Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Families and Community Services) Share this | Hansard source

I certainly welcome the opportunity to speak on these appropriation bills as it gives me my first chance to give an overview of my new portfolio and to address some of the issues where the government is really letting down some of our most vulnerable Australians. It certainly is a portfolio in which I have had a very longstanding interest and a deep conviction that, as a community and in government, we need to do much better than we are.

There are a number of policy shortcomings in the Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs portfolio. I will talk in a moment about Indigenous affairs, but I first want to turn to the families and community services part of the portfolio. Unfortunately, in Senate estimates this week, the additional estimates that have been released show that the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs are in fact in deficit, as they were last year. During the Senate estimates hearing that was held on Monday this week it was revealed that the department do not even have an accurate staffing model that can tell them who they have working on what or where. How on earth they can be responsible for supporting families, particularly some of our most vulnerable families, when they have not got their own house in order is a very serious problem.

The critical challenge facing Australia today is how we sustain our national prosperity after the resources boom is over. There is no question that the resources boom has been very good for our nation, but we know that booms always come to an end. What is it that we on this side of the parliament believe need to be done to make sure that we have sustained prosperity beyond the boom? From our point of view, there are two critical elements to that future prosperity—lifting participation and improving productivity. Unfortunately, yet again, we have seen the government fail to take action in these good times in these two critical areas. These appropriation bills that we are debating today stand yet again as evidence of that missed opportunity.

One critical step that we need to take in this country is to lift workforce participation. For the people who are in some ways cared for and are the responsibility of the families and community services portfolio—a portfolio that has appropriated to it billions of dollars to support Australians who are not in the workforce—lifting workforce participation is a particularly important objective.

We all know, and I think all of us would agree, that participation in the workforce is good for Australians, for their sense of self-esteem and of course for their standard of living. People need to feel that they are contributing and that they are supporting others, especially their families, so that they can rely on themselves and so that they can help their loved ones get through life. Work is one of those essential things like family that gives meaning to our lives. So a government that actually cares about people will do all that it can to foster people’s capacity to participate in work and to gain purpose through work. These human reasons are reason enough, but of course there are other very good reasons why Australia’s national government needs to increase participation in the workforce.

The ageing of Australia’s population will increase the demand for services and reduce the supply of people able to fund and deliver these services. So it is critical that we address the barriers to participation that currently exist in our country. Last year Senator Penny Wong, Labor’s shadow minister for workforce participation, released a discussion paper called Reward for effort which detailed how Labor will address this participation challenge. That paper reaffirmed our commitment to the principle of mutual obligation and proposed to harness mutual obligation so that it actually serves the interest of both the individual and the nation. Mutual obligation should be used to help income support recipients to become independent and also to help the nation to lock in our future prosperity.

Unfortunately, under the current government, mutual obligation is simply a way of keeping people engaged in some activity but not necessarily working. That is not good enough. Labor intends to put the mutual back into mutual obligation by making sure that people who do have participation requirements also have opportunities to get ahead to foster their independence. So what we want to do is bring both obligation and opportunity together. At the heart of that relationship is enabling people—especially those people with part-time participation requirements, some of our most vulnerable income support recipients—to build their capacity through study or training. This really is the missing ingredient in the government’s current plans.

From Labor’s point of view we intend to back up our proposals with options to turn this opportunity into reality. We intend to introduce measures that will be designed to give the financial backing to those who will benefit from investment in their skills. We know that skills are critical to participation. We have a major skills crisis in this country. There are jobs out there available for Australians, not able to be filled by Australians because many of the people who would like to work do not have the skills to fill them. Of course the government’s response to that is to bring people in from overseas on short-term visas rather than extending the opportunities for participation in skill development to our own people.

We know there are other very difficult issues in the social security and income tax areas. We know that some of the most vulnerable Australians face very high effective marginal tax rates when they want to come back to work. They lose more in their social security payments and in the tax that they pay than makes it worthwhile to work. For many, those disincentives are very powerful indeed.

We know for many others that problems to do with accessing affordable child care prevent them from working as much as they would like to do. We certainly do welcome the additional funding that this bill appropriates for the Jobs, Education and Training Child Care Fee Assistance program. An extra $20 million is being provided for this service and it is a program that we support. After all, the JET program is a Labor program, a great Labor initiative, and I am pleased to see that the federal government is supporting it.

We know that for people with children workforce participation is just not achievable without proper childcare support. So while there is this additional funding in the bill, and I do think that is a good thing, more broadly, unfortunately, the latest Bureau of Statistics figures tell us that childcare costs are spiralling out of the reach of many Australian families.

Just to inform the House of the increase in costs of child care, these latest Bureau of Statistics figures show that childcare costs have increased more than the price of bananas or fuel over the past five years. Since December 2001 out-of-pocket childcare costs for Australian families have increased by 82.5 per cent, eclipsing increases in fruit, which went up by almost 73 per cent, and petrol, just over 40 per cent.

You wouldn’t know it, would you? The Prime Minister was quick to blame the price of bananas for the increase in the cost of living. He at no point took into account the very significant increases in childcare costs that have burdened and continue to burden Australian families with young children. These increases compare to an overall increase in the cost of living of about 14.8 per cent in the same period. So you can see that there was a massive increase in the cost of child care compared with the general cost of living.

Of course, it is true that natural disasters can be blamed for increases in fruit costs, but you would have to say it is the disastrous policies of the Howard government that have sent childcare costs rocketing. At nearly $240 a week, it certainly is not easy for parents to afford child care when they have very tight family budgets. Parents—and it is still the case that it is particularly mothers—are acutely aware that if they want to go back to work or if they want to increase their hours of work it is very difficult for them to do so if they cannot afford the cost of child care.

Just recently we have seen that the government thinks that one of the reasons parents are not using the child care that is available is that they are too choosy. A recent report by the Treasurer’s department claimed that:

... contrary to popular perceptions, there is not an emerging crisis in the sector—

they mean the childcare sector—

… supply is generally keeping pace with demand and child care has remained affordable.

I think they need to get out more and talk to parents about the childcare reality that is facing so many families in this country.

The other element to securing Australia’s long-term prosperity is boosting productivity. We know that Australia must find new sources of competitive advantage if our prosperity is to be sustained following the resources boom. We on this side of the parliament believe that investment in our people is essential in creating an innovative and productive workforce that can adapt to a rapidly changing world.

The first priority that we have identified this year, and one that I know parents certainly agree with, is that all of our children deserve the best start in life. Overwhelming international evidence supports the view that investment can provide crucial support to parents and communities, helping to make sure that children succeed in life. So all the evidence is telling us that investing in the early years of life delivers strong long-term benefits for children and the wider community. Investing more and investing it earlier leads to increased educational attainment and labour force participation, with higher levels of productivity. It also helps tackle disadvantage, dependency on welfare, our hospitals and our criminal justice system—all the things that you would think the department of families and community services should be concerned about. Unfortunately, all we ever hear from the government is: yes, it is very important to invest in the early years. They would like it to be the case that four-year-olds in Australia get access to preschool programs, but frankly it has been nothing more than a lot of hot air from the government. They have made no commitment to this crucial area of investment in our young children.

Nobel Laureate James Heckman put it very well, I thought: ‘Learning begets learning, skills beget skills.’ The World Bank said, ‘It is never too early to become involved but it can easily be too late.’ According to the OECD, Australia spends just 0.1 per cent of GDP on preschool education compared with an OECD average of 0.5 per cent. So you can see that, under this government, Australia is not meeting the challenge that so many international experts have set for us. Our four-year-olds are being left behind at just the point where we can help them most.

The OECD reported that, in 2005, four in five Australian three-year-olds did not receive any pre-primary education, one of the worst results of the surveyed countries. What Kevin Rudd, the Leader of the Opposition, and I have done is indicate that Labor will put learning and development of our four-year-olds at the centre of Australia’s approach to early childhood education and care. For Labor, early childhood policies are not just about providing more care. Of course it is true that affordable and accessible child care is essential to lift workforce participation, but it cannot be the totality of any government’s ambitions in providing services for children during their early years. All parents, all of us, have very high aspirations for our children, and I know that parents across Australia share Labor’s concern that our children have access to high-quality early learning and care.

So, under a Labor government, all Australian four-year-olds will have enshrined in a new Commonwealth early education act a universal right to access early learning programs. We will make sure that our four-year-olds are eligible to receive 15 hours a week of government funded early learning programs for a minimum of 40 weeks a year. That will include a requirement for all early childhood educational care services catering to four-year-olds to have sufficient degree-qualified early childhood teachers to meet that entitlement. Structured play based learning would be provided to assist the development of pre-literacy and pre-numeracy skills. We will provide $450 million in additional Commonwealth funding to cover the cost of these new programs in order to make sure that parents do not have to pay more as a result of this increased educational provision to our children.

We recognise that parents are going to use a wide range of different services. We will make sure that these services to four-year-olds are available in preschools or kindergartens, in long day care, whether it be community based or private, and in family day care. We are not going to be fussy about where it is provided; we want to make sure it is provided and provided by a qualified teacher. We intend to do it with the states and territories because we know that blaming others for the lack of service provision is not going to do anybody any good. When it comes to this government, all it can do is blame the states and territories. In the meantime, 11 years worth of four-year-olds have missed out on early childhood learning because all this government can do is blame somebody else for the lack of provision for these children.

It is going to take a Labor government to make sure that each and every four-year-old in this country has access to early childhood education delivered by a qualified teacher. We will also make sure that there are enough qualified teachers available by expanding the number of university places and paying half the HECS fees of those university qualified early childhood educators who are prepared to go to areas of need. It is only Labor that is proposing a way forward in this area, because we understand just how critical it is.

I just want to turn briefly to the other critical area of this portfolio, which is Indigenous affairs. Additional estimates hearings show that the Department of Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs will administer approximately $430 million in Indigenous programs in this financial year. That includes $292 million for community housing and infrastructure, yet their departmental expenses are nearly $110 million. That amount of departmental expense is equivalent to more than a quarter of the administered funds. If you take out the amount they are actually spending on community housing and infrastructure, the amount of departmental expenses almost equals the amount of administered funds; it will take almost as much to run the programs as the Commonwealth spends on them.

Last year my predecessor in this portfolio, Senator Evans, outlined our approach in this area. He noted the failed approach of the COAG trials, which have certainly overreached the capacity of the bureaucracy to deliver. In the time remaining I want to say that we are not interested in bureaucratic solutions. What we will be doing is finding the things that work and building on those, scaling up the things that work in Indigenous affairs and not taking an ideological or bureaucratic approach. (Time expired)

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