Kate Ellis (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

As Labor made clear in the Senate, we will not be standing in opposition to these amendments to the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Jobs for Families Child Care Package) Bill 2016. We do have some concerns that we will place on the record, but our concern, in all of this debate, has never been about the high-income-earning families who will be affected by these amendments; our concern has been and remains those incredibly vulnerable and disadvantaged children at the other end of the spectrum who will be significantly disadvantaged as a result of this package.

These amendments that the parliament is currently debating will cut off subsidies entirely from high-income-earning families. As I said, Labor is not standing in opposition to that. But we do need to say that this will actually be the first time that not every child in Australia has had a universal entitlement to some sort of subsidised early childhood education. And that does set a precedent. It sets a precedent that, if you carried it through, would mean that, for schooling, higher-income families would have to start paying much higher fees to access public schools. It would mean that we would start putting the income of the parents onto the consideration of the early education that their children receive.

We believe that there should be some universal entitlement to early childhood education in the country. We also believe that we should be moving our early childhood education and care system closer to the schooling system, not further away from it. We do not want to see policy which entrenches a backward step where we view child care as a babysitting service, not as quality early childhood education and care, which we know we need to be moving towards.

I would also note that, as the Treasurer just pointed out, these bills have been debated for two years. The amendments that stand before the House were put to the Senate at the last minute, after three Senate inquiries which did not consider these amendments. After a number of submissions and debates over two years, these were last-minute amendments.

No work has been done to look at the workforce participation impacts of these amendments. We know that we are talking about means testing on family income, not on the secondary-income-earner's contributions. So there has been no work around workforce participation. The other thing we do not know is the behavioural impacts and what this will do for these families' decisions. If they are getting no subsidies, why not withdraw their children from regulated, quality, early childhood education and care services and instead invest in nannies, which they can have in their own home but which we know are not regulated and do not have to meet the same standards of care? So there are implications of this which the parliament should watch carefully.

Our concern, all along, has not been about high-income-earning families, though; it has been about some of the most disadvantaged children in Australia. Sadly, these were the children who were sold out in the Senate as a result of the dirty deal done when Nick Xenophon and his team and One Nation agreed with the government that—despite the fact that we are spending an extra $1.6 billion in child care as a result of these measures—some of the most vulnerable children in Australia would not only not receive any additional support but in fact would have their access to early childhood education and care halved. That is what this piece of legislation does.

It is sickening to me that we would stand here as a parliament and say that we are going to bring into place these reforms, to put a few extra dollars in middle-class parents' pockets, but, at the same time, turn our backs on children who may be living in families where there is intergenerational unemployment. They will have their hours of access to early childhood education and care cut, to the point where—while, at the moment, they can attend two days a week—under these reforms, they will receive only one day's care. That is what the debate has been about. So some might like to say that there has been some pedantic debate about whether these children should receive 12 hours or 15 hours. That is not what this is about. It is about the fact that, at the moment, children have access to two days' or 24 hours care; under this proposal, that would be cut to just 12 hours.

The entire early childhood education and care sector has unanimously said: there is no way that they can continue to deliver two days' care when they are only getting subsidies for 12 hours. They have said that the minimum it would take is 15 hours. That is why Labor has stood up and fought for those children. And we will stand up and fight for them in the future. We know that, if we do not stand up and fight for some of the most vulnerable children in Australia, we are locking them in to more generations of welfare dependency. It is short-sighted policy. It is wrong. And the Senate was wrong to sign off on it.

See this speech in context