David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

If ever there was an area of policy lacking a purpose and coherent framework, it's child care. Let's start with a few basic questions. Why should taxpayers subsidise the cost of child care? Why should people who want children but can't have them subsidise it? Why should people who don't want children subsidise it? Why should gays and lesbians subsidise it? Why should it be subsidised by people who choose to stay at home to look after their kids full-time but whose spouse or partner works and pays tax? What is the public benefit in taking around $9 billion from some people and using it to help pay for the child care of other people's kids? What social evil or negative social outcome is being prevented by this massive transfer of money? How much better is our society now compared to 20 years ago when none of this funding occurred?

If you were looking for an answer in the government's response to the red tape report, you would be disappointed. In one place, it says that the primary role of child care is to encourage workforce participation. In another place, it says it is to improve the educational and development outcomes for children. To make an obvious point, they are not the same; indeed, they are somewhat in conflict with each other. Encouraging workforce participation means making child care affordable to the people who would not otherwise return to work after having children. To some extent, the recent changes are a move in that direction with its better targeting, but, really, the targeting is still farcical. What justification can there be for subsidising the child care of someone earning $349,000 a year? Anyone earning that amount of money is not going to decide to return to the workforce as a result of a subsidy of a few thousand dollars on their child care. Indeed, but for me, the subsidy would have been open-ended, and someone earning $1 million a year would have received a child care subsidy.

Clearly, substantially better targeting is needed. High-income earners should not be receiving a child-care subsidy to encourage them to return to work when the subsidy has no influence on whether or not they return to work. As you come down the income scale, you will eventually reach a point at which the subsidy is, indeed, critical to the decision to return to work. The problem is the government has no idea what that point is. It's locked in a political vice created by handing out other people's money and it's afraid to get out of it. Perhaps it might help if I point out that better targeting might actually allow an increase in the subsidy for those who genuinely need it. In any case, we are spending a vast amount of money to get people to return to work after having children. That's based on precious little information about how well it's working and whether it can be improved without throwing yet more billions of taxpayer dollars at it.

As to the second objective, improving educational and developmental outcomes for children, that of course is a worthy aspiration. The problem here is that the evidence to support the idea that early childhood education actually improves educational and developmental outcomes for all kids is not there. What the evidence shows is that early childhood education is only of benefit when the kids come from dysfunctional households—that is, where the parent is extremely poor and the parents are essentially deadbeats. In normal households, the outcomes are no better than those from staying home with mum. Even if they start school without certain skills—such as being unable to spell 'gender inequality'—they catch up very quickly. That is good, because otherwise the social engineers would be promoting Aldous Huxley's brave new world—children would be taken away and required to attend early childhood education because mothers are deemed incompetent to do the job. As we know, because we have thousands of years of evidence, mothers overwhelmingly do a great job.

The bottom line is this: we are spending $9 billion a year on a program that is barely targeted at the people who need it most—those who wouldn't otherwise return to work and kids in dysfunctional households. Rather, we have a massive feel-good program in which money is given to people who are not poor but who happen to have young children, with much of that money coming from people who earn less than those who receive it. Despite the helpful analysis in the Red Tape Committee's interim report and its very modest recommendations, the government is blind to its failures.

In the past, we didn't fund child care at all. Now we do. Why? The government's response should have sought to tell us. It doesn't.

Question agreed to.