Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Parramatta for her question and for her deep interest in child care. When the Rudd government was elected less than 12 months ago, we inherited a childcare system in which the former government had let the market rip. In 1999 the former government had uncapped the number of childcare places available. Meeting growing demand by uncapping places was not an error. What was an error was doing that without a plan for quality, without a plan for workforce, without a plan to bring child care to areas that needed it and without a plan that regulated or dealt with this market in any way. Indeed, what the former government did was to let the market rip and take their eyes off the road and their hands off the steering wheel, and then, as it all went towards an inevitable crash, they prepared to blame state and territory governments. Whenever asked, Liberal Party ministers would say in relation to child care that this was all about state and territory governments. To take just one example, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, in 2006, said:

… State Governments have primary responsibility for regulating and managing pre-school and childcare delivery throughout Australia.

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