Scott Morrison (Cook, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the amendments be agreed to.

I am pleased to support the amendments put forward by the Senate on what is a very important and significant piece of policy reform that will make child care and early education services in Australia more affordable for the vast majority of hardworking Australian families. It is a substantial reform that will increase the opportunities and choice families have to balance work and family life. Our reforms give hardworking lower-income families an increase in their effective rate of subsidy on their childcare costs from around 72 per cent to 85 per cent and provide support to families who earn less than $350,000 as a household. A family earning around $60,000 a year whose childcare centre charges around $100 a day would pay just $15 per day for the care of their child and with just one child in child care would be around $2,000 per annum better off as a result of the proposals and the reforms of the Turnbull government in this package. Families earning $60,000, $70,000 or $80,000 per annum—hardworking families—will find that they are all significant beneficiaries of these changes.

Family eligibility for the childcare subsidy is determined by a three-step activity test that more closely aligns hours of subsidised care with the combined amounts of work, training, study, volunteering or other recognised activity undertaken. This is an important part of the reform that was recommended through the Productivity Commission, and I pay tribute to then Minister Ley, who recommended that the commission be undertaken. It ensures that the greatest number of hours of support go to those families who are working, studying or volunteering the longest number of hours. It is estimated that our reforms will encourage more than 230,000 families to increase their involvement in paid employment.

We know that children from disadvantaged backgrounds benefit from quality early childhood education and care, which is why we are providing additional support to those who need it. The childcare safety net will support families earning around $65,000 a year or less who do not meet the activity test by providing up to 24 hours of subsidised care per fortnight. This is the equivalent of two weekly six-hour sessions and will be provided at the highest rate of subsidy for these families, which I again note increased from 72 per cent from what they would otherwise receive, to 85 per cent under our reforms. Our reforms will place downward pressure on what has been incessant childcare fee increases through an hourly rate cap as well as abolishing the current childcare rebate cap for most families and increasing it from $7½ thousand to $10,000 for higher-income families above $185,000. We will introduce new compliance powers to further strengthen the government's efforts to clamp down on fraud, provide a childcare safety net for the most vulnerable children, and slash red tape so that services can offer more flexible hours.

These are important reforms. They are going to make a very big difference to help hardworking Australian families. They are going to make our system of childcare payments and benefits far more effective in the future. And I endorse the amendment put forward by the Senate. I am very pleased particularly to be able to be speaking on this message in that these measures were put together when I was the Minister for Social Services. I want to pay credit to Minister Birmingham and Minister Ley, who also had carriage of these matters. This has been a long two-year process. We have been very committed to seeing these changes come into this place and be supported to help hardworking Australian families to get access to the affordable child care that they need, to help those disadvantaged families through the safety net program.

Early childhood education has an important impact on the lives of young Australians and can be the absolute game changer for them and their future opportunities. This package supports them in that objective while supporting the families to be able to go out there and take part in our growing economy and seek the additional hours in the work that they need to support their families. This is the right package for Australia. It is a package that has been fought hard for by the coalition government. It has been resisted now for two years, and I am so pleased, having been directly involved in structuring these reforms, that this parliament is now in a position to finally give hardworking Australian families the affordable child care that they deserve and that the Turnbull government is delivering for them.

Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As Labor made clear in the Senate, we will not be standing in opposition to these amendments to the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Jobs for Families Child Care Package) Bill 2016. We do have some concerns that we will place on the record, but our concern, in all of this debate, has never been about the high-income-earning families who will be affected by these amendments; our concern has been and remains those incredibly vulnerable and disadvantaged children at the other end of the spectrum who will be significantly disadvantaged as a result of this package.

These amendments that the parliament is currently debating will cut off subsidies entirely from high-income-earning families. As I said, Labor is not standing in opposition to that. But we do need to say that this will actually be the first time that not every child in Australia has had a universal entitlement to some sort of subsidised early childhood education. And that does set a precedent. It sets a precedent that, if you carried it through, would mean that, for schooling, higher-income families would have to start paying much higher fees to access public schools. It would mean that we would start putting the income of the parents onto the consideration of the early education that their children receive.

We believe that there should be some universal entitlement to early childhood education in the country. We also believe that we should be moving our early childhood education and care system closer to the schooling system, not further away from it. We do not want to see policy which entrenches a backward step where we view child care as a babysitting service, not as quality early childhood education and care, which we know we need to be moving towards.

I would also note that, as the Treasurer just pointed out, these bills have been debated for two years. The amendments that stand before the House were put to the Senate at the last minute, after three Senate inquiries which did not consider these amendments. After a number of submissions and debates over two years, these were last-minute amendments.

No work has been done to look at the workforce participation impacts of these amendments. We know that we are talking about means testing on family income, not on the secondary-income-earner's contributions. So there has been no work around workforce participation. The other thing we do not know is the behavioural impacts and what this will do for these families' decisions. If they are getting no subsidies, why not withdraw their children from regulated, quality, early childhood education and care services and instead invest in nannies, which they can have in their own home but which we know are not regulated and do not have to meet the same standards of care? So there are implications of this which the parliament should watch carefully.

Our concern, all along, has not been about high-income-earning families, though; it has been about some of the most disadvantaged children in Australia. Sadly, these were the children who were sold out in the Senate as a result of the dirty deal done when Nick Xenophon and his team and One Nation agreed with the government that—despite the fact that we are spending an extra $1.6 billion in child care as a result of these measures—some of the most vulnerable children in Australia would not only not receive any additional support but in fact would have their access to early childhood education and care halved. That is what this piece of legislation does.

It is sickening to me that we would stand here as a parliament and say that we are going to bring into place these reforms, to put a few extra dollars in middle-class parents' pockets, but, at the same time, turn our backs on children who may be living in families where there is intergenerational unemployment. They will have their hours of access to early childhood education and care cut, to the point where—while, at the moment, they can attend two days a week—under these reforms, they will receive only one day's care. That is what the debate has been about. So some might like to say that there has been some pedantic debate about whether these children should receive 12 hours or 15 hours. That is not what this is about. It is about the fact that, at the moment, children have access to two days' or 24 hours care; under this proposal, that would be cut to just 12 hours.

The entire early childhood education and care sector has unanimously said: there is no way that they can continue to deliver two days' care when they are only getting subsidies for 12 hours. They have said that the minimum it would take is 15 hours. That is why Labor has stood up and fought for those children. And we will stand up and fight for them in the future. We know that, if we do not stand up and fight for some of the most vulnerable children in Australia, we are locking them in to more generations of welfare dependency. It is short-sighted policy. It is wrong. And the Senate was wrong to sign off on it.

Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the amendments be agreed to.

Question agreed to.