Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In the few minutes that are available to me I note that I find the motion somewhat confused in that it mixes up the need for early childcare education and child care per se. They are two entirely different functions. The training of the people involved in each differ according to the need.

I will address the question of the need for early childhood learning. It is quite clear that already government policy is to support that concept. Looking at the data that are available, 85.7 per cent of children—that is a national figure—participate in preschool education. The really bad figure is that in New South Wales only 60 per cent of children get access to preschool education. That certainly is a very damning statistic for New South Wales, which is slipping on every indicator. It is at the bottom of the heap on every indicator.

In relation to the childcare issues, the thing that has been completely missed—and I listened to the last speaker talk about the need for bricks and mortar, the cost of land and building more childcare centres—and the bottom line is that we have to think more broadly than that. We have to think of the types of child care that suit parents, rather than parents having to suit the needs of the buildings of childcare centres, which are institutions. They are a good institutions, but they are still institutions.

We need to look at the concept of in-home carers, where families can share an in-home carer, who would have to be properly trained—I suggest they would be vocationally trained to a level 2 certificate. Where there is a home-like arrangement you do not have to pay for the land or the bricks and mortar because they have already been paid for and yet you can get a suitable outcome for families. For instance, where there may be children who are two, four and 13, the two- and four-year-olds can be in their own home, the four-year-old can be looking forward to going to preschool and the 13-year-old can have someone to come home to when they return from school.

The government has put in place some very good policy with regard to child care. The evidence about the availability of people to be teachers and childcare trainees is that probably there is pretty good policy in place to provide enough to meet the needs of parents and children, but keeping them in that area of child care is more difficult because they take the training and then leave. I am afraid that these policies of reducing HECS or reducing the cost of TAFE—which we have always been in favour of, right across the board—will not keep them in the area of child care or early childhood education. That requires a different policy setting.

As I said, in these few moments I have available to me, I think it is important to note that it is government policy to have that available to all children in that last year before they go to school for preschool education, that child care is something quite different and that it needs to meet the needs of individuals, not the other way round. So rather than simply talk about centre based care being institutional care, we need to look outside the square and look at ways that we can provide care that people want—that is, perhaps using in-home care providing the coverage of CCB and CCTR to a whole range of care that currently misses out.

I think the motion needs to be rethought because government policy is already established in many of the areas but the committee report, entitled Balancing work and family gives a good way ahead for improvement to occur.

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