Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Deakin for his question. Today, the parliament has passed another important piece of legislation. Today, we've passed laws to cut funding to childcare centres that aren't up to scratch and that aren't meeting the quality and the safety standards that our parents expect and that our children deserve. As I said last week when I introduced this bill to the parliament, this is, perhaps, the biggest weapon that we have to wield here, because taxpayers are the biggest funders of childcare centres. We do that through the childcare subsidy—something like $16 billion every year. Childcare centres can't operate without it. It covers about 70 per cent of the cost of running a childcare centre and out-of-school-hours care centres as well.

This legislation gives us the power to cut that funding off to centres that aren't meeting those quality and safety standards that we set for them.

To be clear, the purpose of this legislation isn't to shut centres down; it's to raise their standards up. But it's also not an idle threat, and I've directed my department to be ready to act swiftly when the legislation receives royal assent. I want to thank the opposition leader, and I want to thank the shadow minister Jonno Duniam and the shadow assistant minister Zoe McKenzie for the work that we have done together here. I mean it. It's the way it should work.

But this isn't the only thing that we need to do. To be honest, this is the start, not the end. To be brutally honest, this work will never end, and the sickening news that we've heard from the Australian Federal Police in the last few hours is a reminder of why this is so important. There is a lot of work that we need to do together to rebuild trust and confidence in a system that parents need to have confidence in—work we have to do, work the states and territories have to do and work that we all have to do together.

The Attorney-General spoke in this place on Monday about the hodgepodge of different working-with-children check systems in different states and territories, and fixing that is on the top of the agenda when attorneys-general meet in a few weeks time. We also need to be able to track workers who move from centre to centre and, in some cases, from state to state, and that's what a national educator register is all about. That's something that education ministers have already agreed that we need and that our departments are working on right now. We also need mandatory child safety training to make sure that childcare workers have the skills they need to help to identify somebody in a centre who might be up to no good.

There are hundreds of thousands of incredible people who care for our children and educate our children, and they're just as angry and distressed as everybody here at the moment. They feel tarnished; they feel tarred. Some have even been spat on in the street. The truth is they're the best asset that we've got here in this fight to keep our children safe. We need them, and we need to support them. Education ministers will focus on this and much more when we meet in the next few weeks.

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