Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On Wednesday next week we will be holding a consultation in my electorate on work and family balance and child care. Since sending out the notices a month ago, we have had an extraordinary response from people who are desperate for solutions to the stresses within their families caused by trying to find a balance between earning the money their families need, being where they need to be for their children and building relationships with each other.

If you talk to businesswomen, as I did at a business breakfast recently, it is amazing to find how a group of powerful women will suddenly start to talk about child care above all other topics. For them it is a major issue in spite of their high salaries. If you talk to women who are out of work, finding a job that is flexible and finding child care are the subjects most talked about. If you talk to women without skills in the workforce and to many in the migrant communities, you will meet the real complexities for families.

The change to workplaces has altered work patterns beyond nine to five. I meet husbands and wives who work different hours so that they can care for their children but who do not get to be together as a family. These are men and women who both work night shift, and many of them are skilled migrants who left their extended family behind in their home country and have no family support here. There are men and women who both work casual jobs and who do not know from week to week, or even from day to day, when they are next working. For them, issues of child care are so far out of reach that they hardly mention them at all. These are people with great need and little ability to pay, and they have requirements for flexibility in the new industrial relations world that are not provided now and will not be provided for under the current government’s budget.

I admit that I was hoping, after all the chat from government about child care, that the budget announcement might make the consultation meeting next week irrelevant. But in my dreams, I am afraid! Two areas of real shortage in my electorate are in long day care and in highly flexible services for parents who do not work nine to five, do not work regular hours or do not know when they are working tomorrow. The budget does nothing for those families. It will not deliver new places, and it certainly will not deliver the kinds of solutions that families in my electorate need.

So let us look at what the Treasurer claims to have delivered. He claims to have delivered more places. That is a con, Mr Speaker. It is an appearance of creating places, just as in the last budget. It will not create additional places, and certainly not where they are most needed. The Treasurer is relying on lifting the cap—that is, the number of places they would fund. But in the most serious area of shortage, long day care, it just is not mentioned. He certainly has not suggested lifting the cap, and there is good reason for that: it is not capped already. There is no cap on long day care, and still there is a chronic shortage. The cap is not the problem. In the two areas that are capped, where the Treasurer has now lifted the cap, there are tens of thousands of places that are unfilled. The supply has nowhere near met the cap already in place and so lifting it, quite frankly, is not going to help.

There are 67,000 unused out of school hours care places under the old cap that could be filled if there were businesses prepared to do that. They have not because there are issues. Yet the government is lifting the cap, and it is hard to see how that is going to make any difference at all. There are 30,000 family day care places from last year’s budget that are still unused. So the government says, ‘Let us give them some more unused places.’ Lifting the cap is not going to work. The cap is not the problem. These places are not being used for a variety of reasons, none of which has anything to do with the cap. For instance, family day care schemes, which incidentally decreased by 6.6 per cent between 2002 and 2004, cannot attract enough workers to deliver the places. The pay is poor, set-up and compliance costs are too high and the fees charged of only $3.67 per child per hour mean that you cannot really earn a good living. Increasing the cap above the 30,000 unused places now will make little difference in this area.

What the government has done in this budget, by abolishing the child-care caps, is a con and contains no substance. It will not create more places and it certainly will not deal with the extraordinary need for flexibility in the modern workplace. It is outrageous that this government introduces IR laws that mean that more and more workers are working without a guarantee of hours in the days coming, yet the child-care arrangements in this country provide very little in the way of flexibility. There are 28 occasional care places in my electorate, yet in some areas of my electorate casual work is the norm. (Time expired)