House debates

Wednesday, 9 December 2020

Matters of Public Importance

Child Care

3:31 pm

Photo of Sussan LeySussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment) Share this | Hansard source

You can't trust Labor when it comes to child care. That is really the very strong message for the House. The member for Kingston talks about mythical families. Well, this may not be a mythical family, but let's take a family that is earning more than $243,250—say, any member of the opposition—with two children in child care five days a week for 40 weeks of the year, paying the maximum daily fee. They will benefit six times more than a single parent—say, a cleaner earning $56,000 a year—who has the same childcare arrangements. It is absolutely crazy.

I don't know why child care has come up, but it may have something to do with the childcare calculator. Labor launched its childcare calculator website this week. I'm quoting from Alice Workman, who has the column 'The Strewth' in The Australian. She starts with:

Well this is awkward! Labor launched its Childcare Calculator website this week, which allows Quiet Australians to estimate how much extra cash they'd get under an Albanese government. The data collected by the ALP

for their childcare calculator—

includes names, email addresses, annual family income (before tax), postcode, number of children and daily childcare fees (before subsidy). And which company are they entrusting to store this private information? Amazon Web Services, owned by the world's richest man …

I'm still quoting from 'The Strewth'. I want to acknowledge Alice Workman's good work here. She says:

There are a lot of Australians who do take their privacy seriously. They should not have parliamentarians look down their noses at them about their desire to have their data protected …

Who said that? The member for Chifley. What have we got? We've got a childcare calculator that collects your personal information and gives it to Amazon Web Services. I don't know that that is really a policy that the Labor Party wants to employ.

I spent a lot of time talking about the Labor—

Ms Rishworth interjecting

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