Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

He slipped through the net, got onto the ship and headed back again. Perhaps his time would have been better spent with the penguins down in Antarctica, rather than us having to put up with that tirade. Let us get to the issue of child care and the federal budget. I want to start by reiterating something that the Treasurer, Mr Costello, recently said to the Press Club, on 1 March this year. He said:

I think ... we ought to be looking at making this—

Australia—

the most female friendly place on earth.

This government has talked a lot about trying to make this country female friendly, but the details of the budget on Tuesday night tell a very different story, particularly when it comes to the issue of child care. You can stand up and talk for as long as you like—until the penguins waddle home, in fact—about the number of places you have created and how much money you have injected into the child-care industry in this country, but to most women and families who are confronted by having to find child care that really does not mean anything. It means nothing to them.

There are millions of people in this country—in fact, thousands of families—who need to ring centres every week to try to put a child or a prospective child on the child-care waiting list, and they will need to ring centres to see when that child-care place comes up. They need to try to balance their work and family life around the availability of child care. Then, of course, when they are confronted with the cost of child care, they need to work out and analyse whether it is worth the wife or the partner going back to work. They need to work out whether going back to work is cost effective for the family. Most long day care places are charging anywhere between $220 and $260 a week for a full-time place. So you can talk about what you have injected into the system—how many places or how many millions of dollars—but the cold hard fact is that the day-to-day reality for most families in this country is that child care is not accessible and is still unaffordable.

The Howard government is paying lip service to the real concerns of families across Australia by simply suggesting that it is throwing money at child care. My colleagues have talked about the smoke and mirrors trick with the child-care places that have been allocated—that is, the ASHC or after school hours care places, Senator Joyce—in this budget. The allocation of those places does not really address where the need is in this country. The real need in this country is not only in long day care but also in child care for babies. People are looking for child care not only for kids under the age of two but also for babies under the age of one. That child care is the most expensive child care in this country. Why is that? States and territories license and regulate child care and, in order to mind babies up to the age of one, you need a ratio of one carer to five babies. For older babies, it then goes to one carer to 10 babies and, for children over three years of age, you can have one carer to 15 children. So to provide child care to babies under the age of one is actually quite expensive for the provider, and the costs therefore flow on to parents and families. It is quite expensive for families because the child to carer ratio is much more intense.

The details are still to be explored in the Senate budget estimates—and we on this side look forward to doing that in about three weeks time—but it is apparent from the budget documents that the Treasurer and this government have no real strategy for resolving the real issues, the issues that actually confront families—and, let’s face it, mainly women—when it comes to child care. This budget has a proposal for fixing child care that is simply a con. Families and women know that. There are absolutely no measures in this budget to deal with two of the most critical issues facing the child-care sector—that is, the increased cost of child care and the availability of quality child care. The two issues really facing women who want to use child care, who want to get back into the workforce after they have had a child, is whether there is a place available and what the financial cost of the child care will be for them and their family.

The Treasurer has provided no guarantee that his proposal will lead to any reduction in child-care costs. There is no guarantee that it will increase the availability of child care in the locations where places are needed; in fact, not one extra place is guaranteed. They are made available but only in after school care and family day care—not in long day care. There are no extra places guaranteed. There is no guarantee that child care will be a single cent cheaper and there is no guarantee that the issues of quality will be addressed or will feature in this government’s sight.

I will now turn to the issue of the availability of quality child care and the failure of the Howard government to address this problem. In the Northern Territory the actions of this government have caused real problems for Territory families. There are almost 2,250 families who want to take advantage of long day care either through community care centres or private day care centres such as the ABC Learning Centres, about 750 families who use family day care, and about 1,300 families who use before and after school care and, most likely, vocational care—in fact, I use vocational care for Kate.

Having spent 31 years in the workforce, I have noticed that times have changed a bit when it comes to child care. We needed to utilise grandparents many decades ago. Some families I know are still utilising grandparents because the cost of child care is enormously high. There were not as many child-care centres available in the past. There are many child-care centres available now but nowhere near enough to keep up with demand. The child-care industry has changed, but this is a government that does not recognise or does not want to address the real, significant changes that are occurring and affecting women and their working lives.

I hear from parents all across the Territory, and this morning I heard from women who were at a breakfast that the Labor Party hosted at Parliament House. As is traditional, two days after the budget, the status of women caucus committee hosts a budget breakfast for peak women’s organisations in this country. We did that this morning very successfully. We again heard the comment that there is a chronic shortage of quality child care right across this country. This was reiterated again this morning publicly. The women I had a chance to talk to this morning were not convinced in any way that splashing money at after school care places or at family day care places—making places available but not ensuring that there are schools, providers or operators to take up those places—would address the problem. Women are not convinced that that is where the problem lies. The problem lies in trying to find long day care places for babies.

So what has been the response of the Treasurer to this crisis in child care? While the Treasurer boasts about his $60 million towards addressing the child-care crisis, simply speaking, Peter Costello is taking the unplanned market based system that has created shortages in long day care and applying it to other types of child care. We have uncapped places in long day care and now we will have uncapped places in after school care. That simply means that you can set up and operate wherever you like, without looking at where the market is, without looking at or analysing supply and demand.

We currently have many thousands of people waiting for long day care centres, and we still have after school hour places that have not been taken up. So why are we feeding more of the same problem into an existing situation that has not been resolved? In other words, this government is adopting the system that is failing parents and providers in many areas of Australia and is simply turning a blind eye to the reasons that family day care places in some areas languish unused, while desperate parents cannot find child care near their work or home.

The Treasurer announced in the budget that the government will get rid of the cap that currently applies to outside school hours care—that is, before and after school, and vacation care, the care you use week in, week out during the traditional periods of school holidays; and family day care, from 1 July this year in fact. The Treasurer claims that this will result in another 25,000 new places at a cost of $60 million over four years. There is no modelling or evidence to support this claim but, more than that, there is no incentive, encouragement or decent policy direction under this government to ensure that any one of those 25,000 new places will actually be used or utilised. They are going to be freed up and funded, but they will just sit out there and languish, without any means by which providers or schools which run after school care programs can pick up and utilise those places.

We know that there are already 67,000 outside school hours places and 30,000 family day care places unused from previous budgets. And they are not being used for a variety of reasons, none of which has anything to do with the cap. Let us just have a look at the 30,000 existing places in family day care, for instance, and the reasons why those positions are not being used. It is simply that family day care work and family day care centres do not attract enough workers to deliver the places. Family day care centres are traditionally run by women who operate a micro child-care centre from their home base. They are probably licensed to have anywhere between three and six children, depending on the age of those children. They have to go to enormous expense to modify their homes to ensure that they meet the regulation and licensing requirements that suit the age of the children—and there are certain requirements they must have. Once they have done all that, they go about minding up to five or six children each day in their own homes.

Many women simply do not want to do it. It is very hard work, particularly when you are there by yourself. Unlike in a child-care centre, you do not have the support and back-up of an additional staff person. The pay is extremely poor—I think it is less than $500 a week—to run a family day care centre from your home. Many women are simply better off staying at home, raising their own children and receiving family tax benefits. There is no incentive to encourage women in our society to become family day care providers. There is nothing there that is going to entice them to pick this up as a career and to modify their homes and put themselves through very hard work which is usually unrewarding and, most particularly, paid extremely poorly.

The Howard government has cut operational subsidies to family day care schemes, so that makes it even harder to recruit and train family day care workers. The budget does not provide family day carers with any incentive in terms of addressing wage inequity. Around 96 per cent of the child-care workforce, as I said, is female and, under the Howard government, the gap between men’s and women’s wages has gone up 34 per cent. When you put on top of this the changes to the industrial relations system through the Work Choices bill, this gap will become a chasm as this government takes an axe to the minimum wage. The budget proposal completely neglects the fact that child-care workers have been on the national skills shortage list for seven of the last 10 years. And the failures of the Howard government do not stop there. In this budget, the government has failed to reduce the cost burden on families which child care imposes.

Let me talk for a minute about the plight of child-care workers. We can have a debate in this chamber and in this parliament about private child-care centres versus community child-care centres—and that is a debate for another time—but I maintain that, at the end of the day, the bottom line is this: they are all child-care workers. It is similar to the argument that we have about teachers who work in public and non-government schools or in the private school sector. At the end of the day, they are all teachers. In the child-care sector, no matter what kind of facility we are looking at—after school hours care, privatised child-care centres such as ABC or community based child care centres—child-care workers are trying to deliver a top quality service to the community. In fact, I see them as early childhood educators rather than as childminders, babysitters or child-care workers, and I prefer to call them early childhood educators. But, at the end of the day, their salaries are absolutely appalling. So appalling in fact that, to the credit of the Miscellaneous Workers Union, there has been a national test case run to improve the pay outcome of these workers across the country. But we do not see the federal government encouraging child-care providers to pick up that national wage case and flow it on to child-care workers in the industry.

In the Northern Territory, the Miscellaneous Workers Union has won the right to flow on that national wage case to child-care workers in the Territory. Three private child-care providers are resisting that case and want to fight the Miscellaneous Workers Union again in the Industrial Relations Commission. They are refusing to pay it on. Certainly the ABC Learning Centres have agreed to pay it, but my understanding is that four pays have gone by and the workers are still waiting for that wage case to flow into their pay packets. So, as a result, women are actually walking away from child care. They are leaving the industry. They are not about to hang around and still be underpaid and undervalued. That is another crisis in this industry that this government is failing to do anything about.

The national skills shortage list has had child-care workers on it. Why is that? They are undervalued and underpaid, and this government is doing absolutely nothing to encourage and promote the image of child-care workers as valued members—in fact, critical members—of our community. As a woman who wanted to go back into the workforce after I had each of my four children, I relied incredibly on child-care workers to enable me to do that. Part of this budget does not recognise the skill of those women and does nothing to promote and encourage the flow-on of the national wage case, let alone provide any money towards child-care centres to ensure that happens.

The only new child-care money in this budget that we will actually see spent is the $2.3 million that will be allocated to advertise the government’s child-care tax rebate scheme that they announced two years ago. Why is it now going to be used as an advertising scheme in 2006? Because two years ago, in the lead-up to the election, when the 30 per cent tax rebate was announced, people thought it would actually apply immediately. That was pushed out a year—it was not going to apply until 1 July 2005. When Peter Costello had another look at the books, he thought: ‘Oh, gosh, can’t afford that this year. I’d better push it out another year.’ So people will not actually benefit from that 30 per cent tax rebate until they put in their tax return this year. That means, of course, that when they front up to do their tax return this year they will need to have evidence of out-of-pocket child-care expenses for the last two years. It would be good luck if they still have or can find receipts or if the child-care centres can actually provide them. I think that in itself will be another story. (Time expired)