Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection. Senator McLucas asked me if I have talked to any parents. I think Senator McLucas would know that I talk to parents very regularly out there in our regional communities, having been one myself. They may well love the program, Senator McLucas, but you know as well as I do that they hate the waste and mismanagement. Interestingly, when we compare the private sector and what they have managed to do and the public sector through the state government, the waste and mismanagement in the state government sector has been nothing short of appalling. It is no wonder that we see this absolute disaster in New South Wales of a Labor government when they mismanage programs like that so badly.

The point is that the Australian people are absolutely astonished that the government can waste billions of dollars on the one hand and yet on the other hand expect Australian working families, through cuts to their childcare rebate, to pay for the national quality framework. I think anybody with any sense and sensibility would see how incredibly stupid that is. If the government had just managed to in any way, shape or form manage the economy properly they would not need to be putting this pressure on Australian families. Next they will be raiding the kid’s piggy banks saying, ‘Quick, we need a bit more money, where can we drag it out of next?’ Instead of focusing on the proper management of the economy, they do as they always do and move to taxes, move to raiding, move to cutting programs like the childcare rebate. It is simply not acceptable.

That leads me to the national quality framework itself. It is all interrelated in one way or another. It is all about child care. It is all about how government addresses the needs of the childcare sector. With the national quality framework, we believe that it sounds good if every childcare worker has to be qualified and there has to be an increase to staff to child ratios. Sure it sounds good and we all want the best system possible, but the policy needs to be realistic. I made some comments about this in this place recently. There is a critical shortage of qualified workers, and there has been some talk about exemptions—not a lot of detail around that. But if we have a requirement for every childcare worker to be qualified when we have something like three out of 10 alone in Victoria who are not, how on earth are we going to provide the workforce for those childcare centres? We have hundreds of centres currently searching for qualified staff and we are going to particularly see the impact of this on rural and regional communities. I was recently up on the North Coast chatting to a lady there. Senator McLucas will be pleased to hear I was again out on the ground talking to people in these centres.