Wayne Swan (Lilley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Another day, another broken promise from the Abbott government, this time impacting quite dramatically on family day care. Family day care is an absolutely essential community service to provide backup for working families to get that balance between working life and personalised care, frequently in the home and frequently out of typical work hours. I have had some experience with family day care over the years. I respect the quality that is provided by family day care—the professionalism of those who are working in services such as the Bramble Bay Family Day Care Service, at Sandgate, and the Wesley Mission Family Day Care, at Chermside.

All of this is now under threat. A little over a year ago Tony Abbott promised no cuts to education—of course, he promised a lot of things. In his first budget, however, $1 billion in funding has been cut out of early childcare services alone. Of that $1 billion, $157 million will be slashed from family day care funding by changing the eligibility for the community support program. So if there happens to be a service in a particular area, and there are two services that may cover a similar geographic area, these cuts will mean that one service will no longer be eligible at all under the new rules for funding. So, in the case of my area, you could possibly see one service simply knocked out in its entirety. That is before you get to the impact of these cuts on the individual services. So in that case there will be no second chances. One could be completely knocked out.

We estimate that over 80 per cent of family day care services will have a funding cut. In Queensland alone, it will be 110 family day care services. This is very important for those areas that do not have the typical long day care services that many areas have come to accept. These 110 family day care services provide care for approximately 30,000 kids.

As a result of all of that, we are going to see less funding, which means less professional help, less professional tutoring and less professional backup to those family day care providers in the home. We simply do not know how much, but it will mean people will be losing their jobs in the services. Frequently these will be people who have been providing these services for years—people who are highly respected, people who are highly trained, people who have an enormous capacity to contribute to the quality of care.

This has been a very nasty budget and we are now beginning to see its full impact across a range of services in our local communities. On this occasion it is going to smash elements of family day care which are absolutely essential to working families getting the care they need, particularly out of hours, for their kids when they go to work.