Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the lead-up to this budget, the Treasurer certainly raised expectations. He talked about the government being very female friendly and said that he was going to respond to the calls of some of his backbench about the crisis in child-care provision. That crisis really relates to the issues of affordability and accessibility. Of course it is partly caused by the hands-off approach of the federal government, leaving it to market forces to determine where new child-care provision will be centred.

Just recently, in a survey of my constituents I learnt that, on average, the cost of long day care in my electorate is about $40 a day and that all the constituents who had problems in placement had children under two whose names were entered on a number of lists to gain access to a place. So, despite the hype surrounding the budget and the promises made by the Treasurer, while it appears that there is a lot going to happen in the child-care sector with the elimination of the cap for outside school and vacation care places and family day care, I think the community needs to realise that not one single extra place is actually guaranteed. It is quite ironic: there are currently 67,000 unused OOSH places and 30,000 unused family day care places, so all the announcement this week is doing is adding to the number of places that are available but not guaranteeing that one place is going to be filled.

I do not think that in my electorate the uncapping of the places will solve the problems that constituents tell me about. In Unanderra and Warilla and the surrounding suburbs, there is not one provider of before school, after school or vacation care. In my electorate we have about 740 OOSH places to service a primary school aged population of around 25,000, so you can see that the number of places per capita in my electorate is woefully inadequate. While the uncapping might be welcomed, there is still the question of who is going to provide the places.

The same problem exists for the under-twos. Most families want a place in long day care. The long day care places for the under-twos in my electorate are provided essentially by the community sector but, again, this sector has found itself in financial difficulties as a result of previous government policies. So it is with the unfilled family day care. It is a great service but the pay is poor and many women have judged that they are better off staying at home, raising their children and receiving family tax benefits. (Time expired)