David Smith (Bean, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that:

(a) in May 2022 Australians voted for a plan for cheaper child care; and

(b) on 23 November 2022, the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Cheaper Child Care) Bill 2022 passed the Parliament;

(2) commends the Government for meeting its election commitment to the Australian people;

(3) further notes that:

(a) the reforms will deliver affordable early education for more than a million families;

(b) from July 2022, approximately 96 per cent of families with a child in early childhood education and care will benefit;

(c) from July 2022, the child care subsidy for families earning $80,000 or less will increase to 90 per cent; and

(d) Treasury modelling shows that this will deliver the equivalent of up to 37,000 workers to the economy in the first year; and

(4) acknowledges that these reforms will deliver real cost-of-living relief while boosting productivity.

On 22 May last year, the people of Australia voted for a plan for cheaper childhood education. By 23 November last year, the parliament approved this plan, and the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Cheaper Child Care) Bill 2022 became law. The Albanese government is getting on with the job of delivering cost-of-living relief for Australian families across the country. From 1 July this year, more than a million families will be able to access more affordable early childhood education. Over the last eight years, we have seen early childhood education costs increase by 41 per cent, putting pressure on already struggling families and risking the future of our kids' early education. But at the centre of the first Albanese government budget was a $4.5 billion investment in early childhood care. This is not just an education reform; this has material economic benefits for our economy and social benefits for our people.

Last year, 73,000 people who wanted to work didn't look for work. This was because of the prohibitive costs of early childhood education—prohibitive costs that affect constituents in Bean. Parents, especially mums, will now be able to take on more paid work hours. This will have wider benefits for the economy, particularly in its recovery following the disruptions caused by COVID-19. Treasury modelling shows that this will deliver the equivalent of up to 37,000 workers to the economy in its first year alone.

From 1 July this year, the childhood education subsidy for families earning $80,000 or less will increase to 90 per cent. These changes will provide household budget relief for families struggling with the rising cost of living. Further, the measures will contribute to the government's gender equality agenda and support children's school readiness and long-term outcomes by reducing cost barriers to accessing early childhood education and care.

There are 47 early childhood education centres in my electorate of Bean, ranging from the Coombs Early Learning Centre to Jenny Wren in Mawson to the wonderful Wonderschools in Phillip and Conder. It's good to know that mums and dads in my electorate will now be able to send their children to these centres for more hours when they are needed. And let's not forget the children. These reforms will also promote the rights of children and the best interests of children, by increasing access to high-quality early childhood education and care.

This government will work with state and territory education and early childhood education ministers through National Cabinet to develop a long-term vision and collaborate on opportunities to support better outcomes across the system, with a particular focus on the early childhood education and care workforce. Evidence shows that early childhood education and care, when delivered in a quality setting, is a key protective factor and positively relates to children's developmental outcomes. Access to quality early childhood education is known to reduce vulnerability and improve early childhood development.

There's also a plan to ensure that early childhood education will have a steady supply of educators to support its growth. Over 1,400 additional university places for early education teachers, along with additional fee-free TAFE courses, will complement this legislation. Additionally, those applying for working visas in the early education space will be prioritised. This will secure a supply of early educators.

There will also be an increase in hours of subsidised care available for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. All First Nations children will be able to gain access to 36 hours of subsidised early childhood education. Nationally, this will benefit more than 6,000 First Nations families and represents a positive step in our efforts to close the gap. These reforms also invest $10.2 million to establish the Early Childhood Care and Development Policy Partnership between the Commonwealth and state and territory governments and First Nations representatives.

I'm proud to be part of the government which is delivering on our election promises and setting up Canberrans and Australians for a better future. This investment means early childhood education will be more affordable for 1.2 million Australian families, and 6,600 families in my electorate of Bean will be better off. This will ensure children can access the benefits of early childhood education no matter their circumstances. This is a big reform that is good for children, good for families, good for our economy and good for early childhood educators who deliver so much for families across Australia.

Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Carina Garland (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes.

Alicia Payne (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Chisholm. The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Angie Bell (Moncrieff, Liberal National Party, Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Bean talks a big game, which of course is a prerequisite of being a Labor Party member these days because Labor just loves to talk about how great they are and how great their policies are and how everything will be better under Labor. It's a rosy picture. Labor loves to sell the Australian people a fantasy, usually too good to be true, and we know that things that are too good to be true usually are. When I look at this government's early childhood education policy, that's what I see. When they come into government, they realise that they have to make all that fantasy a reality, and then they panic because they simply don't actually have a plan to deliver it. There's a lack of plan, a fantasy with no detail and no real plan for delivery.

This government has been full of sweeping statements. Here are just a couple of them: 'No family will be worse off.' 'Fees won't increase'—now there's a promise I'm going to hold them to! 'This policy won't have an effect on inflation.' What are we seeing with inflation, people? Up it goes. 'We'll have enough workers in the sector to meet demand.' But they haven't done the work. They haven't done any work to back up any of those statements.

I ask the government where the plan is to deliver additional access for families living in childcare deserts? There are nine million of them across the country, and what is the government doing to ensure that those families can access early childhood education? Well, don't worry. That was a rhetorical question because we know what the answer is and it is that they are doing nothing. Those nine million Australians simply don't have extra access under this legislation.

What is the government doing to address the rising costs? Well, the latest CPI data shows costs increasing by a whopping 4.5 per cent in December 2022. That's the largest quarterly increase outside the reversal of COVID measures since 2007. Already we've seen CPI going through the roof.

Fees are going up. One major provider announced that they would increase their fees last month, and it's only a matter of time before other providers follow suit. We know what that means. That means that a lot of this money that's coming through—$4.7 billion in July—could be lost simply to price rises and to inflation. How will the government ensure that, come July this year, families aren't immediately—due to those price rises—losing a portion of their higher subsidy to those increased fees? They can't guarantee it, because it's already happening. That's another rhetorical question because they just don't have a plan for that either. They've got the ACCC doing a review of the sector, but that's not due to report back until the end of the year, which means they won't do anything to address those rising fees until perhaps next year, 2024.

While we're here asking for details, I'm sure that educators across the country would really love to know what the government's plan is to address their very real concerns. I've been speaking with educators, as I do, and they're tired, they're overworked and they're feeling underappreciated. What is the government doing to support them? Again, it's a rhetorical question. The answer is: nothing. They will point to fee-free TAFE places and university courses, but that doesn't help educators in the sector right here and right now, doing a job that will only get more stressful come July when more families try to enrol their children. I was at a childcare centre in my electorate just at the end of last week. It's a brand new childcare centre. It's huge—massive—and it's a beautiful, beautiful place. They have over 400 people on the waiting list right now. Is this $4.7 billion package going to help them to shorten that waiting list? I don't think so. The government doesn't have a plan to address access and it doesn't have a plan to address rising costs, and there's no plan to address the educator concerns. It's hard to see how this policy is going to deliver all the things that the government, again, has promised it will.

We in the coalition have a strong record when it comes to delivering for Australian families. During our time in government, we doubled investment in the ECE sector, to $11 billion in 2022-23. We also did something Labor never did: we delivered ongoing preschool funding. We undertook the biggest reforms to the childcare system in over 40 years. We provided more support to families—targeted support that helped bring down the cost of care—and 280,000 more children were able to access early childhood education. That's more places. We saw women's workforce participation reach record highs at 62.3 per cent. Under Labor, when they left office last time— (Time expired)

Carina Garland (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The early years are such an important time of life for development, and ensuring that access to high-quality early education is affordable in Australia will benefit the nation significantly. That's why the Albanese government is making changes to make education cheaper. According to data, last year 73,000 people who wanted to work didn't look for work because they couldn't make the cost of early childhood education work for them and their families. So cheaper education and care is good for children, good for families and good for the economy.

My community of Chisholm will benefit enormously from the changes to early education and care. In the electorate I represent in Victoria, the number of families who access child care is among the highest in the state. In Chisholm alone, 7,200 families will benefit from our changes. That's the fourth-highest number in the whole of Victoria. So this is incredibly important to me and to the people who sent me here to Canberra to represent them and help build a better future.

Around 96 per cent of families across Australia who use early childhood education and care will be better off, because from July this year, only a few months away, the government will lift the maximum childcare subsidy rate to 90 per cent for families with a combined income of under $80,000 and will increase subsidy rates for families earning less than $530,000. We'll also keep the higher CCS for families with multiple children aged five years and under in care. Our plan for cheaper child care makes early childhood education and care more affordable for around 1.26 million Australian families, and no family will be worse off. There are real benefits for Australian families, especially when a lot of people are struggling with inflation. A family on a combined income of $120,000 with one child in care will save around $1,780 in the first year of this plan.

Childcare costs, unfortunately, increased by 41 per cent under the previous government. That's a significant burden to families already struggling to make ends meet. We came into government after a decade of wasted opportunities under a government that oversaw enormous increases to the cost of child care and also saw Australia do really badly when it came to gender equity. We, in fact, went backwards in terms of gender equity under the previous government.

Our plan for cheaper early childhood education and care will not just ease financial pressure for families but also aid in lifting women's workforce participation. The reality is most primary caregivers and stay-at-home parents are women, and this decision is often partly fuelled by the question of which parent has the higher earning capacity, given the expensive costs of child care. We have a gender pay gap in Australia of 14.1 per cent, and it is often women in feminised industries who are the ones that do worse, both while working in the early childhood education sector and as consumers of it. So I'm really proud that our government is not just putting these measures in place but also working to legislate measures to decrease the gender pay gap and to properly value all workers for the work they do. Workers in female dominated industries have persistently earned less historically, and that's despite the fact that workers in these key industries are vital for the functioning of our society.

We know our landmark reforms, such as cheaper early childhood education, are only possible if we retain, recruit and train a high-quality workforce, and we have a plan to deliver just that. That begins with the recognition and professionalisation of the workforce—recognising that this is a workforce of educators, not child minders; that these are highly trained experts; and that there is a significant and respected career pathway in the early education sector. After a decade of neglect and inaction from the previous government, we're making changes to ensure that we are able to have a sustainable early childhood education workforce and sector.

I know our plan is incredibly important to my community, because people in Chisholm tell me that it is. I'm here to listen, to advocate, to represent and to work as a member of the Labor government for real solutions for the real issues facing people in my electorate, and I'm so proud of what we're delivering.

Jenny Ware (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I speak on the motion put forward by the member for Bean. In the words of Nelson Mandela, 'Education is the most powerful weapon we have to change the world.' In that context, I rise to speak about child care. Having spoken in this place on several occasions in relation to early education, I am well known to be a strong supporter of continuous improvement in the way that we deliver early preschool education and child care in Australia. We can always do better in the way we care for and educate Australian children in those formative years before they enter the school system.

Whilst this legislation does provide a childcare subsidy for some Australian families, continuous improvement in early education means more than just making child care cheaper. It is about the quality of the child care that's being provided. It's about ensuring effective school-readiness programs are in place. It's about ensuring that there is access for parents in rural and remote communities. It's about ensuring that there are places in sufficient number and of sufficient variety to enable parents to have choice in the form of child care. Most importantly, it is about empowering a sustainable, high-quality workforce of teachers providing early education that is highly valued and respected by the broader Australian community.

It is well known that access to quality childcare places significantly increases the participation rates of women in the workforce. When Australian women do well, their families do well, and our nation does well. It is, therefore, vitally important that we do child care well. Child care is a major cost outlay for families, including for those in my electorate of Hughes, where we have 7,810 childcare spaces. To that end, I support incentives that assist parents both in my electorate and throughout Australia to pay for high-quality child care.

However, with this legislation the Albanese government has missed an important opportunity to reform child care throughout Australia to foster a sustainable and high-quality workforce of early childhood educators—an opportunity missed by the Albanese government to implement the National Children's Education and Care Workforce Strategy. The development of this national strategy was endorsed as a joint partnership by all governments and the children's education and care sector in 2019. It was released in August last year. It has considerable support in this place. For example, I note that the member for Fowler is also calling for its implementation.

Contemporary best-practice childcare policy is more than providing subsidies to parents, as important as that may be. Childcare policy is not just about child minding. Childcare policy is not just about children's entertainment. It is about recognising that children's education and care is an essential public service. It is about recognising and empowering those that work in the sector supporting children's early learning, development and wellbeing. It enables parents and carers to work, including during natural disasters and national emergencies.

The National Children's Education and Care Workforce Strategy focuses on delivery of a highly skilled, well-supported and professionally recognised workforce. It focuses on leadership and building capacity, empowering those that work within the childcare sector. It addresses how to retain and attract staff within the sector. It addresses the engagement, satisfaction and wellbeing of the early learning workforce. It establishes clear career pathways for these workers. It is a strategy that needs to be implemented.

The National Children's Education and Care Workforce Strategy opens with a simple, powerful statement:

'Education has the power to transform lives'.

Let us begin that transformation in this place. I call upon the Albanese government to implement the National Children's Education and Care Workforce Strategy.

Jerome Laxale (Bennelong, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank the member for Bean for bringing this motion to the chamber. If there's one thing that has been the hallmark of this government in its first six months, it's been our determination and drive to deliver on the promise to reduce the costs of child care and early education—one of a suite of policies we took to the election to reduce the cost of living. More than 1.2 million Australian families, approximately 9,400 of them in my electorate of Bennelong, will be able to access more affordable early childhood education because the Albanese Labor government has gotten on with the job. We said we would decrease the cost of child care, and we will. This is one of many commitments that will reduce the cost of living and provide tangible results for Australian families.

The Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Cheaper Child Care) Bill 2022 will remove the barriers to early childhood care that Australian families have faced for years. It will help ease the cost of living in the face of staggering increases in childcare costs under the previous government. It will ensure that all children can benefit from receiving quality early childhood education, and it will mean that all First Nations children will be able to gain access to 36 hours of subsidised child care a fortnight. This is another massive step towards universal and free access to early childhood education, something that I'm proud to say is a long-term goal of the party I represent.

Bennelong is full of young families raising their children in our local community. These families, like many across the nation, are really struggling with the cost of living. In Bennelong, the median age is 37, and 40 per cent of people rent. We have nearly 10,000 families who will benefit from this policy. That's the second-highest number across the nation of families per electorate that will benefit. This is a policy that helps families in Bennelong, and it's one that they voted for, because the cost of living is one of the biggest issues that is raised with me when I'm out and about in the electorate. For many families in Bennelong, the cost of early childhood education forms a huge part of the family budget. When I speak to parents about the costs of child care, many say that they have become prohibitive and too high for them to reconcile. Under the former government, costs of child care went up by 41 per cent in eight years.

These are parents like Fabio in Ryde, who reached out to me recently. He was concerned that the cost of child care was eating into his family budget too much. For a family like his, we'll increase rebates to a maximum of 90 per cent for the lowest income bracket and increase rebate percentages across the board for all income brackets. Child care will be cheaper for Fabio.

Then there's Sanjana from Gladesville, who contacted me because she and her husband were recently knocked out of the subsidy limit because of a hard earned increase in their household income. They now earn more than the current system allows—a huge flaw in the system. I don't think families should be penalised for earning more, not on the cost of child care. But we've fixed that problem. We'll increase the income limit to $530,000 for families, up from $356,000, meaning that more families will be eligible to receive the rebate and more families will be able to earn more without penalty. Millions of families will benefit from these changes and none will be worse off. Families like these and many more in Bennelong and throughout Australia will benefit from this government's hard work, and our economy will benefit from having more men and women back in the workforce.

We know that we need more people in the workforce. We've got a huge skills shortage. We also know that there's been some evidence which suggests that this policy will help get more people into work. The Grattan Institute estimates that this package will result in eight per cent more hours being worked by second earners with young children. This works out to be about 220,000 extra days worked in Australia every week. Our own Treasury estimates that these measures will increase the hours worked by women with young children by up to 1.4 million hours per week in 2023-24. That's the equivalent of up to an extra 37,000 full-time workers, which not only makes a real difference to families—meaning they can earn more wages and more super—but makes a huge difference to our economy. This childcare package is one that's good for the nation and good for Bennelong. I thank you for the opportunity.

James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the motion and start by noting that the childcare measures that are outlined in this were supported through the parliament by the coalition recently. I commend the contribution by the member for Moncrieff, who's also, of course, the shadow minister in this area, for some of the really concerning issues in child care that she canvassed earlier. What worries me about this motion is some suggestion that everything in child care is now all fine because of the measures that passed in that bill. That's not the case in any way whatsoever.

Like any local member, I'm regularly meeting with childcare providers in my electorate. Like any electorate, we've got different operators who have different models. Luckily, in metropolitan Adelaide, I don't have any childcare deserts—the term that is used in my electorate—though access is difficult for families in my electorate. We have issues around waiting lists and the like. But the first point that is really important is that I know there are a lot of regional areas, in particular, that have major issues with any provision of child care whatsoever. The rebate is not relevant to someone who can't access child care at all, and that's a serious equity issue that I hope the government is taking seriously and looking at addressing, because it certainly isn't addressed in the measures that went through the parliament recently.

In my electorate—and I know this is a problem nationally—all the providers say exactly the same thing when it comes to workforce challenges: they have enormous issues in attracting and retaining staff. If the forecasts of the success of this package are to be realised, and all these extra hours of work are going to be possible because all these extra people are going into child care, then I'm very worried about where the workforce is going to come from to support those extra places. This is a really serious issue. It's a serious issue across the care sector more broadly, as we all know, whether it's in the childcare sector or in aged care, disability et cetera.

The other thing that's a really dramatic challenge in those workforce areas is inflation running as hot as it is right now. Commitments around pay increases are being completely eroded by the hot-running inflation that we are experiencing at the moment. Seven point eight per cent inflation year on year is way more than 15 per cent in two years. Even if you got, over two years, a 15 per cent pay rise, which is not necessarily the proposition across all the sectors, you're going backwards in real terms if inflation is sitting at 7.8 per cent. So we've got a workforce challenge at a time when the government's own policies would see the real wages of people in these sectors go backwards. That's not going to encourage or help to address or alleviate those pressures.

We think we need a very urgent workforce plan for this sector, which, frankly, needs to stitch together a whole range of other sectors that have the same challenges, because if we don't have the workforce in place to support the childcare centres and other care requirements in our economy then all these other policies won't be able to achieve the outcomes they promise. That's not political pointscoring at all. It would be good if we could all work together on these challenges, frankly, because they are going to require some very significant lateral thinking, which is probably going to have to be tailored, particularly on a geographic basis, because I know that the challenges of workforce in some of our regional and remote communities can be very different from the challenges in metropolitan areas.

So I—like anyone in this chamber, hopefully—am very supportive of making sure that all families in this country have the best possible access to child care and that we're providing that access so that everyone who wants to can get that access and participate in the economy as they would like to. But, of course, it's not as easy as the government makes out, and we've got to make sure that some of those very significant issues around equity of access and workforce are addressed. It would be good for the government, rather than just congratulating themselves on what they've done, to tell us what they're going to do to address those problems in the future. (Time expired)

Sam Lim (Tangney, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm so proud of this government. I'm filled with a sense of hope, and I am passionate for all the things to come from this government. In less than a year, this government has rewritten the history books on how much any government can care for and help Australian families. This government chooses to work hard and work tirelessly for the sake of improving the lives of Australians and their children. This government delivers to its citizens cost-of-living relief that you can see and feel. You can see it as more wages in the bank. You can see it as more women working. You can see it as more full-time employment. It is not tax cuts for wealthy mates or punching down on struggling Australians to pass up the savings to those who don't need them. The Albanese Labor government is delivering an investment—the equivalent of 37,000 jobs—by ensuring more primary caregivers can work. It is an investment that puts in the hands of Australians the opportunity to work hard, to progress their careers and to have peace of mind that their children are receiving first-class education and care.

In my electorate of Tangney, 5,600 families are better off and more able to get on with the job by putting food on the table and not having to choose how to cut their working hours to be able to afford early childhood education and care. They are not having to pick between one partner's career and another's. They are not having to choose to give up or to go without. They are choosing to have quality child care that is affordable—child care that is cheaper than it would have been under the last government.

In the last eight years, the cost of early childhood education has increased by over 40 per cent for the average family. This government is doing what those opposite would not: delivering cost-of-living relief that means Australian families this generation and next will be better off. These changes mean that more than a million families across Australia can afford a double parental income; they afford single-parent households breathing space when opening bills; and they are a step further to assuring them that there will always be bread on the table.

I'm delighted to be part of a government that is ambitious for its people, that looks at an issue and decides as much as we are able to that there's much that we would dare to do. We're a government that works hard, like parents of children, to try to make sure that every child prospers and succeeds and is afforded a wonderful life because their parents have the means and their children can access quality early learning in the critical years of their development. This is a government that works tirelessly, and I'm so proud that what this government works on is ensuring that families and children in Australia have a future that's taken care of. From child care to Medicare to aged care, it has been Labor governments that cared and did the heavy lifting. I love my electorate and I love every person who has ever called Tangney home, does call Tangney home and will call Tangney home. My job is to make sure Tangney is a wonderful place to live, and, because of this government's cheaper child care, 5,600 families in Tangney are better off and many more will be for many years to come.

Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As has been said, as an opposition we supported the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Cheaper Child Care) Bill 2022. But I want to focus on one of the issues raised by the member for Moncrieff for the government to consider, given this childcare legislation and potential future childcare legislation, and that is the question: who have you forgotten? We've heard about issues around access and workforce, and so I ask: who is not covered by your childcare legislation, and where will the additional 9,000 people needed to fill the extra demand actually come from? Having the places available or not having the places available but simply increasing the rebate that will increase the amount of time that children will spend in child care will require additional staff. Where will the 9,000 people needed to fill the extra demand for those extra days actually come from? Where is the plan that the government should have for the thin markets that exist in rural and remote areas?

I'm a proud rural member of this place. Many of the families who are desperate for child care live in regional and more remote parts of Australia, and they are equally desperate to get child care for their children. But there isn't funding in this bill for additional places. The funding is for existing places. Where is the funding for those additional places that are desperately needed and the services that are desperately needed? As I said, not one cent has been allocated to additional childcare places. We've heard about childcare deserts and that 50 per cent of areas that need those extra childcare places are in rural, regional and remote parts of Australia. I have regional, remote and rural areas in my patch, and I want particularly to focus on one today, and that is the Augusta area.

Augusta is a tiny town, and I want to acknowledge the years of work put in by Kylie Lucas and Jasmine Meagher and the other fabulous women and mothers who have been trying to get child care in Augusta. Their first goal was to have a facility so that the community would be able to offer child care in such a centre, and I've been assisting them through that process. They were seeking support from the Augusta-Margaret River shire to upgrade a facility so as to offer child care in the first instance, but there hasn't been a serious commitment to this. In the absence of serious funding from the local government for this childcare facility, I suggested that they use the funding provided by the federal government through the Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program that we put in place, and that the funding be used for this purpose. I note that Labor has not provided the phase 3 extension, funded by the coalition in our last budget, to these local governments at this point. So that isn't an avenue that's currently available for the Augusta Margaret River shire and for these wonderful women to be able to provide child care for their children in Augusta for the first time.

So I ask the government: when these families get their facility once those premises are available, when will they be able to access the childcare subsidy? It's not available under this legislation. However, this legislation contains childcare fee support for families earning up to $530,000 a year. Now, how do I explain that, and how does the government explain that, to the families who can't access child care at all? That's another question that Labor needs to answer around who's missing out in this legislation. And childcare fees may have increased since they introduced their legislation. So I'll keep working with those mothers and the families in Augusta. I would say to the government— (Time expired)

Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.