Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to debate child care in this House today. We don't often get to discuss early education and care in this parliament, but this bill is a bill that is long overdue. The bill is officially named the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Building on the Child Care Package) Bill 2019 but it really should be named 'Fixing some of the government's childcare systems stuff-ups bill'. Rather than building on the package, what this bill actually does is fix some of the design faults that the government system missed in the original bill. Almost a year and a half on, the government is finally getting around to fixing up problems that have been evident from day one.

This bill will extend the time frame for enrolments ceasing due to nonattendance from eight to 14 weeks. Labor supports this change as it fixes one of the most ridiculous design faults with the government system. It's almost comical that the government designed a system that kicks families out of the system after eight weeks when the school term goes for 12 weeks and the thousands of families using vacation care only access the system every 12 weeks. If you're one of these families you'll be kicked off every eight weeks, meaning you'll have to go through the whole registration system all over again. The amendment before us means that families using vacation care every school holidays won't have to reregister for the system with Centrelink every term. This is something that should have been done and foreseen at the outset of the package and is something that the sector has raised on many occasions. Anything that reduces the amount of time families have to spend trying to contact Centrelink or trying to register with Centrelink is something that Labor will support.

The bill also improves the treatment of third-party payments in calculating the childcare subsidy, and this is also welcome. The government designed a system so that a childcare subsidy would only be calculated after state, territory and third-party contributions were applied to the childcare fee, meaning that some low-income and vulnerable families were still facing out-of-pocket fees when the intent of the state and philanthropic programs was to eliminate, or significantly reduce, the cost of accessing early learning and care. State and territory governments and the sector have been lobbying this government since July 2018 to make this change. So it is definitely in this case better late than never when it comes to this government's action.

The government has also seen common sense with the provision of this bill to remove the 50 per cent limit on the number of children that a provider can self-certify for the additional childcare subsidy for child wellbeing, although this will not come in for some time. It is a mystery why the government decided to introduce this arbitrary rule in the new system which completely ignores the reality of life for some of the most disadvantaged communities in Australia. Labor will support this change.

The additional childcare subsidy for child wellbeing is a vital program that provides a safe and nurturing learning environment for children in extremely vulnerable situations at home. For most of these children it can be the difference between being able to stay at home or having to go into the child protection system. It is critical the government treat this program with sensitivity and ensure that families and providers are not overly burdened with red tape. This Liberal-National government is doing exactly that. The introduction of a number of new requirements and rules to access the additional childcare subsidy came into force last year. The government cut the number of weeks that a provider can initially claim the subsidy on behalf of a family from 13 to six and stopped the provider from handling the application on behalf of the family. They now require the provider to work with the family to collect all the evidence that's required in order to qualify for the payment and to notify state and territory authorities. And they require Centrelink to process and approve the application within six weeks. That's a herculean task. When Centrelink fails to approve the paperwork within six weeks, claims are backdated only 28 days, meaning debts are accumulating.

This third-term government like to bang the drum about cutting red tape. It is a media release they put out on a regular rotation. But they go out of their way to increase red tape for vulnerable families and the early education providers that are trying to help those families. The numbers prove that the government's new rules are failing vulnerable children and families. In the first six months of the new system, the number of children receiving the child wellbeing subsidy collapsed by 21 per cent. When asked in Senate estimates if they were concerned about the drop, the department admitted they weren't. They also confessed that they weren't even tracking whether families had dropped out of the system. Unfortunately, this is not surprising behaviour from a government that has not focused on vulnerable children's access to early education. Ensuring that vulnerable and disadvantaged children access early education is of critical importance in ensuring they get the best start to life and don't start school already behind.

Most of the other provisions in this bill are minor and technical amendments, which Labor will support; however, there is one provision in this bill that Labor will not support. In the current system, families registering for the subsidy have a 28-day grace period in which to provide their bank account and tax file numbers. Families are able to claim the subsidy and have 28 days to get those details to Centrelink. That is reasonable and rational, as it recognises that people don't always have their personal details handy when they interact with government. Unfortunately, it seems far too sensible for the government. We now see that items 35 to 38, 41, 42, 50 and 51 in schedule 1 of the bill remove the current 28-day grace period, so families will not be approved for the subsidy unless they have their personal details on hand. Of course, the government has claimed that this will reduce complexity in the system, and it's true that it might make it easier for Centrelink. But it won't make it easier for families; in particular, families in stress, who may be fleeing a domestic violence situation or natural disaster and who don't have time to grab all their paperwork as they leave the house. Families in stress still need their child to enjoy the benefits of early learning and care, as they want to maintain some kind of routine or normality for their children, but if they don't have the details then this government will not allow them to enrol in early education.

Almost every single submission to the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee's review of this bill was critical of this change. Childcare providers and their peak bodies are clear that this is a regressive change that will impact those families least able to cope. Labor does not find this provision acceptable and so will be moving an amendment to remove it from the bill. I do note that the minister has indicated the government will move an amendment in the Senate to allow families in crisis to apply for an exemption from this new policy. Labor will not oppose this amendment, and I'm pleased the minister has responded to some of the concerns of the sector. But to me it sounds like there'll be increasing complexity in the system for families and providers, because the Secretary of the Department of Education will be required to grant the exemption. Twenty-eight days is not a significant length of time. Why burden the secretary with this type of work? Why not just let families have their grace period of 28 days to get their tax file number or bank account details, rather than have a system that requires an exemption granted by the secretary? By the time that happens, the 28-day period is probably going to be finished. Labor think that our amendment provides a better solution. Retaining the 28-day grace period is a simple and effective response to the concerns raised by both the sector and families.

The bill presents modest improvements to the government's childcare system, but it doesn't rectify some of the biggest problems. This is a system which leaves one in four families worse off. It's a design feature that access to early education and care did reduce for approximately 279,000 families. It is a system that only 40 per cent of providers and only 41 per cent of families told the independent evaluation reviewers had resulted in positive change, and 83 per cent of parents told the evaluation team that the new system had made no impact on their work and study. It's a system that has been forcing childcare providers to act as unpaid debt collectors for the government, because families are struggling to stay on top of their complicated activity and means tests. It is a system that has been riddled with software glitches, left providers and families in the dark, and left staff without pay. To claim that this bill before the House builds on the current system is stretching credibility.

Labor's view is that this bill is only ironing out a few of the kinks in the system but doesn't really touch the rough edges. A bill that truly built on the childcare package would include provisions that would abolish the regressive activity test. When it implemented the new system, the government acted against all evidence and advice highlighting the benefits of universal access to early education and care, and introduced a new activity test in order to qualify for 24 hours of subsidy. If this bill were to genuinely build on the childcare system, it would restore the guarantee that existed of two days a week of child care for all children and the childcare safety net that occurred under the old system. Families used to receive 24 hours a week of guaranteed access to early education in which they could access the childcare subsidy. This government cut it to 12 hours a week. A bill that truly built on the current system would fix the complete mess the government has made of the additional childcare subsidy. It would stop the government's Centrelink robo-debt letters which are being sent out, blunt letters telling families that they owe the government money, without any explanation. So far, over 91,000 families, or 16 per cent of families audited so far, have been hit with a childcare subsidy debt notice. Many of these families are finding that, if they do pursue this debt notice, they don't actually owe as much money as was stated in the letter. This is more evidence that the new system is too complex and is not working for families.

If the government was serious, it would do something to bring childcare fees under control, which have shot up 30 per cent under this government. The latest CPI figures show that childcare fees have increased by 2.5 per cent in the September quarter alone, the fourth successive increase, and have now gone up by seven per cent since last September. The government was very confident last year that their new system, in their words, would put downward pressure on fees and that they were driving down the cost of child care. The minister was keen to spruik the new website as a game changer for families and told families to shop around, but less than half of providers are providing accurate fee information on their website, making it incredibly hard for families to even get accurate information about fees. We don't hear the minister make these claims anymore, which is disappointing. Unfortunately, all the spin has been blown away by the reality.

Unfortunately, like with every other portfolio, the government has provided no plan or view about how to actually bring fees under control. We've had a couple of thought bubbles that have been dropped previously to Sunday papers, including the naming and shaming of centres that hike their fees, but nothing has actually come of that. Families are now paying on average $3,000 a year more for early education and care under this government. A bill that improved on the current system would have, if they were serious, restored the $20 million in annual funding that the government have slashed from the National Quality Framework budget. The latest data shows that 21 per cent of services have been assessed as not meeting the national quality standards. The minister needs to restore this funding and assure families that all centres are safe and up to standard. But none of this is a surprise—after all, this is the government that has a senator who believes early education, and I quote, is not the best way to invest in our future; a Minister for Education claiming the taxpayer funding of early education and care is communism; and a Prime Minister who calls the childcare budget a money pit.

Unfortunately, this government haven't taken the early years seriously. They see it as a burden, not as an investment. But, of course, it is an investment. Labor are always pleased to ensure we are advocating for children, as I did this morning at an event here at Parliament House. We will advocate for investment in the early years. We will support most of this bill because it does make some progress towards making the system work better for families, but we do believe the government has a long way to go.

Kate Thwaites (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to join my colleague the member for Kingston in rising to speak on the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Building on the Child Care Package) Bill 2019 because access to affordable and quality child care is something Australian families rightly expect. As we know, this government introduced its new childcare system in July 2018 and since then we have heard stories from families and childcare providers about systemic design flaws and the administrative burdens the new system has imposed on them. So it is pleasing the government is finally addressing some of these concerns.

As the member for Kingston said, we don't often get the opportunity to talk about early childhood education in this House but we do know how important it is. It leads to improved developmental outcomes for children and it has positive effects on wellbeing, learning and development. The brain sensitivity of highly important developmental areas such as social skills, language and numeracy peaks in our first three years of life. Across the OECD, data shows us that 22 per cent of students who had attended early education for less than a year performed below the baseline level of proficiency in science yet only 10 per cent of students who attended more than two years of preschool were below the baseline. This means students are twice as likely to underperform in science if they attend less than one year of preschool, which is very important if we think about the skills our children are going to need for the future.

Access to quality, affordable child care is not just important for children; it's essential for families who are juggling the responsibilities of working, studying, being active members of their community and raising their children. I know parents in my electorate feel this juggle keenly. In many cases, arrangements about who does pick up, who does the drop off and which day the grandparents are required are so finely tuned that the slightest pressure means the whole arrangement breaks. We know, from this government's own evaluation of its childcare system, that 63 per cent of parents reported they did not understand at all or have much understanding of the new payment system. In fact, one parent reported that they needed to call Centrelink more than 20 times—and anyone who has had to call Centrelink knows it can be a trying experience. I have to admit that, in my own household, I looked at the complicated assessment and application process that the government was expecting for the childcare payment and I promptly handed that administrative burden straight over to my partner. He has handled that admirably, but not everyone is that lucky and it should not be that difficult. The last thing parents need is a system that makes it more administratively difficult for them, that adds extra to the already considerable mental load and stress of parenting. It is good that this bill addresses some of the issues that have proved to be a block faced by families accessing child care.

However, there is one element of the bill that is concerning, as the member for Kingston has outlined: the changes to the process for registering for the CSS, which remove the 28-day period in which applicants may provide their tax file number and/or bank account details. We know the child care sector is extremely concerned about this change and its potential impact on families in difficult circumstances who do not have immediate access to their personal documents. This may include families fleeing family violence or those displaced by natural disasters. These families may, in effect, be locked out of the system at a time when they need it most, and I urge the government to reconsider this change.

There are also a number of issues that this bill does not address. I'm particularly concerned that the government hasn't taken the opportunity to address the activity test and the minimum number of hours under the childcare safety net or considered the disproportionate effect this has on families from disadvantaged backgrounds. The first five years of a child's life are crucial. In these early years, 80 per cent of their brain develops. These years set up a child for life and they're vital in ensuring they start school with the communication skills, general knowledge, social language, cognitive skills and emotional maturity that will help them succeed. Research tells us that if students start school from behind, they are often left behind throughout their schooling. Research also shows us that children from low-income families are twice as likely to start school developmentally behind their peers from high-income families but that access to early education can reduce that risk significantly.

This makes it particularly important that our childcare system is most accessible to those children who benefit from it most—those who need the full value of educators who can help them hit their developmental milestones—and yet the requirements of the activity test lock out families where parents or carers are less likely to be able to engage in work or volunteering activities. So we have an unacceptable gap between advantaged and disadvantaged families when it comes to accessing child care. OECD figures show that Australia ranks below the average in providing access for disadvantaged families; we lag behind New Zealand, Singapore, Japan and Switzerland. The children most likely to benefit from early childhood education, those from disadvantaged backgrounds, are least likely to participate.

Of course, one of the obvious barriers to child care is the cost. Under this government, the cost of child care continues to go up and up. Quarterly data released in March this year confirmed what we already know: childcare fees are on the rise at an alarming rate. Since the election of this government childcare fees are up 30 per cent. The yearly cost of long day care, the type that most of us are using, has increased on average by more than $3,000 to more than $14,00 per year, an increase of more than 30 per cent. While the cost of living increases and wages stagnate, families are being placed under the immense stress of ever-increasing childcare fees. I've had these conversations in the playground, the ones where families wonder whether they can make their childcare bill; the ones where women—and it's nearly always the women—decide that they won't go back to work because the cost of child care is higher than their wage. And we've seen the reports about the very difficult circumstances that women then find themselves in later in life: lower wages throughout their careers mean less super and an uncertain future in retirement. This new childcare system is just not putting the downward pressure on fees that the education minister promised it would.

While the education minister did say in July last year that teething issues are inevitable, and I don't disagree—all new systems require a period of adjustment—in this case it goes beyond teething issues. Sufficient support for transition just has not been given by this government. Its own data shows that fewer than half of providers feel that the government provided enough support for the transition, and that only 40 per cent of services and 41 per cent of families feel the changes were positive. What an indictment!

I spoke earlier about the administrative burden the childcare system places on families and on centres. Now, the fear for those families is that they will be caught up in this government's version of the heartless and cruel robo-debt system. We have heard that the government is planning some changes to that system, but it's unclear what it's looking at in terms of child care and recovery of childcare debts. So families are still facing the possibility that a miscalculation or an unexpected change in their working hours may result in them having a debt they certainly didn't expect and can't afford. We know that there is case after case of people being put under immense strain from receiving these unexpected debt notices, and so this government must take immediate action to ensure that families accessing child care do not face this additional stress.

The other area the government must address is secure, long-term funding for the childcare sector. In 2017, state and territory governments commissioned an independent review into early childhood interventions to consider the most effective ways to achieve educational excellence in schools. Seventeen recommendations were made out of this review, including that universal access to early education and care programs be extended to all three-year-olds, with access prioritised for children from disadvantaged families and communities. This would not only benefit children in their development but it would also benefit our productivity and health as a society, and even have the potential to reduce crime as people get the education they need.

During the 2019 election campaign I was proud that Labor proposed an expansion of access for three-year-olds, with a new national preschool and kindy program. It was a program that would have guaranteed access to two years of early education and care programs for children for 15 hours per week. Labor also committed to guarantee current arrangements for four-year-olds over the longer term, something the Morrison campaign, and now the government, made no commitment to doing. The investment in ongoing funding that provides certainty to the early education and childcare sector is something that is much-needed, and it would be warmly welcomed by all, and yet the government continues to be silent on calls to secure this much-needed ongoing funding.

I was pleased this morning to be at the launch of the State of early learning in Australia 2019 report. In fact, that report shows us that Australia's investment in early learning is below the OECD average and that we're ranked 11th out of 21 OECD nations. Our investment in early learning per child declined between 2016 and 2019. What an indictment. This government must do better.

The final point where the government needs to do more is support for childcare workers. For those who have worked with or know or entrust your children to an early childhood education worker, you know those are people of high standard who are professional and deeply caring above and beyond their job descriptions. I want to, in a slightly self-indulgent way, take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank the entire team at Heidelberg Goodstart, who are ensuring that my daughter is cared for and supported in her development every day she is there. More than that, she has a lot of fun, and I particularly want to thank Asi and Simran for this because my daughter's face lights up every day when I tell her that's who she's going to see.

Quality education and care requires a skilled workforce. We know that salary is a barrier to attracting quality people and it's a barrier to retaining them. The report launched this morning found that the sector is struggling to retain the people it needs. Again, this is something that Labor has looked at, and at the last election we proposed to address it. Early education and care work does not get the recognition it deserves across our community. It's undervalued and, unfortunately, undervalued often means underfunded. We know the benefits are well worth the investment in the early education sector. The ripple effects of children receiving one and, in the better case, two years of education and care before full-time school are well established, particularly for disadvantaged children. There is still a lot of work to do before we see a system that delivers for Australian children and families. I urge the government to do more to realise this.

Anika Wells (Lilley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise in the House today to speak about the childcare crisis in this country. Affordable child care is one of the most tantalising promises of modern Australian civilised society, but it's also one of the most broken. Our modern economy cannot function without a system for nurturing our littlest citizens. So confounding is the childcare economy that, despite the sticker shock for parents, looking after children remains a very poorly paid job. What we on this side of the House know from talking to parents and from talking to educators is that the system isn't working.

There are now 1.36 million Australian kids accessing childcare services—972,000 families across Australia. It's a big part of the country. The government's latest quarterly data, which came out in March 2019, has been released, and it confirmed what we already know to be true, which is that childcare fees are still going up. They're still going up despite the big reforms the government brought in in their second term that promised us things would get better. The cost of long day care, which is the type of child care that most people use, has increased again to approximately $14,328 a year. That is the cost of a fairly ritzy private school education in Brisbane per year. When the Liberals were elected, families paid, on average, $11,016 a year. That is a staggering 30 per cent increase in childcare fees since the election of this government.

At a time when cost of living is increasing and at a time when wages are stagnating, families are being crippled by ever-increasing childcare fees. The truth of the matter is that this government's new childcare system has failed. It has failed at putting downward pressure on fees. It has failed to address the problem. Now here we are, debating amendments to childcare legislation with no proposed vision and no proposed plan to fix the childcare crisis in this country. In fact, we appear to be tinkering around the edges with no indication from this government that we will even debate childcare legislation again this term. There is nothing coming down the line to assist 972,000 Australian families. It is so disheartening that we can do so much to get here to this parliament and we can have so much opportunity in this parliament, yet we fritter it away by doing so little when we have the ability to do so much more.

This is an issue quite dear to my heart, as you might be able to tell. At this point I have to refer to some notes on my phone because when it was in my diary to write this speech I had my toddler at home with me because I could not get a spot for her in child care that day. So for the purposes of sharing with the people in this House who do not understand what living the hustle is like for Australian families, I thought I would share a little of my experience with child care.

On the day of our successful 12-week scan with Celeste we toured two childcare centres near our house and enrolled her at both of them—at the 12-week scan. I don't think she had a fixed due date at that time—she certainly didn't have a name and she didn't have a gender—but she had to be enrolled, because that is what the waiting list situation is like on the north side of Brisbane. When Celeste was seven months old, a place for one day came up at one of our preferred childcare centres. We had to take it, because that's how you get a foot in the door—you take the spot. So she went in two months earlier than planned for a day a week, and I had to find additional work outside of my substantive employment to pay for that day a week, because that was the only way we were going to get her in. At nine months I returned to work and Celeste went to child care for three days a week. At 12 months my parents agreed to take her for an extra day per week so that I could campaign for preselection and then, when I won that, for the federal election. Not everybody has grandparents around. For us, my side of the family are the only people who live in Brisbane, in terms of being able to care for Celeste on an ongoing basis. That stayed the case until the election.

Something that people have talked to me a lot about is how Celeste appears in my campaign photos. People ask: 'Is that because you are trying to demonstrate what it's like to be a working mum running for parliament?' Unkind people ask: 'Is it because you're trying to politicise your child? Are you trying to use her as a weapon or an asset?' The reality is that Celeste appeared with me on the campaign trail and Celeste appears in so many photos because often the only way for me to get to a function was for her to come too. I suspect Celeste has had more canapes than many lobbyists on the federal campaign trail!

That was the reality for me. I got through it because I knew it was temporary—win or lose, come 18 May. I just had to get through that period of months. But it's not a temporary reality for many Australians. We have an unpaid-care crisis in this country where we and our economy are so dependent upon unpaid care provided by mothers and grandmothers and aunts and fathers and grandfathers and uncles, both caring for their children, who we're talking about today, and also caring for our elders. Our economy is reliant upon millions of hours of unpaid care given by Australian families and Australian workers. If you look at the aged-care inquiry and the crisis going on in aged care, you see it's just the same. The system is underfunded, because for too long we have been entirely reliant on the unpaid care given by Australians. This federal government owes everyone a lot more than that.

Returning to the childcare crisis of today, I have a mum squad. We all have our childcare problems from time to time. One of my friends only got a spot for her toddler because once we got Celeste into her child care we arranged for the other centre to give Celeste's spot to Archie directly. We should not have a childcare system that, if you move from interstate and need a childcare spot at somewhat short notice, relies on your knowing some fanatically organised person and federal MP who can give you a spot that they've got as a backup. That's not how our system should work.

My parents care for Celeste for a day a week. They went overseas, because they're retired. They worked hard their entire lives and they worked hard to be able to go overseas for periods of time in their retirement. Our childcare system collapsed for that six-week period, because losing that day a week that we relied upon them to look after Celeste meant that we had to find temporary solutions. So at the time I was meant to be writing this speech—and I seriously intended to give gravitas and considered policy thought to this 15-minute speech—I couldn't do it, because I was painting watercolours instead, because there was nobody else around. When I was elected to federal parliament, it took 5½ months to get Celeste that fifth day at child care, 5½ months of us making week-by-week temporary arrangements—my husband taking carers leave; my husband taking annual leave; an elaborate system of neighbours, mum squad and brunch members looking after Celeste to get us through until we could get a permanent spot. That is not how things should be in a modern, developed economy where we claim to look after our littlest citizens and the parents who care for them. We need to do a lot better. I would like to reiterate that this is a failed opportunity today for us to address some of the serious structural reforms in the industry. We can speak to the flaws in these amendments and the merits of the amendments but, at the end of the day, it is disappointing that they are minor amendments that will not address the crisis of child care in this country.

I want to read aloud a letter that a lady named Peta gave to me. I have toured many childcare centres in the six months since I was elected to parliament. They are a heart-warming and very fuzzy way to spend your morning, and I recommend the experience to everybody in the chamber. When I go around and meet people for the first time at community groups and businesses and community events I say, 'If you could send one message to Canberra, what would it be?' This lady gave me an answer at the time but came and found me a few weeks later and hand-delivered this letter. Honestly, early educators are just the best people in the world! She said:

My apologies Anika,

You asked me a question about my message to Canberra and, to be honest, I hadn't considered the question prior to being asked.

You see, as an educator I turn up to work day in and day out and give my all and I make myself physically, mentally and emotionally available to the 22 children in my care.

I, to the best of my ability for those 6 contact hours, push aside my personal life and become a nurturing, encouraging, patient, knowledgeable TEACHER.

I don't often think about or consider the people that have "MADE THE RULES", that make all of .the decisions that decide what my job is and how it should be done and what EXCEEDING PRACTICE should look like.

I love my job, and I struggle to call it a job because that word "job" doesn't do it justice. I'm passionate about being an Early Childhood Professional, I believe on some level it's what I was created to do.

So, upon pondering your question further, these are my thoughts about our sector, about our work, about our children and families and about our future:

1. Is the current early childhood education and care system serving the right people with the right purpose?

Families, more commonly nowadays, BOTH parents are working harder than ever, longer hours than ever to make ends meet for their young families, but the loss of childcare cancels out earnings. It's a LOSE/LOSE scenario. We need to find a WIN/WIN scenario for early childhood education and care.

We are on the brink of losing our precious kindergarten structure because parents cannot meet the demands of the workplace and fit in with our hours—however the kindergarten program is a highly valued and regarded institution in the community. Long day care should not be the ONLY option for our young children.

2. If we are struggling more than ever to get students (school leavers) to consider studying teaching and also to retain new & existing teachers we must take a step back and ask WHERE/HOW we are failing our teachers?

Stricter regulations, ratio pressures, time constraints, impossible expectations handed down from "desk-sitters" is not the answer to training and retaining HIGH QUALITY EDUCATORS! Assessing services on one set of standards and then re-assessing on another tougher standard is sending mixed messages and de-grading the hard work, the high quality work, the exceeding work of experienced, dedicated and passionate practitioners.

…   …   …

So you see, this "job", this calling that I love so much, that I live for is under threat.

And do you know who is going to pay for that? Our most precious "commodity", our children, the future of our nation, our future world leaders. What message are we sending them?

We've got to get real about early childhood education and care and we MUST ask ourselves, is our current early childhood education and care system serving the right people with the right purpose?

Thank-you for your time.

That is Peta, from C&K Nundah.

Touching on the issue of kindergarten and funding, I'd like to finish by talking about something I didn't expect to discuss in an early childhood and childcare legislation debate, and that is the Trump family, currently ensconced in the White House. Previously I have not had many positive things to say about the Trump family. You might recall from my first speech that it was a combination of being diagnosed with autoimmune disease and falling pregnant with my first child, who was born early—a daughter—while watching President Trump being sworn in on the hospital television that acted like a lightning bolt to spur me on to what was then a federal political preselection. But I will give the Trumps this credit: in the midst of a presidential budget process which is generating controversy for its drastic spending cuts, Ivanka Trump, senior adviser to the President, is forcing a conversation about increasing the availability and affordability of child care. She said:

You have care providers who are working at below poverty wages, you have parents who can't afford the care and you don't have a robust ecosystem of facilities because it's a low-margin business with high liability.

She continued:

So, it's like just a fundamentally flawed system.

This billionaire heiress, this mother of three, gets it, and she gets it in a way that this federal government does not get it. I want to make the point today that, if you are a third-term federal government and you have to be given advice on how to be in touch with the working families in your country and how to better support them in raising their children, then you are out of touch. I condemn you for being as out of touch as that.

In 2018, President Trump signed into law a $2.4 billion funding increase, which provided a total of $8.1 billion to states to fund child care for low-income families. Contrast this with our federal government, who refused to guarantee funding for two years of universal preschool. Contrast the Trumps, who are doing a series of roundtables across the country to learn from early childhood educators and businesses about what needs to be done, with this government, who has referred this out to a private consulting firm to see what they have to say about funding for childcare arrangements. It is astonishing that Australia is one of only a few advanced nations to offer no subsidised early learning to three-year-olds, despite several major surveys and the Gonski review calling for just that. We would have, and you should do it now.

Patrick Gorman (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The early years are so important, and you see from the speeches on the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Building on the Child Care Package) Bill from those on this side of the House just how passionate members in this place are about investing in our next generation. Early learners are shaping their brains when they walk into those childcare centres, those kindergartens, those schools where they get that first sense of their own self-worth and the confidence that will drive them through the rest of their life. They're preparing for a future, and I think what always hits me is that we're trying to educate these children for a future that most of us in this place don't even understand what it will look like. If we walk into an early childhood centre today and say, 'Here's what it will look like when you go for your first job'—we don't have an answer for that. So I think that gives you a sense of how important the work that educators do on a daily basis in giving young people all the life skills that they need to get through whatever the world is going to throw at them.

But those early learners are actively involved in shaping what sort of a future they want, and I'm thinking in particular of the kindergarten students at Perth College in my electorate. They have been running a two-year campaign to reduce the amount of plastics in their local community. They have been researching the oceans and the impacts of plastic. They've been talking to local cafes and encouraging local business owners to switch from plastic straws to paper straws. They've got their parents lobbying, and they asked me to come and speak with them so that they could lobby me. It's fair to say that they were some of the more convincing lobbyists I've seen in my time. As a result, I wrote to the Prime Minister and said, 'This is what Perth College is doing, and this is what the kindergarten students want.' To the Prime Minister's credit, he wrote back and was very appreciative of the work that those young people have done. For me, it shows the power of early learning, the power of integration, the power of showing young people that they do have a voice and that they are valued. The thing that gets me when we talk about legislation like this is that it doesn't truly recognise the value of those young people. I want to say to the teachers at Perth College, a fantastic school in the Perth electorate, that it was so great to be part of the student-led campaign on eliminating plastics. I'm sure that, by the time those students are in the workforce, their mission will, hopefully, be close to complete.

When we all talk about early childhood education, we have to think about our own experience. As the member for Lilley said, it isn't a well-integrated system. It is a system that you battle with no matter how lucky you are in life because it's poorly designed. It's as simple as that. Jess and I use an early learning centre for Leo three days a week. My mum, Wendy, does Thursdays, and whenever there's a peak point of stress in our lives Leo's nanna, Diane, comes from Brisbane to Perth. It's for that reason we don't have a spare room; we have Nanna's room.

We are very lucky in Australia that we have some amazing artists who appreciate the value of early learning. It is the Teeny Tiny Stevies that help us pack away our things every night—sometimes with more success than at other times. It was Justine Clarke who taught us a banana is a banana but that if a butterfly was really made of butter, its wings would melt in the sun. And Bluey doesn't just do a great job of entertaining Leo; he does a great job of teaching Jess and I, in that never-ending piece of learning, how to be great parents.

In Australia we are, on the whole, a lucky country, and we do have a very good education system. But I'm a bit sick of talking about the childcare crisis. When the member for Lilley said 'the childcare crisis', I thought, 'We've been talking about the childcare crisis for a decade.' It's not because it sounds good or because people are trying to score political points; it is because there's an actual crisis. Parents can't get their kids into early-learning centres. If they get their kids in, it costs them a fortune; it costs them up to a third of their salary just to have their child in a learning environment in Australia. It is absolutely ridiculous. This legislation doesn't do any of the hard work, any of the hard thinking or any of the heavy lifting to actually fix our childcare system in this country. It doesn't support our educators. It doesn't recognise that families are at their wits' end when it comes to child care. I am absolutely sick of talking about the crisis, but just because I'm sick of it doesn't mean there isn't one. There is a huge crisis. We don't have good enough integration with schooling. We don't have proper professional pay and recognition for our educators. We have our subsidies centred around the activity of parents rather than the interests of the child. We have no way for families to do proper cost control; indeed, the government's approach is, 'We'll just send them a debt notice at the end of the financial year.' Seriously!

We talk about where Australia ranks in international rankings. We're sort of hiding in the comfortable middle. We don't want to be at the top. We don't want to be the highest funder. We don't want to have the best student outcomes. We don't want to have the highest-quality pay and conditions for educators. We just hide in the middle. I'm sick of hiding in the middle on things that are important, like education.

For all that's wrong in the early-childhood sector, there are some things that are good. We have the National Quality Framework, making sure that every parent has some level of assurance that, when they take their child to a recognised centre, their child is going to get a quality education with a standard curriculum that is focused on that particular child's needs. That's all delivered—and this is the other great thing about our system—by trained, qualified early-childhood educators. Our educators are the real light in this system. They make sure everything else works for parents. For many of us, they spend more waking hours with our children than we do. They are truly some of the heroes of the Australian economy, and I say thank you to every single one of them.

When it comes to the specifics of this bill, while it's clear I would like it to go a lot further on basically every possible metric, Labor recognises that it does have sensible amendments that make accessing child care easier for many Australian families. But the amendment that families are no longer able to register for the childcare subsidy without immediately providing their tax file number and bank account details is very short-sighted. The government removing that 28-day grace period will achieve very little other than pain. The Labor Party is concerned about this change and the childcare sector is concerned about this change. Worst of all, it will disproportionately affect the families and, most importantly, the children who benefit most from early-childhood education.

We know the sorts of circumstances that lead to people not having access to those things—fleeing domestic violence, fleeing natural disaster, loss of employment and other crises that happen in someone's life. To deny a child the right to an education because their parents can't do the paperwork is just wrong. We should indeed look at what we do in the education system and see that as the model for everything that we build in the early-childhood space. A school will take a student because that child has value, not because of what their parents do or don't do. Removing the 28-day period, blocking vulnerable families, is wrong—28 Days was a terrible movie; 28 days is a terrible policy when it comes to child care. When you think about the implementation of this system—the new bureaucracy—the approach of this government is to cut red tape with one hand and create it with the other.

I was lucky to visit, with the shadow minister for education last year, the Leederville Early Childhood Centre—I think it is run by Goodstart and my apologies to the Leederville team and Sally at the centre, if it is not, but I'm pretty sure it is—as they were rolling out this new system. There were delays in being able to register parents and there was conflicting information from different parts of the bureaucracy about what information they had to be collecting. There was no recognition of the huge workload that this had put on centres transferring the work that the government was requiring onto these non-government and private sector organisations. At the time, as many of us will remember, it was a bit of a mess. Thankfully, because early-childhood educators and those that run centres are some of the most resilient people that you'll meet, it kind of just worked. I don't think that was because of good policy design, it's because the people at the coalface of this sector do just make things work.

There have also been many families who have struggled with the childcare subsidy and struggled with getting what they are entitled to from the government. I will tell a story of Yelda and JP, who contacted my office. People don't come to a member for parliament's offices because everything is well; they come because something is not clicking within the bureaucracy. They had been struggling with the Department of Human Services for some months as they were being significantly underpaid for their childcare subsidy payments. When they had contacted the department, the only fact that they were given was there was a technical issue. That was it. That was the explanation: 'We can't tell you what you're owed. We can tell you there's a technical issue.' They were promised, of course, that it would be rectified. They waited: one month, two months, three months—big technical issue!—four months, five months, six months, seven months. On the eighth month, the technical issue—which I imagine was just poor policy design, which is a huge technical issue in this place at the moment—was rectified, and they finally got their payments. How many other Australian families are dealing with this on a daily basis or, indeed, being underpaid, because they just can't stand the pain of dealing with Department of Human Services? It is a department that, I might say, also could do with a few extra staff, and maybe some of these 'technical issues' would actually be resolved.

We've had about 10 years of major reform, and I think, if we're going to get to where we need to be as a country, we're going to need probably another 10 years of major reform. This morning I helped to launch the State of early learning in Australia 2019 report. I think it's sometimes like saying, 'I believe in climate change,' in that you have to state these really blatantly obvious things just to start the conversation. But it highlighted the 'long-term benefits of early education for children'. We're still having this fight and trying to justify that this is important for young people. The report had many interesting facts but I'm just going to quote a few things. It does note that we haven't realised the benefits of providing early learning for all children in this country. It noted that we are not distributing across key equity groups the benefits of early childhood education. It noted that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, children from low socioeconomic areas and children with a disability are not getting equitable access to early learning. And it noted that we do have structural factors and policy settings, differing across jurisdictions, which hold back our ability to effectively roll out quality early childhood education in all parts of this country. There were some hard truths in it. For my state of Western Australia, it noted that the highest proportion of early childhood education care services receiving lower ratings or working towards the national quality standards was in Western Australia. That's not good enough. But we need to be honest about where we're at and where we want to go.

The critical work that is done by educators in the sector is well-known. I think we should also place this in an international context though. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals say universal access to early childhood education should be something we strive to achieve by 2030. Now, Australia is a pretty good country; I'm pretty sure we could get there earlier than 2030 if we wanted to. The Sustainable Development Goals state that by 2030 'all girls and boys should have access to quality early childhood development care and pre-primary education' so that they're ready for primary education. And that's where we get to this discussion about the two years of preschool funding.

If the reports of a week ago that the funding for four-year-olds might be on the chopping block, that would just be absolute madness. It would destroy the educational opportunities that young people have. It will cause havoc for families across this country that rely on that funding to help them balance their budgets. And it takes us in the wrong direction. We should actually be talking about how we fund three-year-olds to get into that education environment. It is such a positive start for young people to be able to have that opportunity.

And, in terms of what we pay versus what we get, it's a transformative investment. We know that the first thousand days make a huge difference. There was some research from the Telethon Kids Institute that said the cost of late intervention—that is, acting too late; trying to fix these things up because we were too tight, too scared to spend a little bit of money when children are young—is $15.2 billion every year. Children and young people experience serious issues that lead to crises, lead to law enforcement, lead to challenges with child protection that, had we invested earlier, could have been prevented. I'll leave my remarks there.

Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to follow the member for Perth and the member for Lilley today, both of whom are young parents. I'm a long way from being a young parent, and child care has changed a lot since my three children were being looked after in preschool years. As a parent, I used the family day care services as well as their grandmother and early childhood education in a structured way, but that is a long time ago now. As the member for Perth said, the crisis seems to have been going on for an extremely long time.

I'll pick up on one of the points that the member for Perth made about this government's approach to quality assurance in child care in general. When it comes to ensuring the safety and the value of early childhood education this government sees red tape in the form of compliance, and yet it sees it as an absolutely good idea for the providers to be used as a quasi-government service in getting families registered so that they can access their CCS. This is what's wrong with this whole sector: on the one hand we approach it as bean counters, trying to make sure that nobody's getting what they shouldn't get and making sure that everybody complies in terms of their ability to access a supplement; but on the other hand there is not nearly enough focus on the compliance around the quality that we are providing.

This all comes down to this government's issue that, since coming into government in 2013, it hasn't been able to put 'early education' and 'care' into the same sentence. If you keep separating these two notions and see early education as babysitting then you are not on the same page as the families who are accessing these services. Because families who are accessing early education and child care are doing so to ensure the quality of early learning for their children, as well as their ability to access employment for, in many cases, both parents.

Although this legislation is building on the childcare package in some positive ways, there are also some areas that I have concerns with—as I always do, because when this government makes steps in the right direction but builds those steps on the wrong foundations, as it has here in early education, then there's a problem. Alarm bells also ring for me whenever this government says that it's going to simplify something, because when it goes to simplify something, then we get bad news. They planned to simplify the census, and we saw how that went. They planned to simplify business tax and we remember the debacle that that was. The Prime Minister said last week that he wants to simplify the award system, making it easier for business, and we know that is code for lower wages for workers. We should always be wary when this government says it wants to simplify something.

When they introduced this package in July 2018 it was to simplify things. The simplification has seen, as we've seen from Senate estimates, families and providers experience significant delays, confusion and additional paperwork—that would be red tape—to register for the childcare subsidy, which has often resulted in families' entitlements being over or underestimated, resulting in overpayments and debts for affected families. Providers have been forced by the government to act as debt collectors—not just registration processors, but debt collectors—and, with the government commencing data matching with the ATO, families are being issued with unexpected debt notices.

We stand here to say to the government: 'Good. You've made a few changes. There are some positive things in this piece of legislation, but we have a technical issue over the 28 days in terms of the provision of ATO files and bank account details that could be very problematic for some families.' So some good points and one big negative that will be very easy for this government to fix. They're building on a system that we have found, through Senate estimates and through reports in the last three months, has not simplified the system, has made the system more complex. And not only that, in this simplification there was a promise that families would be better off and yet what we're finding is one in four families are worse off under this system.

We're also seeing an increase in costs to child care above CPI. In my electorate, there was a 5.5 per cent increase in the previous quarter in the cost of child care in an area where we have a broad demographic. For a lot of our families the median income is $52,000 a year. A 5.5 per cent increase is extraordinary. It is on this government's watch, which takes me to the other really tricky part of this. In the past week we've seen the Minister for Government Services say that in terms of Centrelink and robo-debt we're going to finally suspend the automatic data matching without human oversight in the process, and yet what we find in the childcare subsidy is—you guessed it—data matching with the ATO.

We've found, across the last few weeks, that we've got lots of families already being hit. We all saw the stories that have been run in the media. The most concerning, and out of the blocks very early, was one mother in particular who had overestimated her income by $12,000. That's a pretty good buffer. I would have thought you would have been fairly confident if you had overestimated your income by $12,000 and you'd been meticulous, as she says she was, about reporting your activity. Remember, red tape is only bad for governments. It's okay for parents; as much red tape as we can put in place for them the better. This mum estimated her income on a fortnightly basis, estimated her activity on a fortnightly basis—this red tape's good for the system—and then she found out that she had a debt notice. She overestimated by $12,000, but she was meticulous about the activity reporting.

We were told at Senate estimates that this wasn't about the activity reporting; it was just about the estimation of income. This woman got a debt notice. When she went to question this—because she's quite sure in her mind that, 'Having overestimated my income by $12,000 I better check my records'—she found that the records where she'd been reporting her income and reporting her activity hours had disappeared off the system at Centrelink. I don't know where else we can go other than this government seems to put red tape in the wrong places. Then pile everything into Centrelink, starve it of the human resources to do its job and introduce an ATO data-matching scheme that we know has failed already as a quarter of the debts people were being alerted to didn't exist. We've got a minister withdrawing that, but, in the childcare space, what does that mean? Does it mean that we're stopping the automatic data matching when it comes to the childcare subsidy? The human services minister might want to talk to the Minister for Education. They might want to figure out where they're doing in this space and do so very quickly. This piece of legislation, I would suggest, is now almost defunct, with the errors that we've discovered and with the increase in the cost of child care under this government's watch in the last 12 months. The government introduced its simplified system that was going to make all families better off, but a quarter were not better off from the day this started. Now we've got increases above CPI—in fact, extraordinary increases. We've got families being hit with debts and then being told that the debts occurred because of some glitch in the system—data going missing from the system—so families are feeling absolutely stressed.

It may be a long time since my kids were accessing early learning and child care, but I certainly remember the stresses of being a working mum with three kids under six. I certainly remember the stresses, and, as a school teacher at the time, I don't know that my lunch hour would have afforded me the time to be on the phone to Centrelink, waiting for 3½ hours. I would have had to hang up every lunchtime. I would have been trying to get on the phone in between classes—remembering that in most secondary schools where I was teaching in those days sessions were 50 minutes. That wouldn't get me onto Centrelink! Fifty minutes won't get me onto Centrelink—try 2½ hours of waiting. I've done this in my office with my constituents. I've sat with them in my office while they have been on hold, only for them to be then cut off—suddenly someone's on the phone and then the phone's dead, after a two-hour wait. Mostly, I've done this when we've been trying to sort out a debt that had been issued to them that we didn't think was real. My office doesn't need to be another quasi-government agency set up to deal with the red tape this government puts in place for parents and for providers; the government is supposed to be simplifying the system.

I also echo the words of the member for Perth on the importance of early education and child care in our society, and this government needs to come to terms with the fact that we are dealing with those two things: early education and child care. The two go together, and quality is absolutely at the forefront of this. That quality comes back to the providers and to ensuring that we've got quality on the ground and compliance in the system, but it also comes back—fundamentally in education—to the quality of the people who are working in the sector. I spend a lot of time talking to early educators, and I want to carry to this House their message that they feel absolutely undervalued. They feel that their work—the quality of their work—is less important to this government than ensuring that there are people inside the centres so that we can tick a compliance box. But it's not about quality. This government thinks that reporting against children's milestones—knowing every child in the centre and ensuring that every child in every centre is meeting their milestones on time, having targets set and having engagement and activities planned to ensure that they are progressing towards their next milestone—is red tape. This government says that the quality doesn't matter.

Yes, this government's bringing legislation into this House that will make some small improvements; but, in fact, the entire new system that they set up, that has only been running for 12 months, is being dramatically called into question in our communities as we speak today. The problem that I have with this piece of legislation is, absolutely, around the 28-day grace period that had traditionally been given. We've had some inquiries into this, and the Early Learning and Care Council of Australia explained:

Currently, families making a claim for CCS have 28 days to provide a Tax File Number (TFN) or bank account details. In the current legislation, the provision of this information is required for the individual's CCS claim to be effective, which affects their CCS eligibility. However, their eligibility is already verified, and this information is only required for the payment (and reconciliation) of subsidies. If the information is not provided within the 28 day window, a family is deemed CCS ineligible and may incur a debt with their provider.

Ian Goodenough (Moore, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It being 1.30 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 43. The debate may be resumed at a later hour.