Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would also like to thank Senator Hanson-Young for bringing this issue up and giving us the opportunity to explore some of the very serious problems that there are at the moment. Senator Arbib commented that Senator Bernardi had not provided the solution. Last time I looked, Senator Arbib was the one sitting on the government benches. It is the government who should be looking for a solution. Also, Senator Arbib tells us that there is a plan. Well, we have asked; Senator Hanson-Young has asked; questions have been asked in the House of Representatives, over and over: what is the government doing about this? We do not know what the plan is unless we hear about the plan. What we currently have is, basically, a completely incoherent approach to the entire issue.

We had Minister Evans in the Senate today carefully setting out a timescale that had been developed—allegedly developed, I should say—by the government. Firstly, we heard that in September a task force had been established. He neglected to mention that that was set up after ABC Learning said to the government, ‘Hey, we’re in very big trouble; you’d better do something to help us or the industry is going to fall in a heap.’ He then went on to tell us what happened on 2 November and 6 November. He even mentioned that today there was a meeting of the national peak groups. You would have thought, from the way Minister Evans phrased it, that this was part of a coherent and sensible response to developing a quick and urgent solution to the problem. The only problem, of course, was that, at the same time that Minister Evans was saying this in the Senate, the Minister for Education and Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Ms Gillard, was happily pointing out in her particularly erudite fashion to the House of Representatives that this was just a routine, regular meeting with the ordinary childcare groups who came to see the minister and the parliamentary secretary regularly and normally. She even said that she ‘expected’ that the issue of ABC Learning Centres would be discussed at the meeting. She did not say she was definite it would be. She did not say, ‘Absolutely; it’s going to be our No. 1 priority.’ She said she ‘expected’ the issue would come up at a regular meeting—quite a different version of events from the coherent plan that Senator Evans would have had us believe they were going to make.

I would like to move on to just how decisive all this is looking at the moment. We are getting very used to this now: what is the word of the week from the Rudd Labor government? They used to work on ‘working families’ but—