Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens support these amendments. During the committee hearings, I was quite concerned to hear that there was not an adequate assessment process of child-care places being carried out, in particular in regional Australia, where I believe there is going to be a significant increase in demand, particularly as it relates to the new Welfare to Work legislation that has come in. Outside of that, the department really has no idea how many places are required in regional centres. It has no process for adequately assessing the demand in regional centres, and when I asked about what process is in place in other areas I was told that it mostly depends on requests from existing centres. I do not think this is an adequate way to be handling child care in this country. I believe that the Labor opposition’s amendments go some way to addressing this issue but, as we articulated in a minority dissenting report to the committee hearings, we believe FaCSIA needs to be developing a robust assessment process to allow it to model future demands for child-care places, particularly in regional communities. We also believe it needs to be doing a bit of forward planning to address these identified future needs. We will be supporting these amendments.