Amanda Rishworth (Kingston, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education) Share this | Hansard source

Are you going to do it next?

A government member interjecting—

Yes. Next! He's going to keep going! In my next question I'm going to move on to preschools. It was a really historic moment when Labor was in government and we were able to lift the attendance in preschools to four-year-olds by our universal access program. Unfortunately, for seven years, this government has refused to provide long-term funding for preschools. The excuse that the minister and previous ministers has given is that there were attendance problems. As an excuse, that could go on for only three years, because then it became a little boring. So then the minister said that they were waiting for a review of the national preschool program to be completed before they made a long-term commitment. That final report was released six months ago, and it was very, very clear that long-term funding—over a four-year-old period, for example—was critical to providing some stability and certainty for preschools, for states and territories, for enterprise bargaining and for everyone that was investing. The report was very critical of the Morrison government's short-term funding for preschools and called for the funding to be locked in for five years.

Unfortunately, during the COVID period the government slipped another announcement in that completely went against this report. So my question to the minister is: when will you adopt this report's recommendations and provide our children and teachers with the certainty they need and deserve? Has the government been having any discussion with states and territories about the long-term funding commitment? Why has the government ignored this report, with their most recent announcement being to extend it for only another 18 months? Why has the government ignored its own report, which COAG commissioned, to provide funding? When will our kindies, our preschools and our long-day centres, which deliver universal access, actually be given the long-term funding they need? When will families be assured that their children can get best prepared for school because the Commonwealth has coughed up its share of funding and has put it in the forward estimates and because we know it will be there over the next four years? Those are my questions to the minister. I hope that, if he can't answer the questions about child care and costs, he'll be able to answer the questions about preschool.

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