Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My kids are the men they are today because of great early childcare educators. I'm so lucky to have had wonderful educators in my kids' lives when they were little. As a young mum, I returned to work pretty soon after having both of my kids—you've got to keep paying the bills somehow. It's something I know so many parents out there can relate to. So I put my kids into child care in Ulvie, and I'm glad I did. Those educators shaped who my boys are. I want every child to have these experiences—the playtime with other kids and the chance to laugh, play and squeal with joy. It shouldn't matter where they live, what their parents do or how much money their parents make. Every child should have the same opportunity to learn, but the current system doesn't allow that.

There's this little thing in place called the activity test. It was designed to link subsidised child care to the number of hours parents worked, studied or volunteered. It means the more hours you work, the more hours of subsidised care you have access to, except it's actually locking families out of child care. It's punishing parents who have insecure jobs, people looking for work and carers who contribute to their communities in other ways, and it hits families on low or unpredictable incomes the most. It means people get stuck in a vicious cycle where they can't get a job because they can't get care for their child, but they can't get subsidised care for their child unless they get a job. What are these parents supposed to do?

That's why I support getting rid of this test. It's not working the way it's supposed to. This change will help an estimated 126,000 Australian children access more affordable care and will give them a better start to life. But removing the activity test alone isn't enough to solve the tangled web of problems with the childcare system. If we want every child to have access to child care, we have to have somewhere to put them. Tassie has been labelled a childcare desert. There are fewer childcare places available than there are options for water in the Sahara Desert. Parents can be stuck on waiting lists for months. Some of them sign up for places as soon as they find out that they're pregnant. If there aren't enough places now, there definitely aren't going to be enough when universal child care is implemented. The government has got to start getting creative, and Tassie is already leading the way with a solution.

Some family day care centres in Tassie are at risk of shutting down because there are two day cares running out of the same building and the Tassie bureaucrats say this isn't allowed. The Tasmanian Minister for Education, Jo Palmer, has the power to keep them open, but she refuses to do it. Shutting down amazing childcare centres doing their job doesn't make any sense. It will put a hundred families at risk, with no other childcare options available in the area.

Last year, the Productivity Commission said that dual-educator models in childcare centres could help with childcare prices. The federal government should have them in rural and regional areas, where there aren't a lot of options available. The two centres currently under threat in Latrobe are the perfect example of this; they're filling the gap and doing it well. The federal government should use these centres as an example of how dual-educator family day cares could be rolled out across the country, but to roll out new centres you need staff to fill them.

Early childcare educators are underpaid and overworked. Centres are struggling to retain staff, and educators are heading off to work at Woolies because the pay is better. Labor tried to fix that with their recent pay rise for childcare workers, but it hasn't been executed well. The government won't say how many centres have successfully applied for the wage boost so far, because it isn't rolling out as well as they'd hoped. Educators aren't getting pay rises fast enough, because the wage-boost rollout is a bureaucratic, confusing application process. Some providers are on their fourth attempt to get paperwork approved so their staff can receive their wage increase. I absolutely support a pay rise for early childhood educators, but, if the process is so hard that no-one can get the pay rise, then the system is stuffed.

The federal government needs to work with the sector to make this process as easy as possible. Without addressing these issues, we risk creating a system where families are eligible for care but no places exist for them. Universal child care and removing the activity test are steps in the right direction, but make sure there are spaces available for our kids where they're needed and don't close down what we already have.