Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The Early Childhood Education and Care (Three Day Guarantee) Bill 2025 is an important bill in terms of finally assisting young families in juggling those commitments of parenting, children and working. Support for our working families leads to stronger outcomes for the economy and our community.

The decision about whether to return to work or take more time off to care for a child is a decision that all new parents must face, and all too often women are left with that responsibility. That needs to change. Men and other parents and partners must shoulder more of that proportion and responsibility. Of course, there are trade-offs when that choice of either staying home or going back to work has to be made, whether they be financial or emotional, because none of these choices are easy. I've spoken to many young parents, especially women, across my electorate who rely on many different types of care, from private and public child care to relying on family, to help juggle the demands of working life and the exorbitant cost of accessing child care.

I've been there personally and I understand how incredibly hard and expensive it is. As a barrister and as a sole trader, I didn't get access to any of that assistance. It was a juggle between local childcare centres and my parents assisting me a number of days a week, and I often had to juggle leaving court and leaving chambers early because of the crazy closure times and the penalty rates that apply if you're five minutes late picking your kids up from the childcare centre. It's incredibly hard, and all too often the decks are stacked against women because all too often women are left to shoulder this responsibility. My call-out to men is: it is good for your relationship with your children to spend more time with them. The responsibility of caring should not fall on mothers; it has to fall equally on all parents. It is good for your relationship with your children and for our economy and our society because it means everyone has the opportunity to participate.

All too often for women, the frustration of wanting to go back to work but being penalised by a reduced eligibility to claim days in child care—you have this penalty cliff at which there is a point you are working to pay for it rather than working to get ahead. That is just wrong. Women juggling commitments need to feel supported by the community and our broader society. Parents need to feel supported. This is an essential part of Australia moving forward—being able to have that juggle of family, children and work and progressing careers.

Of course, support comes in many ways, through the childcare system, family support and a broader understanding of the pressure on working parents. The call for universal child care holds significant benefits for our children, and, far too often, it has quite insultingly been pitched as something that is given to women. With respect to every member, it is something given to our society, because we go nowhere unless we have children and we go nowhere unless everyone in our society has the opportunity to work and to contribute and has that equal opportunity to do those things. So universal child care holds significant benefits for our children, our community, our economy and our society.

Of course, for children, it also provides the best opportunity to be happy, safe and secure and it builds the necessary foundations and skills that children need throughout their life, especially when they then enter schooling. It's incredibly important that all children have the opportunity to access that early childcare experience. It's particularly impactful that children who come from disadvantaged backgrounds are able to get into those opportunities. So I very much support the implementation of full, universal access to child care for this minimum of three days, and this bill is a welcome start.

The bill is being introduced because the activity test is broken. The childcare subsidy does not provide an adequate safety net for working families. We have the second-highest childcare costs in OECD countries. It is prohibitively expensive, and, whilst there are childcare deserts and a lack of availability in regional communities, the cost in urban communities is exorbitant. My community would have to have one of the highest costs when it comes to child care. Australian families spend about 27 per cent of their income—that's nearly a third—on child care, compared to the OECD average of 14.5 per cent.

The Productivity Commission's report on universal child care found that 328,000 parents were not entering the workforce due to the affordability and availability of child care. We hear a lot in this place about staffing shortages and skills shortages. You can point to and blame immigration and do all those things, but, ultimately, the first and best thing we can do is utilise, to the best and the fullest capacity, our current population, making sure everyone in our communities now have that equal opportunity to participate. If you think about it, 328,000 parents are not entering the workforce due to the affordability and the availability of child care. So this bill goes some way to fixing that, and I welcome it.

The activity test introduced by the previous government in 2018, designed to encourage workforce participation, was shown not to work. The test is used to determine how much care subsidy a family can receive, but it's linked to hours a parent is working or a parent is volunteering, job hunting, on leave or studying, and it has been heavily criticised, because, unfortunately, it has not resulted in increased workforce participation. In fact, it has disincentivised workforce participation. The Australian Institute of Family Studies's evaluation found no evidence that the activity test caused any increase in workforce participation; instead, it is most likely to hurt lower income families and discourage use of access of early childhood education for their children.

The Productivity Commission, the Thrive by Five campaign and the Parenthood group all have done phenomenal work in raising this issue. This is not a women's issue; this will be a society issue and an economy issue unless we can all participate. It is very good to now be looking at this activity test and getting rid of it. It's too convoluted and difficult to understand. As it was, the subsidy didn't increase enough to cover the added cost of child care as a parent increased their working commitments. Too often parents, usually women, were left to work part time because the cost of going full time or increasing their days was simply too prohibitive. That has so many knock-on effects. It means that women may stay on part-time or casual contracts instead of going into permanent employment. It means that they are not accumulating the same amount of super. It means they are not eligible for the same promotions. You then see that pay gap and that opportunity gap widen.

The focus on the parents in that activity test does not provide an opportunity to allow all children to have the best opportunity to thrive. In fact, families have been found to deliberately keep their hours low enough to receive support. Alarmingly the Productivity Commission found that 70 per cent of sole parents and secondary earners have reduced their hours due to the reduction of childcare subsidies. If there was ever a counterproductive measure, this would have to be it! The ACCC found that families on a lower income spend a greater share of disposable income on child care and are disproportionately impacted by the childcare subsidy activity test. The impact is that some 126,000 children from the poorest households across Australia have missed out on early childhood education, and, unfortunately, that missing out is compounded over the years, and it makes a difference.

This bill reforms the activity test to ensure that families who earn less than $530,000 per year will be guaranteed access to at least three days a week, or 72 hours per fortnight, of subsidised child care. According to the Department of Education, households earning between $50,000 and $100,000 per year will save around $15,000 a year. This is really significant. It provides a guaranteed 100-hour entitlement per fortnight for parents caring for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child. And I welcome that additional provision for First Nations Australians.

It's a high-stakes road map; there is no doubt. The bill presents an opportunity to improve gender equity by providing more choice between increasing caring responsibility and entering the workforce. It's a first step to make universal child care available for all Australian families. Better access to affordable child care leads to additional hours of work by more parents joining the workforce. It's estimated that the taxation uplift will actually be in the order of some $292 million, and it will increase Australia's GDP by some $6 billion. So I dare anyone in this place to oppose the bill and say that somehow this is not a good measure.

The bill presents an opportunity for children to access high-quality child care that will set them on the right path. Now, of course, this only works if we couple this with a measure to make sure child care is available in all communities in Australia. I've heard many from the opposition, in their speeches, talk about the childcare deserts. That does not warrant opposing this bill. It means go to the table, sit down with the government. You find ways to do it on other issues, so sit down and work out how we can roll out childcare centres so they are available in every community in Australia. Pointing at the lack of availability is not a reason to not support making it available and more affordable to all. It's so important.

I've spoken many times in this place about the need to help women participate equally in work and strengthen our gender equity, including in our superannuation laws and paid parental scheme. For me, this campaign to increase the childcare subsidy to provide more support for working families is essential. That's why it is so important to be committed to having more voices in this place, more diversity. Especially, it is about having more women's voices in this place—to make sure that these issues are not pigeonholed but are put front and centre of good economic management.

This bill is welcome, but more can be done. The activity test still needs reforming. I think we need to remove the activity test completely to ensure greater universal childcare access. The affordability is one piece of the puzzle, but it doesn't work without access to high-quality childcare centres. So, as I said, we need to do more about this. During the break, the government committed to funding and constructing more. They have committed to 160 centres. Unfortunately, I remember at the time there was a media outcry about the scale of that spend. Well, you can't come into this place and complain about the lack of availability, oppose the measure to build and support more child care and then also oppose making it more affordable for families. And you can't then go out to communities and say you're somehow in this place fighting for families.

I support the government on this issue. We need to do more to make sure that there are more centres built and, in particular, that regional and rural Australia has access to child care. Victoria University has done a study which shows that 24 per cent of Australians live where there is a lack of childcare availability. There are more than three children for each childcare spot. So it's slightly better than in 2020, when it was 34 per cent, but it shows that there's still a lot to do; there is so much more that needs to be done.

Yes, I represent an urban community, but I am acutely aware that child care needs to be available to all Australians. All communities need to have access to quality child care so that all Australian children have that opportunity to develop. So I encourage the government to consider incentives to increase availability of high-quality education and early learning, such as rewarding centres if they meet or exceed national quality standards. We need to make sure there are incentives.

Of course, we have labour shortages, so the question will be whether we have enough people to staff these centres. So, again, it's making sure qualified staff are available. We know that they're struggling to find qualified staff, and it's putting extra pressure on families as centres cap the number of places due to staffing shortages. Now, of course, that is linked to wages and whether or not it's an attractive career pathway. Median wages for early childhood teachers are about 20 per cent lower than those of primary school teachers. They have poorer working conditions, fewer leave days and greater workplace pressures. More than half of graduates of early childhood education degrees choose employment in primary school, so clearly we still do not have parity across these education sectors and we are picking and choosing which ones we value. We need to do better to make sure that the entire pathway is supported and equitable.

The government's commitment to early childhood education is welcome, but, as I said, more can be done. So it comes again to that coordination piece at the state and territory and federal levels to improve the recruitment and retention of early childhood educators: removing unnecessary workforce barriers, such as moving between state and territory jurisdictions; improving opportunities for career development, such as early career support and mentoring programs; and, of course, wage increases.

So I welcome this legislation. It is an essential part of us having an equitable society where men and women—all parents—have the opportunity to juggle the responsibility of parenting with working and making a financial contribution by being in paid employment. It is so important that early child care be available. Ultimately, it is a key to us having a smart next generation. We know that the data shows that engagement in early child care helps development and improves learning outcomes as children go on to primary school.

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