Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution to the debate on the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Child Care Measures) Bill 2014. My children are right in the middle of this debate—my grandchildren are in child care and my children and their partners are trying to make decisions about what they can and cannot do. I think Senator Xenophon is absolutely right: this is the barbecue-stopper conversation.

I spoke to a group of young women on the weekend who were talking about their child care options and the implications of this bill, and the cuts they represent. They were actually making those kinds of decisions and choices. They were saying, 'Okay, I'm going to have to cut back my child care.' I had my daughter and son-in-law looking at me and saying, 'After 1 July perhaps you could mind the children one day a week.' These kinds of things are being suggested to me for post-retirement!

What brought it home to me was the fact that in the weekend media I saw Minister Andrews talking about the importance of productivity, and arguing for wider participation rates by women in the workforce. He talked about the fact that because we have an ageing population we need to be more productive. At the same time that I am having this conversation with young women, all of whom are young parents, I am thinking about the investment that has gone into their education, their university time, their skills and training, and the fact that they are making decisions about withdrawing from the workplace, to withdraw their productivity from working, simply because the economics of child care do not stack up for them.

It is very interesting that several people have also mentioned the NATSEM report, which was issued at the weekend. It is a fascinating report and I commend it to everybody. On the one hand we have the government spruiking workforce participation, clearly aimed at promoting the Paid Parental Leave scheme as a way of ensuring that mothers remain in the workforce. The evidence really is that child care is the issue. The impact of paid parental leave on workforce participation is actually minimal. The impact is to do with child care. The National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling report really bells the cat. Child care costs have gone up 150 per cent over the past decade, and while government subsidies for child care have risen to $5 billion, that is not actually enough.

Can I take you back to where one of the crises in childcare costs occurred, and that was with the collapse of ABC Learning. People will remember that a former minister, Larry Anthony, was a director of ABC Learning. I watched across New South Wales as ABC Learning actually consumed community based childcare centres across the board. Then, with the collapse of ABC Learning, communities were left with very few options. It actually made a significant contribution to the way in which childcare costs have increased.

So there is nobody in support of the measures we are debating today. Other than the government, not one person to whom I have spoken can see the logic of putting all of your eggs into the basket of paid parental leave and abandoning the vexed issue of a very complex childcare system, one that is also underfunded.

The major stakeholders, who have had much to say in the media and to the Senate inquiry, include people like Early Childhood Australia; Family Day Care Australia, who are very concerned about what is happening to them; the Early Learning Association; and the Australian Childcare Alliance. I recommend that latter's submission to everybody here in the chamber because it actually lays out well and truly what the impacts will be. Also there is the Goodstart Early Learning Network and the National Welfare Rights Association. Even the Australian Industry Group is arguing that the cuts would not be necessary if some of the expenditure allocated to the government's Paid Parental Leave Scheme was redirected.

So the nonsense we have before us today really is that, again, it is an ideologically driven position that the government wants to pursue in this measure. Several speakers have talked about broken promises—the promise that there will be no cuts to education, to health, to child care, to pensions and to universities. But what really gets my goat is that the Prime Minister wrote to childcare centres and promised them that he was going to address the affordability issue. He said that caps and freezes on childcare assistance would have the impact of increasing out-of-pocket costs for families. But now he is doing exactly that. He is actually driving up the cost of child care to such an extent that people are making serious decisions about the affordability of child care and what that will mean.

The report on the weekend provided some very interesting information. On the subject of affordability, page 15 of the report says:

Government subsidies, such as the Child Care Benefit and Child Care Rebate, have meant over the long term out-of-pocket child care prices have not increased much faster than the CPI, but the concern is around recent price growth and the likelihood of further rises.

That is what really has parents concerned. The report continues:

Child care prices have increased by 44.2 per cent in the past five years and, in the absence of additional Government assistance, family out-of-pocket costs have risen at the same pace.

The report shows five-year price increases of 44.2 per cent for child care, 78.9 per cent for electricity, 25.8 per cent for health, 31.9 per cent for education, 36 per cent for petrol, 6.5 per cent for food, 21.6 per cent for rent, and the CPI increased by 13.9 per cent.

All of those issues are issues that this government is targeting in one way or another. If out-of-pocket expenses were only happening for child care, perhaps parents could cope—but it is not just child care. I listened this morning to a young mother saying on the radio, 'Well, I just have to think about all of these things. I have to think about an increase in child care. I have to think about parking. I have to think about road tolls. I have to think about losing my support for study.' It gets to the stage where people are in a huge level of stress. The reason that they are in stress, it seems to me, is not just because of childcare costs; it is the cumulative impact of all of these costs. It is really very significant that the Paid Parental Leave scheme is part and parcel of the government's contribution to this debate.

The NATSEM report actually suggests that paid parental leave is a nice thing to have, but it will not impact on whether you return to the workforce. That was a discussion confirmed by the young women I spoke to on Saturday. It will not make much difference to workforce productivity and it certainly will not do much for low-income families. It is a $5.5 billion program where the more you earn, the more you get, so it is regressive. It is so logical it is regressive. It has no obvious benefit for workforce participation, whereas child care has the biggest impact in workforce participation, as well as positive outcomes for early learning among children. There is good evidence that you get better educational outcomes from investing in good-quality child care and this in turn benefits the workforce and increases government tax revenues in the long term.

There is no logic in the measures in the bills before us. It is quite illogical. There is the frustration that we have about the almost one million families—978,000 families rely on child care on a daily basis—who all stand to lose some level of support under this bill. The bill has a cumulative impact. There is $450 million that is being lost for outside school hours care. That was all part of the debate that we were having just a few years ago about the double drop-off. Now, funding to that program is going.

As I said, the Family Day Care services are very concerned that they are copping a hit of more than $150 million to those programs. That is the largest childcare service in Australia. Support to parents who are completing studying and getting back to work has been cut. The programs to increase childcare places have all been cut. Look what the government has planned for Indigenous child and family centres: that funding has disappeared. $300 billion that was to go into supporting the quality framework and educators' wages is gone.

Now, we get right to the heart of the childcare rebate and childcare benefit. It really is a disgrace, as every other speaker has said here this morning, and something that we really should be thinking about in terms of policy coherence. What are the messages that we are actually sending to our communities? What are the messages we are sending to our employers? What are the messages that we are sending to our young men and women? What are the messages that we are sending to our older folk about the way in which we value supporting families, keeping their stress levels to a minimum and understanding the value of education, the importance of the early years and the formative learning that goes on in childcare centres?

What are we forcing people to do? They are back to having conversations like, 'Grandma might be able to mind the kids while mum goes back to work,' or they are back to looking at working shift work, with some people doing nights and some people doing days, and never actually having the chance to spend time as a family with their children. It is a very, very backward step.

The notion that we wait for the Productivity Commission report is also nonsense. We have a situation where we have already had one report. We have had this significant report, which confirms the Grattan Institute report, and now we are having continuing considerations by the Productivity Commission. That draft report is coming down in July, so why are we rushing through this bill now? Why not wait for the draft report in July and the final report in October? No, instead we will just railroad through this whole process now and get it done as an ideological position.

The minister and the senior minister—the Minister for Social Services—have said that the Productivity Commission will solve those issues of affordability, availability and flexibility. Well, why are we here having this discussion if everything is going to be resolved? With the collapse of ABC Learning and the way in which that rippled across workplaces and communities, we saw that the issues of affordability, availability and flexibility are things that require long-term planning; wide consultations, which is something that this government has proven again and again that it just cannot do; and people actually being listened to, stakeholders being listened to and parents who understand the demands being listened to. They are parents who understand that they might be travelling for two hours a day to actually get to their childcare centre and who need some flexibility.

There are challenges around the workplace, which is not nine-to-five anymore. People work at all hours and 24 hours a day. How do we provide that kind of care? It is not going to come from radically cutting childcare rebates and childcare support in this haphazard way, it is going to come from a very comprehensive, well-thought-through process in which everyone is able to have a say. We are looking at solving an issue that is an issue for the nation. It is not an issue for just one part of the economy. Child care is one of the most frustrating and difficult challenges for employers. It is not just a challenge for families and employees, the unions or the childcare industry. We have a huge challenge ahead of us if we are looking to lift the nation's productivity. It is a national challenge that we should all be seeking to address in a really sensible and sensitive way.

I want to point out one more thing about the affordability issue before I conclude. The report that came out on the weekend from NATSEM followed a very significant piece of research it undertook around the issue of regional differences in costs and where the least affordable childcare, as a share of disposable income, was in Australia in 2013. What struck me was that, of the 10 locations identified in New South Wales, Queanbeyan has the second-least affordable childcare in Australia at 8.6 per cent and then Goulburn-Yass at 8.3 per cent. Here we have two regional areas in a large part of New South Wales—very close to home for me—where the childcare stress is exactly what I was talking about to the young people on the weekend. There is a lack of affordability, there is a lack of accessibility and there is a lack of flexibility. This bill does nothing to address any of those issues. I urge people to reconsider. I urge the government to hold off until the Productivity Commission brings down its report on a comprehensive way in which we can address this issue as a nation.