Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, thank you for being here. The logical connection between your portfolio and the Minister for Education and Training is obvious. It is also good to have the assistant minister here. My concern is child care. There has been a lot of public debate, even in my electorate, about fraud in family day care in particular. Everyone in this chamber would recognise just how important flexible forms of child care are, and both sides of the chamber have worked to increase those choices for Australians. But the record is not so good on the other side of this chamber, Minister, as you well know, in relation to closing the loopholes in family day care that led to some of the stories that hit the media the last few weeks. In particular, we will be concerned about value for money for the taxpayer, whether is it what we call sharp practices in family day care or genuine fraud—which we have seen in a few cases that have hit the media in the last few weeks. Everyone here would be concerned about value for money for the taxpayer. But above all, we are looking after the wellbeing of the child. In these very difficult spaces to regulate, we have literally hundreds of providers operating thousands of locations. We leave to the state and territory governments the role of both certifying and regulating these practices, obviously bringing into play the challenge of two tiers of government regulation.

It is quite damning though that the previous government, as you would know, Minister, set up a situation where some of these very odious but not illegal practices began to flourish, and child swapping was one of them. I do not need to explain that in too much detail, except to say that, effectively, one exchanges children and claims family day care payments for both. I think this caught in the throat of many Australians, who appreciate just how precious the taxpayer dollar is. For all of the protested commitment to early years that we have heard from speakers on the other side—for goodness sake, a dollar wasted is a dollar never spent on that frontier on the most vulnerable children of all.

It is also worth noting, as you would know, Minister, that in many areas only around two per cent of vulnerable children are in formal day care arrangements, and many fall out of this network completely. So we can work on the quality of the system, but we actually need to connect these vulnerable children, who previous speakers have referred to, to some form of formal day care. It can only be done if the reputation of family day care is untarnished by the practices we have seen.

Closing loopholes is something very close to my heart. It obviously disappoints me that hundreds of millions of dollars can go out the door. Despite all of our best efforts, it took months or years to finally tighten up previous arrangements. I am glad to see that that is now occurring. More specifically—Minister, you will well know this—I know it is okay to say you want to focus on two-year-olds, but we know very well that, under the previous government, none of the Medicare Locals entities took any particular focus on vulnerable children. None of them had it as a KPI and none of those GP superclinics did anything in this space whatsoever.

Minister, I commend you for the fact that we are finally focusing on this area. But just six years ago there were 100,000 kids in family day care and there are now 200,000. They are now claiming twice as many hours and, on average, 40 per cent more in the hourly charge. So we have seen an explosion in family day care that virtually represents the entire increase in day care costs overall. The long day care sector has stayed relatively stable throughout this whole time.

You would agree, Minister, that we need homelike environments where siblings can often stay together, and, in the circumstances of some of the most unusual work environments, family day care is ideal—we appreciate that. But we are also mindful that long day care and family day care have completely different educational requirements. I would be really alarmed if those requirements—such as a diploma minimum or a certificate III minimum—were taking years, not months, to fulfil. There are not many professions where you can go out and say, 'I'm working towards qualification, so let me start providing.' We do that in family day care, so we have to be absolutely certain that they are, in good faith, undertaking their educational requirements, with some view to finishing within two or more years. The federal government should be interested in that quality framework, which was established by the other side of politics and never had an end date.

For those who are going to be cared for in someone's home, my concern is that this explosion in numbers has predominantly been in Sydney and Melbourne in areas with high degrees of poverty and high rates of non-English-speaking backgrounds. That is not quite where I want the most vulnerable children to be if I do not know that family day care is providing the highest possible educational quality, if not equal to long day care.

So, Minister, I would specifically like to know some of the measures that have been taken by the department, pushed by you and the minister, to make sure that these loopholes are closed and that the reputation of family day care is untarnished.

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