House debates

Wednesday, 16 June 2021

Bills

Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2021-2022; Consideration in Detail

11:01 am

Photo of Alan TudgeAlan Tudge (Aston, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Youth) Share this | Hansard source

This has been another very good budget as far as the education sector is concerned, right across from early childhood through to schools and higher education. I want to take the opportunity to speak very briefly on a few of the key measures in the budget which are delivered across those few areas.

To start with I want to mention the early childhood area, an area which is very important. This budget has been delivering in spades for the preschools and for the early learning centres, the childcare centres. This budget, for the first time ever in Australian history, locks in long-term funding for preschools across this nation. This hasn't been done before by our government and hasn't been done before by the former government. A four-year agreement will be put in place. That four-year agreement will provide some surety for the sector. We'll also be introducing some reform elements along the way to effectively put in place attendance measures down the track. We want to ensure that there are some performance based measures in there as well in years to come. I'll be negotiating these with my state and territory counterparts in the months ahead.

In the child care area, people would be aware that we announced this just before the budget, but it's an important budget measure: we have added $1.7 billion to the overall funding for child care. We've made two significant changes. Firstly, we've removed the overall fee subsidy cap, which is something people have been calling for for a long time, including in the most recent review which has been done. Secondly, and I think more substantially, we're providing additional subsidies for families who have two or more children in child care. That is because (a) that's when your expenses start to add up, and (b) it's also when you have the highest effective marginal tax rates, for want of a better term, where it becomes almost disadvantageous, in some cases, or not as advantageous as it could be, for a person to do, say, the third or fourth or fifth day of work. These measures really address that. So it's a huge boost for those families with two or more children. We've scheduled that to begin in the middle of next year. As I've said repeatedly, if we can bring that forward, we will.

Just quickly on schools, we've again provided record funding for our schools. It will be $23.4 billion in this calendar year, which is how we fund the school system, and that's $289 billion over the 10-year period. There has never been a better friend of our school system than this government.

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