Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

We invest billions of dollars in supporting early education and childcare activities and we have strong record of clamping down on such behaviour. When we came to office the Jobs, Education and Training Child Care Fee Assistance program had no limits as to what parents on income support payments could claim for their childcare support while studying, leaving it wide open to abuse. In January 2015 we put in place an $8 per hour cap and linked qualifications for the payment to the skills list. These initiatives are estimated to have saved over $110 million. Later in 2015 we clamped down on the practice of child swapping—a practice where a childcare educator in one family day-care centre sends their children, or at least pretends to do so, to another family day-care centre which has children enrolled at their original house. These types of practices—effectively child swapping, sometimes only on paper—were reaping millions in federal government subsidies. In fact, since our clampdown occurred, more than $7 million has been saved on a weekly basis as a result of these measures.

In October this year further measures, saving an estimated $27 million, were introduced to ensure fee assistance is not available where there is no genuine liability for the care—where the care merely involves transporting a child to or from school; where a family day-care provider is operating in the child's own home or is in fact their parent or sibling—and by implementing more rigorous suitability criteria. We are now consulting on a further round of reforms to make sure that every dollar of support in early education and child care is going where it is meant to go, rather than in the pockets of those who seek to rort the system.