Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Families, Community Services, Indigenous Affairs and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Hansard source

I apologise if the business of the House had to be slightly rearranged. Speakers are dropping off the list very rapidly, so the ordinary timetable is apparently a little out of joint. The Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Child Care Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2008 involves a means test that should have been announced prior to the election. I want to put it to the House and to members opposite, in particular, that you cannot announce good news before an election without also announcing the bad news. The fact that most people will be better off is beside the point. A means test is a means test, and some people will not get the benefit that they were led to expect because of this secret means test which the government has sprung on the Australian public subsequent to the election.

I think it is pretty clear now that the Rudd government won office under false pretences. It took policies to the election without disclosing the fine print. There were policies on means testing the childcare benefit that we are debating this evening. There were policies on the baby bonus, which is now subject to an undisclosed means test. There are policies on family tax benefit part B, also subject to an undisclosed means test. The Australian people are rightly bitter about the fact that the government which they elected was elected with a secret agenda that was not disclosed to them prior to 24 November last year.

I say to members opposite that, if a business went to the public with a policy with secret fine print, that business would now be before the courts of this country for breach of contract. Very likely, the ACCC would be investigating its conduct. And, if that is correct for businesses, it certainly ought to be correct for governments. Any government which goes to the election letting people know the good news but not the bad news is a government which is behaving in a way that would rightly bring a business before the courts and to the attention of the ACCC—and governments should not do it just because, sadly, they are often able to get away with it.

The opposition will be moving an amendment against this dishonest means test, and we certainly intend to divide on the amendment although, in the end, we do not intend to obstruct the passage of the legislation as a whole. Let me concede that the government did promise pre election to increase the childcare rebate to 50 per cent of out-of-pocket childcare costs. The government has a mandate for this, so the opposition certainly does not intend to oppose this aspect of the bill. I want to say, though, that the government, in my view, did not clearly think this through pre election.

If the government had been thinking carefully about this pre election it would have understood that the greater the percentage repaid, the smaller the percentage burden that the consumers must pay, the greater the potential for profiteering by the providers of the service. This move to a 50 per cent rebate has effectively given hard-pressed operators of childcare services a green light to increase their prices. I should remind the House and, in particular, members opposite that in the March quarter of this year, in anticipation of the increased rebate that this government was going to bring in, childcare costs rose 4.5 per cent. Childcare costs rose 4.5 per cent in one quarter in anticipation of the government’s increase to the childcare rebate.

Because this government suddenly saw the benefits of the childcare rebate increase going to providers rather than consumers, we now find the government talking about ‘child care watch’. This was the panicky reaction of the Deputy Prime Minister on Lateline earlier this week to the news that some childcare providers at least are contemplating increasing their fees by 10 per cent. So we have a half-baked policy, that which the government took to the election, followed now by policy on the run. On Lateline, as many of us in this House would have seen, the Deputy Prime Minister repeatedly said that prices would be watched.

When the Deputy Prime Minister was challenged, as she rightly was, by Tony Jones, she kept talking about how the government was considering its options. Then in parliament the next day she said to this House that any unfair price increase would trigger an exercise of the government’s powers. She was not specific about what those powers were or what precisely might be done, but everyone in this House who is at all familiar with this area knows that the only power the government has is the power to change the subsidy. And, if the government were to cut the childcare subsidy for children attending centres which had increased their prices unfairly, the government would be hurting the parents for the sins of the centre. It would be imposing a penalty on the parents who could least afford to bear it, because they would be the parents who would be facing the allegedly unfair increases in childcare costs.

In the wake of the Deputy Prime Minister’s remarkably inept and stumbling performance in the parliament the other day, there is now a suggestion that there will be ministerial approval of childcare price increases, analogous to the system for ministerial approval of private health insurance premiums. I cannot say that in all circumstances a system of ministerial approval is utterly wrong, because it was in fact the Howard government that put in place the system for ministerial approval of private health insurance increases. But I make this important point: there are about 40 private health insurers in this country, and monitoring those prices is hard enough. There are thousands of childcare centres in this country, and any attempt to monitor their prices, any attempt to require them to submit their prices to the minister or the department for prior approval, would be an absolute bureaucratic nightmare.

It goes without saying that any system of price control for child care would be a complete abrogation of the principle of economic conservatism which the government claimed it stood for prior to the election. Any system of ministerial approval for childcare prices would not be a conservative system; it would be, quite plainly, a socialist system. But a socialist system would not, I suspect, particularly worry the Deputy Prime Minister. In fact, any such system would, I believe, be used by her as a weapon with her colleagues to undermine her leader—a leader for whom it is plain she does not have a great deal of respect.

This is legislation which certainly does, in the end, offer significant benefits to most users of childcare services. The last thing the opposition want to do is to deny benefits which were promised by the government at the election and which people have a right to expect, but one thing we certainly must do and will do is expose the dishonesty and deception of this government. If this government were fair dinkum, if the Prime Minister really was mentored by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as he used to claim, he would have been up front, he would have come clean, about the secret means test. This secret means test, little enough though it may well be, is still an important breach of faith with the Australian people. It deserves to be exposed, and that is why I move:

That all words after “That” be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: “whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House:

(1)

records its concern at the proposed amendments to the Child Care Benefit; and

(2)

calls on the Government to maintain the current structure of Child Care Benefit eligibility and to maintain the minimum rate.”

The opposition certainly intends to divide on the amendment.

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