Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very happy to participate in this debate and indicate, not surprisingly, that I see a very different, much brighter, outlook for child care in Australia, particularly as a result of the budget announcements made just two nights ago by the Treasurer, Peter Costello. I see a situation for parents seeking child care for their children that indicates a growing opportunity for accessing subsidised child-care places, and for the growing availability of child-care centres within particular regions of Australia which may not have had adequate services in the past. I see growing affordability, and I believe that all the evidence points to a dramatically improved outlook for child care in this country as a result of the work of this government over the last 10 years.

You would not glean from anything that Senator Lundy has said in this debate that funding for child care in Australia in the last 10 years has doubled, or that the number of approved child-care places in this country has doubled from around 300,000 in 1996 to approximately 600,000 in 2005 and more, of course, in the budget announced on Tuesday night. I would like to know from another speaker on the other side how you could possibly have achieved the kinds of outcomes that Senator Lundy has spoken about for children and for parents in this country if you kept levels of subsidised child-care places to the sorts of levels that you had under the former Labor government. On average, families today are now receiving over $2,000 per year in child-care benefit—way up from the government assistance they were receiving under the Labor government.

The government supports families to choose the way that would best suit their circumstances for the care of their young children. As well as supporting families with the cost of child care, we are also of course providing a range of other family payments which are increasing the capacity of Australian families to meet costs of that kind—things like the family tax benefit and the maternity payment. On average, families are now receiving $7,700 in family tax benefit alone. Think of how much capacity there is for many Australian families to meet the cost of child care with payments of that kind.

Senator Lundy makes reference to the fact that inflation in the cost of child-care services has increased at a greater rate than general inflation in the community. That is no doubt true, but I want to draw to Senator Lundy’s attention and to the attention of senators in this chamber that the Australian government does not itself provide child care in the community, and nor indeed do the state and territory governments. They do not run government child-care centres. Perhaps one day—I hope in the not-too-distant future—when we get a child-care centre in this particular workplace, it might be possible for a government to once again be in the business of running those centres. But at the moment governments themselves across Australia do not run these centres. So the government cannot click its fingers and create the particular circumstances where supply and demand are matched up or where centres have particular features, are located in particular places and so on. We have relied for many years on the reality that the marketplace must meet the demand for child care with appropriate subsidies to those centres reflecting the community’s interest in affordability and with appropriate support to families to meet the cost of providing or paying for child care. I would argue that the evidence clearly demonstrates that we have delivered that, notwithstanding increases in the cost of child care over those years. Subsidies have risen and the number of subsidised places has risen. That has had a major impact.

I would like to somehow regulate the marketplace to prevent those costs rising, but we all know that you do not do that. You do not step in and say what it is that people must be paid and cap that amount to somehow ensure that child care remains affordable. If child-care workers are in demand—if there are not enough child-care workers—then the cost of those workers and the wages they are paid will tend to rise. That in part is the problem that we have faced. I might say that the rising cost of child care and child-care workers is a reflection generally of the skills shortages, of which many have spoken in this chamber even today. We are working hard as a government to fix those problems by investing in training and skills acquisition across this country, and there are many measures in this budget and in previous budgets that I think assist that process. But you cannot as a government wave a magic wand and somehow prevent child-care workers from asking for and receiving higher wages.

Government can create or contribute to the circumstances where child care is more available and more affordable, and in that respect this government has delivered and delivered in spades. I do not necessarily want to refer to all the things that have been done in previous years’ budgets, or to the addition of $9½ billion over the next four years alone, or to the other many things that the government has done to increase the number of child-care places from 300,000 to 600,000 in the last 10 years—notwithstanding of course that we have not seen a doubling of the cohort of eligible children in that time. I will not refer to those. I want to refer to what is in this year’s budget, announced two nights ago.

In this budget, the government committed to an additional $120.5 million in the coming financial year to provide an even more responsive child-care system for Australian parents. The government removed the caps on the number of approved child-care places for out of school hours care and family day care so that those forms of care matched long day care in having no cap. Again, that delivers a system where demand can be met wherever it occurs and does not rely on the designation of a certain number of places in particular regions or areas of Australia. If there is demand in an area, that area is eligible for child-care places.

This means that 99 per cent of places in the sector will be uncapped from 1 July 2006. Services will be able to set up or expand to meet demand when and where it occurs, provided they meet approval requirements, including quality assurance and licensing. Parents using these places will be eligible for subsidised child care through the child-care benefit. This is one of the most significant changes in the provision of child-care places in Australian public policy history and certainly the most significant change since the Howard government introduced the child-care benefit.

That is a general benefit available to all Australian parents irrespective of their conditions or means. Of course, parents on income support such as the parenting payment who are re-entering the workforce will also benefit from this budget’s increased funding for the JET Child Care program, which pays almost all the gap between the fees at their child-care centre and the child-care benefit—a huge benefit that Senator Lundy seem to have overlooked in her remarks, but one that makes a big difference to the way in which parents in those categories—