Page 2011 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 5 August 2014
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Child care is an incredible cost imposed upon a family. According to the 2011 census, 45 per cent of women now in the workforce who have young children returned to work before their youngest child turned one, and we do not appear to have an adequately flexible system. A good system must have variety and quality, but at the moment we know the system is struggling and families are struggling.
Federal Labor’s changes to the childcare system focused on improving the quality of services, but the decision to increase the rebate paid to families to help them with out-of-pocket costs was not good policy. Boosting the payment from 30 per cent to 50 per cent of parents’ out-of-pocket costs was an electorally popular decision, but childcare operators warned that paying the rebate directly to parents rather than to centres would have an inflationary effect, and this is exactly what happened.
In Canberra it is very common to find charges of $100 a day per child. The price rises have led to a debate about child care that focuses too much on affordability. This, in effect, hinders women’s participation in the workforce. If it is financially penalising for a family, someone may give up work and, unfortunately, all too often that is the mother.
Apart from raising the rebate, Labor required centres to hire more qualified staff and increase overall staff numbers, and it is at a tipping point where many families say it is not worth going back to work after the birth of the child. While the value of high quality early learning has enormous potential for long-term productivity, the cost is making it unsustainable for some who need it most, especially people for whom quality child care may have enormous benefits for the future social and educational outcomes for their children. The quality of the system must be maintained to give all children a fighting chance of doing well at school, but the cost must be monitored to ensure parents earning low and medium incomes do not decide to give up work because child care is too expensive.
A few weeks ago, as we heard, the Productivity Commission released its draft report on future options for child care and early childhood learning. The report has a focus on developing a system that supports workforce participation, which is essential for individual families and our economy as a whole whilst still addressing children’s learning and development needs. All you have to do is read some of the comments submitted to this review to get an understanding of how much this affects people every day.
Childcare costs in the ACT have doubled in the past six years, and that is a phenomenal impost on families. You also then must take into account the increases in other daily necessities across the board—electricity, rent, rates, fuel, food—and it seems everything has increased at a greater rate than the average income and the belt gets tightened more and more. This is even more noticeable for those who work in casual positions outside the public service and who may be on far lower incomes than their public service counterparts.
Earlier today a Conder resident said to me:
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