Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak enthusiastically and wholeheartedly for the Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Cheaper Child Care) Bill 2022. I welcome this legislation. There is no other bill that could bring me greater joy than this bill in front of the parliament today, and I welcome the support across the parliament for improving accessibility and affordability in child care.

Child care has three crucial impacts, I think, and this bill has three crucial impacts on Australia. The first is on our children, in terms of giving them greater access to education—that crucial pre-five education that we know is so important in setting them up for effective education and school life. The second reason why I support this legislation is that it is good economic policy. This is good economic policy because it is anti-inflationary and it lowers costs for families, which is crucial, but it also drives labour productivity. Finally, I support this because it's a policy that will support families and particularly women.

Child care and paid parental leave are often seen through this economic lens, but we need to also consider them through a cultural lens. Australia has a wonderful egalitarian culture, but I have to say parenthood is an area where we are not as egalitarian as we could be. I speak from personal experience of watching my own friends and family go through having children at the age we all did. It's an unremarkable phenomenon—when you look at the numbers—where working women and their partners, who are typically men, are relatively equal in their participation in the world of work. They are often very equal in terms of their pay and their positions. Then children come along, and almost universally the women in my social circle took a step back while the men just kept on going. This is something that you see again and again and again borne out in the economic statistics. There are always examples where men took the primary load in relation to the kids, but it was always more the exception than the rule. Access to child care is a crucial enabler for us to change our culture, in terms of women's economic participation in the workforce and, ultimately, equal participation in society.

There's a default view in the country that looking after children is women's work. You see that absolutely in the statistics, where Australia comes equal first for women's education but we are 70th in the world when it comes to economic participation. That is absolutely down to how we raise children and manage children through this. So this default view is holding us back. It holds back women and it holds back the country. Recently Treasury released some research that showed that women's earnings were reduced by an average of 55 per cent in the first five years after parenthood. This is what they call the 'motherhood penalty'. This is the penalty that relates to lower participation in paid work, reduced working hours and reduced hourly wage. It doesn't just happen where the father is the primary breadwinner. Even for women who are the primary earner, the motherhood penalty is large. There's real room for improvement in our culture and our society by changing the culture so women are not the primary carers by default, regardless of their career, aspirations or trajectories.

This is an issue that so many people came to speak to me about in Wentworth. I remember very vividly standing on a corner in Paddington. A woman came up to me and I said, 'What's important to you?' And she said, 'Actually, for me, child care is the most important issue.' She said: 'I'm a lawyer; I'm someone who's highly trained. I made choices because of the costs of child care and, on reflection, I wouldn't have made those choices about my career. I wouldn't have taken such a big step back if child care had been more available and more affordable for my family.' I just heard time and time and time again that this is a crucial issue for women's participation and actually for more equal sharing of child-rearing arrangements among families. We need the cultural change that would mean more parents working out themselves what arrangements best suit their families. I hope this will lead to more fathers sharing parenting responsibilities, including those crucial pick-ups and drop-offs.

One of the reasons why I support this bill is that I think it will help to support changes that will make our society more egalitarian. Making child care more accessible frees up more women to fully pursue their professional aspirations. It will help reduce the motherhood penalty that so many experience. We invest huge sums of money developing the human capital of women. Basically, we educate them, we develop them, they have wonderful jobs, and then we do not allow them to flourish economically. You see that in terms of the discrepancy of pay and the discrepancy of economic outcomes for women compared to men, and child care and child-caring arrangements are absolutely crucial to this.

However, this bill is not a silver bullet. It contributes towards cultural change, but there's much more to do. And I think the two key areas that we need to consider in this House are, firstly, access to child care and childcare deserts and the childcare workforce, because we can have this welcome increase of support for families to access child care, but, if you can't actually get a place in a childcare centre, then it is not meaningful. Again, in my community, I have people who say that they called the childcare centre literally when they were 12-weeks pregnant to put their child's name down and still were not able to access the child care that they needed when they needed it. And I know that Wentworth, of all communities, probably has better access to child care than many other communities. So access to child care and making sure that this aspiration is met by both an increase in childcare places and childcare workers is absolutely crucial.

The second crucial element to changing the culture, which I think is so important, is paid parental leave and, crucially, that there is a part of that paid parental leave that is 'use it or lose it' for the second parent, which is typically a man. This is absolutely crucial to ensure that we change the culture in Australia so that men and women equally share the burdens and the joys of raising children and that we do that equally because this is good for women. It's actually good for men's mental health and it's good for child development because children develop better bonds with their fathers.

So Australia is making more progress towards becoming a fairer, more egalitarian society, and this legislation is a crucial piece in ensuring that we enable the economic empowerment of women as well as support families and children for our future. I commend this bill.

See this speech in context