Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Child Care Rebate) Bill 2011. I am struck with that same sense of deja vu that other members of the House have spoken of, in part because this bill does precisely that which the Australian Greens have tried to do since June last year, when we moved amendments to the relevant bill. Instead of facilitating quarterly payments to parents, the bill allows parents to access the rebate in fortnightly payments. This brings the childcare rebate into line with other similar payments, and this a healthy move. There are still unresolved questions in the legislation itself about the lack of indexation and also about the government’s commitment to fund child care commensurate to its importance, about which I will say something in a moment. Moving to fortnightly payments will have the effect of helping make child care more affordable for parents. It is a way of helping parents budget with reliability and regularity in the context of increasing childcare costs.

I cannot stress enough to the House the extent to which people in my electorate of Melbourne view the importance of accessible, affordable and quality child care. It is vital, especially if we are serious about women’s participation in work, particularly after they have had children. In the electorate of Melbourne there certainly was a sense of relief and excitement when there was a proposal from the government to expand the number of childcare centres and especially community childcare centres. There was a similar sense of disappointment when 222 childcare centres that were slated to be built were no longer to be built. Part of the reason that was given at that time was that the government would wait and see how the market sorted itself out after the collapse of ABC Learning and the incorporation of GoodStart Centres into the electorate.

Also at the time the astounding claim was made—which came as news to many parents in my electorate—that vacancy rates for children between zero and two in major capital cities in Victoria were in the order of 92 per cent. We conducted a survey in the electorate, because this simply did not gel with parents’ experience, and found that at community centres in the capital city and in the electorate of Melbourne the vacancy rate for children between zero and two was somewhere in the order of 10 to 20 per cent and that the waiting lists were, on average, around 18 months, with some well over two years. What we also found was that a number of parents were preferring to wait and not send their children to private centres, because they wanted the quality and accessibility that comes with having your children in a community centre.

This bill is an important step towards making child care more affordable, but there is no point in having money in the pocket if there is no place to send your children to or you have to go onto an exorbitant waiting list to get them in there. I know that there are many community childcare centres in my electorate which would dearly love to have an immediate grant of funds to enable them to expand their infrastructure, their capital and, basically, their buildings so that there would be more space for them to take on the large number of children who are already on their waiting list. I hope that in the context of the upcoming budget the government considers our proposal to allow community childcare centres to have access to a pool of money for capital expansion. We have had expansion of schools and we have had money put aside for expansion of universities. It is time to do the same for child care. Capital expansion would go a very long way to making child care more accessible, more affordable and of greater quality.

So, in closing, we support the bill. Fortnightly payments help families manage the increasing costs of child care and we especially support it given that the government is adopting, wholesale, the Greens amendments.

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