Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education. In recent days I've been flooded with concerns from childcare providers worried that they will lose significant revenues as a result of the recently announced changes to childcare funding. Can the minister guarantee that no childcare provider, including those run by councils and schools, or in-home carer will be worse off under the new funding arrangements?

Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Indi for her question. As she would know, we're backing free early childhood education and care for around one million families no matter what type of service they use. This has been an incredibly significant change, which was brought about because there was overwhelming feedback from the sector of the potential for a large number of services to collapse. Therefore, in the space of seven to 10 days, we overhauled the childcare sector to put some fundamental underlying security into the sector. What this change means is that the new payment, which is 50 per cent of the revenue that services received, up to the hourly cap, in the fortnight before 2 March, will be paid to providers weekly, and it will be calibrated with the JobKeeper payment.

For all services out there who want to get further information about their eligibility for the JobKeeper payment, we have set up the childcare subsidy help desk. Those providers can dial 1300667276 to find out about their eligibility, how they apply for JobKeeper, and how that, which will provide approximately a billion dollars to the sector, coupled with the $1.6 billion that we are putting into the sector with this new, underlying payment, will enable their viability to continue.

There is another mechanism for providers where there might be extenuating circumstances in which they need further assistance. A special circumstances payment will also be set up, and that will go live on the Department of Education's website tomorrow. For all those services—some, for instance, might operate for 24 hours a day—we'll have to take their circumstances into account. There might, for instance, be some providers who look after children with special needs and who are accessing a large proportion of the additional childcare subsidy. In those instances also there will be additional arrangements which will be put in place.

Could I take the time to thank all those in the sector and all the officials who worked with the government to design this new system of providing free child care, and especially all those workers on the front line who, over the next six months, will be helping us defeat this pandemic.