Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week was Early Learning Matters Week. I had the pleasure of visiting Goodstart in Wentworthville. I thank the centre director, Rebecca, for that opportunity. It was great to hear directly from early educators about the important role they play in educating our youngest minds, and I saw firsthand quality early learning in action—great educators bonding with young children, supporting their key development needs and helping to set them up for success in school and in life.

Early Learning Matters Week highlights how the first five years of life are critical to children's social, emotional and cognitive development. Most shamefully, the Turnbull government's recent changes to child care, while they have left some families better off, have stopped or reduced support to 279,000 families around Australia. It is funding that families rely on to help balance the household budget when they return to work. In Parramatta alone there are 2,698 families who are worse off because of changes to child care. That is 24 per cent, or one in four, of families who are worse off. This is really worrying as most of the families who are worse off are families in the lowest income cohort—that is, families who have a family income of less than $65,710—and the less money you earn the more worse off you are. The changes exacerbate the difficult problem that parents find when they try to return to work in that they can't get sufficient child care unless they're working sufficient hours and they can't work sufficient hours unless they have child care already lined up. So that catch 22 is already seeing families kept out of the workforce.

On top of the Liberals' childcare debacle, 350,000 children across Australia are about to miss out on preschool because of another change—another cut—of $440 million from the national preschool program when the current funding expires in June 2020. Tanya Plibersek has said that since the first preschool agreement was signed by Labor in 2008 preschool enrolments have increased from 77 per cent to almost 93 per cent. That is incredibly important. All of the research shows that children who attend two days of good-quality early learning have a far better outcome, even at university level, some 20 years later, than those who don't, and the more disadvantaged the child the greater the difference.

We on this side are committed to child care. Our record proves it. We reduced the financial burden of child care on families with increases to the childcare rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent. We increased the childcare subsidy to $7,500 and invested $970 million to create universal access to preschool for four-year-olds in partnerships with the state and territories. They are incredibly important changes for the adults of the future, who are currently at preschool age, and I urge the government to really think seriously about the damage they're doing to children.