Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have now been in this parliament for eight years. With some of the things I've seen from this government, it takes a lot to shock me. But I almost fell off my chair when I saw this motion from the member for Bonner. I don't doubt the member for Bonner's sincerity in having a personal commitment to early education and child care, but let's be clear: the Morrison government's handling of child care during the pandemic has been absolutely abysmal. It has been abysmal before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.

I want to go through this motion and provide the facts about this government's childcare failures. The first point of this motion says that the government helped families during the height of the pandemic and continues to support families. For me, as a Victorian and as an MP who is in constant contact with families and childcare centres across my electorate during the pandemic, this is an extraordinary claim. The government had to be dragged kicking and screaming to their short-lived free childcare experiment. There were thousands of families writing to MPs across the country. It was not perfect, but it was good—so good that the government bagged the idea when Labor proposed something similar at the 2019 election. So they came up with the free child care, which, for the first time, made families understand what it might look like, particularly after they'd been so stressed in the weeks prior to that with people not being able to work and people holding their kids out of child care for fear of catching COVID. They then found that there were limited numbers of days that children could be out of child care and that they would still be paying full fees—and then still paying gap fees. This government clumsily staggered from one issue to the next throughout this. And, of course, their free childcare moment was withdrawn and wasn't there for subsequent lockdowns. So the whole cycle began again: families having to instigate conversations with members of parliament and the industry having to ring us to talk us through the conditions they were finding themselves.

Paragraph (2) of the motion notes that the latest data shows government programs have kept services viable. That is what we were telling them throughout the pandemic: that services would not be viable without government intervention. What does the data actually show us about what's happened in this space? The ABS data confirms that families, on average, are paying more than they ever have in out-of-pocket expenses for child care. In a single quarter, out-of-pocket costs have gone up by 2.1 per cent nationwide, more than double the CPI. Childcare fees have now soared by 39.2 per cent since this government came to office in 2013. The department of education's most recent data, in March 2021, shows that childcare fees had risen by 2.4 per cent over the previous 12 months—again, more than double the Consumer Price Index. This increase included six months of frozen fees.

This government is patting itself on the back today about the support that it gave to this sector and to families, but with the families in my electorate the numbers are extraordinary. In the electorate of Lalor there are 21,000 children in early education and childcare settings. That is 16,000 families in 160 local services. That's an enormous number of families. It's the highest number of families accessing early education and child care of any federal electorate in the country. These are families that are working incredibly hard. These are families who this government is ignoring, because it won't take up the ideas that are being presented by Labor.

If Labor is elected, an Albanese Labor government will make child care cheaper for 97 per cent of families. Importantly, we will task the ACCC with designing a price regulation mechanism to shed light on costs and fees and drive them down for good. The Productivity Commission will also conduct a comprehensive review of the sector with the aim of implementing a universal 90 per cent subsidy for all families. I stand here today and clearly tell the people in my electorate: only Labor has a plan to fix the coalition's broken childcare system, only Labor will deliver better services and more affordable— (Time expired)

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