Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Preparing for this grievance debate is very difficult because we are confronted with a veritable panoply of grievances. As each day goes by, you can add to the list. I wish to highlight one particular grievance that I have with the delivery of a piece of public policy and an important service—that is, child care in my electorate—and then show how this has problems that are consistent with a number of other national public policy areas and the way in which the government goes about trying to solve those problems.

In my electorate over the last few weeks a number of people have been returning to work and children have been returning to school. They are starting the new year, and they have found that childcare fees have risen considerably. This is in the context of a report that was released last week by the Treasury in the Treasury round-up which indicated that problems with child care were not as a result of the scarcity of places or of increase in pricing. Really, when mandarins of a department can come to those conclusions, you wonder whether they have spent too much time in Canberra and have not gotten out and about.

In the local papers in my electorate there have been a number of stories that have indicated the way in which the increase in fees is affecting people in their day-to-day lives. In the Whittlesea Leader of last week—6 February—under the headline, ‘Fury on care fee hike’, a constituent, Sylvana Iacuone of Mill Park, was quoted as indicating that now their childcare costs were $240 a week or $12,000 a year. This is actually for a household that is yet to get into the home ownership market. These are people who are trying just to see their way clear. They have quite rightly made a decision that they cannot go forward without both parents working. The circumstances were that, on returning this year, without notice or with less than two weeks notice, the increase of some $50 a week, I think, was announced to them.

This is a real problem because in fact we are seeing the corporatisation and privatisation of child care. We see companies like ABC Learning Centres, which is the company involved, slowly but surely buying up smaller private childcare concerns. The way in which this government has run child care has made it very hard for the community childcare sector.

When the Treasury made the remarks that they did, I was quite amused. I am more than amused that I have to indicate that I agree with the member for Mackellar and her statements about the Treasury analysis. This does make a very strange sort of duo—for me to be quoting from comments that the member for Mackellar has made. But I think that her 18-month chairing of the inquiry of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Family and Human Services into matters to do with child care—even though it came to a rather inglorious conclusion when she perhaps ran roughshod over the committee—did expose her to this particular public policy matter.

She quite rightly says that all of the other evidence goes contra to what the Treasury has said. The Productivity Commission put out a report which said that the main reasons that parents were unable to access additional formal care were that places were booked out, it was not flexible enough to meet their needs and it was too expensive. How can we have such contrary indications by those who are giving advice to the government?

I would hope that members of the backbench of the government are using their new-found voices to place pressure on their executive and say, ‘We think the Treasury has got it wrong.’ If the Treasurer falls into line with that type of policy advice, he is not doing the right thing by the families of Australia, who require childcare services to ensure that they go forward. We have had the infamous Intergenerational report that the Treasurer talked about so much a few years ago. But, once the headline died, where did we see that fitting through into the way in which public policy is put together?

It was interesting to note that over the weekend—this is another grievance that I have—this $1.5 billion package on aged care was announced in the electorate of Greenway. There was no ministerial statement. Today a dorothy dixer was asked and the minister talked, paraphrasing the importance of this. Another heap of money is thrown at a problem. There is no context as to where it fits into the economic and budgetary situation of the government. Appropriation Bill (No. 3) and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) were introduced on Thursday, both with $2.5 billion.

One would have thought that, if we were going to have big announcements already this year—an election year—of $10 billion for the Murray-Darling Basin and $1½ billion or whatever it is for aged care, they would be put in the context of the overall budgetary situation of the Commonwealth. I know I am perhaps asking too much, because the budget is in May, but if we are going to have these sorts of expenditures at this stage, we should be seeing the way in which they fit in.

There is no discussion of the types of problems that the Treasurer announced about how difficult it was for the Commonwealth, the nation, to go forward because of the change in the age of the workforce and the difficulties of the intergenerational transfer of these problems. Yet that is what we expect of a government: we expect a government to govern not just in the short term, to get itself re-elected, but in the longer term to set in place a suite of policies in a whole range of policy areas that are sustainable.

We see, in an outer urban electorate like Scullin, a lack of accessible and affordable childcare places, and a lack of aged-care residential places and insufficient packages to enable the elderly to stay at home. We hope that, in the gesture announced yesterday, there will be sufficient increase in the number of those packages that we might see the opening up of access to those services to people living in the outer urban area. But I just do not have confidence that this government will look beyond an event that is to happen towards the end of this year. We have seen, over the life of the Howard government—and predictably again now, early in an election year—the attitude that: ‘The way to take things forward is to throw buckets of money at them,’ the only intention of which is the re-election of the government, ‘and then, ho-hum, we might think about what solutions are required.’

There has been discussion about whether this is a government led by a tired leader, or a tired government. I think it is a tired government. No matter how often they change the deckchairs of the ministry—and we welcome the new minister at the table, Mr Robb, the Minister for Vocational and Further Education—I do not think that we are going to see the sort of reinvigoration of the government that is required. They will not get it by just changing the faces, because it is the ideology, it is the context of the government that is the problem.

In faint praise of the new minister at the table, he is an example of this; he is an example of a minister who will do anything to ensure the election of the government and therefore has a horizon that is much shorter than one would expect. I think that he should be involved—as somebody who has, I think, the benefit of this nation at heart—in looking to the longer term. He should look to the longer term and not just switch the switches that a polling group or the Textor organisation dictate that he should. If he is really interested in training, let him look at it for the long term and not for the short term.

That is what we expect of a government, and we would hope that the Howard government—and I grieve that this is not the case at the moment—will look to the longer term and see that it has a responsibility to ensure that Australia in the 21st century is a country that looks after all its citizens and looks forward to a prosperous future for those citizens.