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

Girraween Activity Centre is an out of school hours care centre located in the grounds of St Anthony’s school at Girraween. Along with the children from St Anthony’s needing after-school care, they also collect children from Girraween Public School and walk them to the service, and on any given afternoon you will see a group of around 40 children making the walk from Girraween Public to St Anthony’s.

They already have a waiting list for 2007 that has about 30 children on it. The hardest part of that is that at least 17 of the children on the waiting list who will not get a place in 2007 are siblings of children already enrolled in the service. As a matter of fact, all of the 30 children who are on the list are starting kindergarten and will not have access to after-school care for 2007. A lot of the children come from multicultural families who do not have the support of family and friends in the country, so child care is their only option. Although most of those families—and I know quite a few of them—speak English at home, there is nothing that replaces for a four-year-old child that experience of spending time with children who speak only English. It is an important part of their preparation for their school life.

Girraween Activity Centre is funded for 80 children and has no more indoor space to expand its service. The principal of Girraween Public School down the road has agreed to let it operate a service from the school grounds as long as the service can find a suitable portable building to operate from, as the school has no vacant classrooms due to the large number of children enrolled in the school.

The problem, of course, is money. As a not-for-profit organisation and a community centre, finding the money needed to purchase or lease a building is difficult if not impossible. And here is the rub: the state government department, DOCS, does not provide funding for childcare centres and only deals with preschool support and kids with disabilities. It says the capital funding for before- and after-school care is a Commonwealth matter, which seems to be well understood. The Commonwealth department, FaCSIA, says there are no capital funding sources for building before- and after-school childcare centres, although there are some small grants for sustainability assistance of around $9,000 and for set-up services of around $2,000—considerably less than is needed to actually buy or lease an appropriate building.

The general federal government policy, according to the department, is that flexible shared arrangements can be made to use school halls and community services buildings so that separate capital grants are not provided for this purpose. Where is my community in all this? It is between a rock and a hard place. There are no spare school halls or classrooms at Girraween Public—in fact, they do not have a school hall—and every single schoolroom is filled to the brim. The same pressure from the growing community that the Girraween Activity Centre is facing, the Girraween Public School is also facing. They are bursting at the seams. Yet on the other side there is no public funding to build something specific, and 30 children and their families are left trying to figure out how they can get on without childcare services.

Labor understands about the need for additional physical infrastructure to be built by state and territory governments, community or private providers. This is why federal Labor has committed to providing extra financial assistance to build additional childcare centres on primary school grounds and other community land in partnership with childcare providers. The total investment would be $200 million and priority would be given to locations such as this one where early childhood services are not currently available or are insufficient to meet growing demand. Any new centres constructed under this initiative would incorporate early learning centres, and further discussion will take place with state and territory governments to ensure that new early learning centres incorporating long day care are considered in the planning of all new primary schools.

Unfortunately, children’s lives do not wait for the changing of governments and nor can the families in Girraween. It is pretty tough out there, in spite of the Treasurer’s belief that they have never had it so good. Making a family work, I would suggest, has never been more difficult—high rents, high house prices, high interest rates relative to the rest of the OECD, rising costs, but most importantly juggling family and work time with both parents working. Now, in addition to that, my community in Girraween has to spend valuable family time trying to find ways to provide for themselves something that should by now be a basic service, which is access to good-quality, affordable child care. The lives of children move at the speed of light; they are two and then they are three, and the time that families spend together with their children and the service they provide their children in those years are the most important in the child’s life. They are not called ‘formative years’ for nothing. I commend my Labor colleagues for putting forward policy that recognises that.