those opposite if it's their choice to have their children in long day care, nor should anyone come in here and lecture this side of the House if we represent families in our communities who would prefer to have the option, where possible, to look after their own children for longer. They are both reasonable choices with the best interests of the child at heart. That's a fundamental issue of the debate that we should be having today: where are we placing the best interests of the child in this debate? Surely, if we're talking about early childhood education and care, we have to be fundamentally addressing the needs of the children throughout Australia, whether they live in the suburbs, the inner cities, or in rural, regional or remote communities.

I appeal to those opposite to start taking the time to listen to members on this side with a lived experience of rural, regional and remote communities, because our needs are different when it comes to early childhood education and care. We're fundamentally focused on accessibility. We need access to more and a greater variety of services. In many of our communities, the corporate care for-profit model of 120 kids in a childcare centre just doesn't work. There are going to have to be models in regional communities where we work with local councils, hospitals and big industry, and support childcare facilities being built to support maybe only 20 or 30 children at a time. The accessibility question is fundamental. Again, the affordability question, I see the minister opposite nodding her head in agreement, but the choice question is one that this place has not grappled with, they refuse to respect the different choices Australian families want to make in the interests of their own children.

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