Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was good that Senator Nash got back to the bill that is actually before us today, the Family Assistance and Other Legislation Amendment (Child Care and Other Measures) Bill 2011. This bill, as has been discussed by other senators, makes a number of administrative amendments to family assistance law to strengthen debt recovery and improve compliance in the administration of the childcare benefit. That could sound extremely litigious, because what we are talking about is a bill that is looking at tightening up compliance so that we can have true accountability in the system.

Senator Bilyk in her contribution referred to the concerns that spread across our whole country when the ABC childcare centres collapsed. In fact, many of the processes in this bill have come about because of what happened in communities. I think there was absolute shock around Australia, in every region, about the collapse of these childcare centres. These centres had been highly promoted. There was a great advertising campaign and they were out there selling their services to the community, and in some cases they were doing a really good job. But there were great concerns with the way the compliance system was operating and with the administrative arrangements that were in place.

I am sure all the senators in this debate will be talking very seriously about the great influence of trust that must be around in the community about child care and the certainty that parents, families and communities must have when they are placing their greatest asset into the care of others. In our com­munities many families are making that choice. It has been established as a worthwhile and valuable exercise for a whole range of reasons, particularly for people involved in the workforce. Our government is committed to ensuring that more people have the opportunity to work and, when they have child-caring responsibilities, they must be assured that the services that are out there in the community are completely reputable and there will not be a repeat of the overnight shock that occurred in our community due to the collapse of the ABC childcare centres. The government took active and immediate action in that case to ensure that we would work with families, childcare providers and the people involved in the ABC issues to ensure that they would be able to have effective child care in their regions.

This bill puts in place the administrative arrangements that have to happen to ensure that there is accountability and certainty in the system. The amendments will make important changes to the A New Tax System (Family Assistance) (Administration) Act 1999 and other legislation, as pointed out by Senator Nash, to improve accountability in the sector. Importantly, it will broaden the powers of the secretary of the department to refuse the approval of a childcare service for the purposes of family assistance law to ensure that operators are fit and proper persons. We often hear the term 'fit and proper person', but in this case—and more than in most others—we need to have the assurance that childcare service providers are indeed fit and proper.

The bill will give the Australian govern­ment greater scrutiny over operators and their past practices. This is an important process that is coming into play. The bill will enable the Australian government to offset and recover payments owed by one service from another service operated by the same operator—keeping that knowledge of similar people involved in providing the service and ensuring that there is absolute certainty that the financial trace will be able to be made. It will ensure that operators that run up debt to the Commonwealth in one service can be held accountable for their actions. It does seem that that is a straightforward process and must be put in place. For instance—and this is just an example to make sure that we understand how it will work—it will stop an operator who accumulates debts and then exits the market, as happens, from coming back into the market under a restructured company with similar but not identical directors. It is pure company law. It is maintaining the scrutiny so that that element of trust can be put in place.

Under the current legislation, the government can only consider the exact operator and their history in the industry. This will widen the scrutiny to ensure that people cannot come in and out and set up different companies and then take on the extraordinarily important role of providing childcare services. It follows that we need to have that trace so that people can be clearly identified and action can be taken to ensure that the knowledge is there and that follow-up action can be taken by the department. This will facilitate a broader consideration of childcare operators, associated organisations and individuals in both the approvals and ongoing approvals processes.

The need for this was identified by the ABC process. There was major media coverage—newspaper, radio and television coverage—of what happened with ABC. It reflected the pain, the shock and the fear of families across our country because the operational processes had fallen over in their childcare centres. As a result of the action that the government took in working with other providers and working with the community, there has been a remarkable rebirth of childcare centres in regions that now have that link to local centres and the acceptance that there must be openness between families, providers and the government, which actually provides the funding.

I take most seriously Senator Nash's point about the issues of privacy. This comes up in so many areas of interaction between people and their government. I know that the department has taken immense time to consider the issues of privacy in this whole area. When families are entering the childcare system, we know that through the interactions they have to have when filling in forms and giving their financial circumstances and the interactions with the various officers that provide information about their payment eligibility and their childcare operators, the issue of privacy is supreme—it must be—through the whole process. The department has worked very hard and has been involved in many discussions—as it always is—to ensure open and effective consultation on the decisions to be made not just in the childcare area but across the board in government service delivery. But today, as Senator Nash knows, we are talking about the Family Assistance and Other Legislation Amendment (Child Care and Other Measures) Bill. We need to have absolute knowledge that you are protected and that your personal circum­stances that you need to provide to government to ensure that you get your appropriate payment are protected by the full force of the privacy law. That has been completely reinforced and will continue to be a key principle in the ongoing operations.

The whole process of what happened with ABC has been a valuable lesson. Since 2008 the government has introduced a range of new measures to ensure the financial viability of childcare providers, including strengthening the approvals process and requiring additional notification of closures of centres. There should be no shock. If you have your children enrolled in a childcare centre, you have a just expectation that that service will be available while you have that need, so there should not be any shock closure. That should be arranged and notified.

The process has been clearly supported through a new penalty regime to reinforce the accountability aspects. The new approvals process includes financial checks for new childcare centre operators to make sure that they are viable from the outset and well placed to meet the quality standards. It is a business process: if you are going to be setting up a childcare centre, you need to be an effective business. Those processes should be transparent and available to the government department to ensure the future actions will go through.

The government is also developing an enhanced financial viability framework for large childcare providers. As we know, in the Australian system there are many providers that operate more than one centre. They are reputable, understood and known by their community, but we are going to ensure through the legislation that there will be an enhanced financial viability framework. The amendments in the bill represent part of our government's commitment to improving accountability within the childcare market and protecting the market from unscrupulous operators. That is what our families deserve. They need to trust that they will not be subjected to unscrupulous operators moving into this business situation.

The bill will also support the government's $273.7 million investment in the national quality framework. The framework, very importantly, is endorsed by COAG, bringing the full force of the COAG arrangements together to ensure that the national quality framework has engagement from all states and all players in the market. The COAG arrangement will improve educator-to-child ratios so that each child gets more individual time and attention—a pure expectation of the families that are choosing to have their children in child care. They need to know that each child will have individual time and attention from skilled, trained operators within the childcare market.

It will introduce educator qualification requirements so that educators are better able to lead activities that inspire youngsters and help them learn and develop—again an expectation from every family in our community that care be much more than just making sure the child is safe for a period of time. The terms used in the COAG agree­ment—to 'inspire' and help with 'learning and development'—sum up part of the exper­ience. As we know, the childcare experience leads on to the opportunities children have for effective education across their whole lives, not only during their childhoods. The education experiences someone has in child care may well determine the options they will have in the future, so the expectation is that there will be trained, skilled and—I like this word very much—'inspirational' edu­cators in the childcare arrangement.

It will include a new rating system so parents know the quality of care on offer and can make informed choices. One of the core principles of this government has been to ensure that our people have informed choices. When you are seeking child care, you need to have information about the providers and their backgrounds and the kinds of staff members they have, and this is part of the expectation that there will be an effective rating system so the link of trust and accountability will be reinforced in the system.

Important for the service providers is that regulation burdens are reduced so that services only have to deal with one regulator. When talking with the providers, one of the aspects they raise regularly is the work they have to do to be part of the system. We have raised the commitment that we will reduce regulation burdens. That is across many aspects of service delivery put forward by this government, but in child care it is one we have made to the providers so that they know that we understand the work they have to do and that we understand that they will be under scrutiny and will have to be good operators. But they understand that we are not going to burden them with a high regulatory workload that will take time away from what they are there to do, which is to provide care for children.

I know Senator Bilyk, with her experience in child care, talked about the international research. As I have said, as a community we understand the value of child care. We respect the work that is done, and that creates the first step in a learning environment that will last a lifetime. Over many years there have been various surveys done about the community response to child care, and increasingly there has been an acknowledge­ment that child care is something that people take as a matter of course in their lives. It is no longer just a luxury or an option just for a few people. The expectation is that when you are doing different things in the community you can have the option of safe, accountable child care for your children into the future. With regard to the changes to protected information—this is the point that Senator Nash was raising about privacy—we will know that we will have those protections and shared information, which is the living spring of the COAG arrangement. There must be shared information, but there must be confidence.

I know Senator Bilyk went through in detail the expenditure that the government has made on child care, and that reinforces the importance and value we place on it. It is always interesting to listen to arguments about who spends more and whose budget is bigger. The one true, inescapable budgetary fact about expenditure on child care is that the Australian government—our government—has been investing $20 billion in funding for early childhood education and child care over the next four years. That is almost $13 billion more than provided in the last four years of the former coalition government. You can talk about the value of services, the way money is expended or the locations of childcare services.

All those things are valuable and need to be considered, and we can stand on our record. When you look at the network of childcare providers across the country now, you can see that child care is an option right across this country. Certainly one of the things this government has done of which I am most proud is the extended expenditure in the area of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander child care, which was not effectively funded under the previous government. It was a commit­ment of our government that we would look at providing an equal option for Aboriginal and Islander families, wherever they live, to effective child care. Again, this is an important aspect of our Closing the Gap commitment; it is one we talk about and on which we are assessed in the Closing the Gap process.

The funding of child care by this government cannot be questioned in terms of the quantum and of the commitment. These figures are so confounding: 627,980 Aust­ralian families with 869,770 children in approved child care are benefiting from assistance across 13,899 services. Only 10 years ago those figures could not have been considered. When we see the numbers of families who have made the choice to access childcare services across 13,899 services in the country, we know that child care is important to the community. We know that there is a clear understanding of the value of—and I use this word again—inspirational childcare services and that people can trust that they will have access to worthy, trustworthy, trained child care and receive an effective childcare rebate.

The government are committed to child care and we have said that since we were elected. It was a core part of our promises when we were first elected in 2007 and it was reinforced in the last election that it would be a core element of action for the government. The bill we have before us looks at the tightening up of administration to ensure that the business element of child care is particularly well regulated; that there is an understanding of accountability; and that there is a reinforcement to childcare providers that they are a valued part of the government service delivery model and there will be an expectation of strong performance, but they will be supported in providing that service by their government. We will continue to have extensive consultation with the industry—with the core groups within the industry and also with individual providers—so that they understand the relationship they have with their government and know they are a trusted element of community service. We will continue to make a strong commitment to the families of Australia that, when they choose to have child care, they can trust that their children will be effectively cared for under this government.