Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

This afternoon we're here to debate the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Child Care Subsidy) Bill 2021, and what we are seeing today is the government finally admitting that they've been keeping the foot on the neck of working families and hurting the mental state and wellbeing of Australian families as well as their economic security. Their need to bring this bill forward is an admission that their much-lauded changes of a few years ago have become a burden on Australian families, just as Labor predicted that they would. So, as we enter into this debate today, from the outset, it's timely for me to move a second reading amendment. I move:

At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate notes that:

(a) most families receive no extra support from the government's changes to the child care subsidy;

(b) the government's changes do nothing to stop out of control child care fees;

(c) passage of the bill will allow the Minister to bring forward the commencement of the changes; and

(d) the government should deliver extra support to families as soon as possible".

Australian families have been left voiceless and disadvantaged by this government. One of the most pathetic news presences of recent times was the specimen from the coalition party room that said that women using child care were 'outsourcing parenting'. Access to affordable, quality child care is a fundamental cornerstone of economic participation in our country. It's a fundamental cornerstone of the economic wellbeing of families with children. In order to meet their family's needs, a parent needs to be working as a single parent or, in a two-parent family, often you need two parents working. This is the quality of the debate that the coalition had internally around these issues.

The government has wasted a lot of oxygen trying to deny many of the hard facts in relation to child care in our nation. Long day care fees have gone up by 2.4 per cent in 2020, and that included four months of their free childcare experiment—four months where fees couldn't go up at all. We've seen that overall fees went up by 2.4 per cent. They've hiked 9.3 per cent under Prime Minister Morrison's new childcare subsidy. Fees are now up 37.2 per cent since the election of the coalition.

But this government doesn't like to talk about this data. Their mismanagement is not only hurting the 'selfish' women who need the support of this package but also holding families back from work. There are almost 100,000 families in our nation not working due to the cost of child care. As a telling example of this, I had a senior psychiatrist in Western Australia come to me, just a couple of weeks ago, desperate that something be done about the cost and affordability of childcare because, as he said to me, the cost and affordability and inaccessibility of child care was contributing to his ability to recruit psychiatrists into the workforce, psychiatrists that support the developmental needs of children and, indeed, the mental health of Australians. The cost of child care is having an impact in so many ways. Research from the Front Project based on a survey of 1,700 families found 73 per cent of families say the cost of child care is a barrier to them having more children. What a sad and sorry state of affairs. And 52 per cent agreed that once the cost of child care is factored in it's hardly worth working.

Labor has always argued that the system is broken and that the system under this coalition government is completely busted. That's why we announced our own ambitious plan to make child care cheaper for one million families, a million families who need it most. The Morrison-Joyce government know this too. That's why they were pulled kicking and screaming into making the modest changes that we have before us in this bill today.

As we look at the bill itself, we can see that schedule 1 removes the annual childcare subsidy cap from the family assistance act so there will no longer be a limit on the amount of subsidy that families over a specified income year can receive. The annual cap was a terrible policy. It was always a terrible policy. It has served as a serious barrier to second income earners in a family, usually a woman, working the hours that they want and need and—in the kinds of skills shortages that we are facing in Australia currently, which are very evident in Western Australia—working the hours that our economy also needs them to work.It was such a bad idea. Nobody ever, ever recommended it. The Productivity Commission didn't when they were asked to design a new subsidy scheme by the government back in 2015. They certainly didn't include it in their design, so who came up with this idea? The social services minister did, and that social services minister was Mr Scott Morrison. Abolishing Mr Morrison's cap was a terrific idea, so great that it is already Labor policy and part of our plan for cheaper child care.

The amendments in schedule 2 will increase the rate of childcare subsidy by 30 percentage points but only for second and subsequent children aged under six up to a maximum rate of 95 per cent. As we know, this measure has been implemented through a two-phased approach to ensure implementation can occur as soon as possible, but allow sufficient time for the system to build support for the change in policy and to put in place integrity measures. These changes to the subsidy provide income, some extra support for some families, in a short period of time, and in that context Labor supports the bill. But it is a disgrace that there is not more help and more support.

The government's pre-budget announcement promised a lot, but, as this bill demonstrates today, it delivers very little. Like everything with this government, it is all flash and no substance, as we've seen again and again. The problem with this bill is that not many families at all will see a cent of extra help. Three-quarters of families in the system will still get nothing. The government announced a complex and restrictive policy that only benefits families with at least two children below school age in care. Families will need a mathematics degree to understand their subsidy under this new system.

Any passing analysis of the Labor and Liberal childcare policies shows unequivocally that the Labor policy provides more support to more families for longer. Eighty-six per cent of all families with children under the age of six in the system would be better off under Labor's policy. The vast majority of families with two children in child care and a combined family income of between just over $69,000 and just under $174,000 would be better off under Labor's policy. Any extra support the Liberals have in this package for families with two children is only temporary. It's ripped away when the family's older child goes to school, no matter that the older child is still likely to need after-school-hours care. What a ridiculous prospect—to give and then take it immediately away! How is a family supposed to continue to juggle participating in the workforce with two children if the extra support you put in place just suddenly disappears?

Labor's boost in support will be provided to every child for the entire time they are in child care. We will also get the ACCC to design a price regulation mechanism to shed light on costs and fees and to drive them down for good. The Productivity Commission, under Labor, will also conduct a comprehensive review of the sector with the aim of implementing a universal 90 per cent subsidy for all families. This is critical, in Labor's view, not only for working families, to get them participating, but indeed for the access of children to early childhood education and care. It's a plan that's good for families, a plan that's good for the economy and a plan that's good for children's wellbeing.

Here, today, we support this bill because something today is better than nothing. But it is little wonder to us on this side of the chamber that this government doesn't want to talk about its childcare policy. Those opposite know it is a pathetic scrap of a policy. The government's own workforce papers show that the workforce participation rate will fall even after these changes are introduced, and, with closed borders and people screaming out for jobs and skills in the economy, this is unsustainable. We need a strategy to lift participation in the workforce, and child care is key.

I have to say that only this government could design a childcare policy in the depths of Treasury that won't help working families more. We need to get Australians back working the hours they want and need and the hours our economy needs. Early learning and child care are absolutely fundamental to this. Labor knows this, but members of the Morrison-Joyce government clearly don't. Some of them clearly think that child care is just glorified, expensive babysitting. There was even talk in the coalition that aiding working families was forcing women back to work, as though respecting a woman's right to work had been a new and unexamined prospect for the coalition up until this point. I have to ask: what century are we in here? It is 2021, and we have members of the Morrison-Joyce government shaming parents for using child care and needing a reminder to respect the right of women to choose how to balance their work and family life. I know that juggling children and work can be difficult in terms of creating a balance, but how is only being able to afford two or three days of child care a week and, in order to work the other days, juggling informal care contributing to the quality of that juggle? These are not choices that the coalition is offering families and especially women. It is completely and utterly out of touch.

It is embarrassing that this government has taken this approach and has delivered to the nation this quality of debate around these issues. To make matters worse, they even called for more incentives for women to stay home. This ignores the structural incentive they've created to encourage women not to work—their record-high childcare fees. It ignores the fact that many women and families do work full time and only access child care for some of the days during that week. Sometimes they survive well with grandparental care, but sometimes informal care is an inconvenience— (Time expired)