Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me enormous satisfaction to speak to this bill as essentially my second first speech. The Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Child Care Budget and Other Measures) Bill 2008 represents a number of measures and sits within a broader reform context in areas of social policy about which I am very passionate. Aside from the Rudd government’s workplace relations reforms, the Working Families Support Package and our early childhood initiatives also directly redress years of poorly framed, and often purely ideological, policy and a period of neglect under the Howard government. The childcare sector, like the dental services area that was discussed in the disallowance motion earlier, was one of the early victims of the Howard government’s ‘reform’ when capital funding was removed from the sector. We also have their long-touted, but never eventuated, early childhood agenda. As Senator Allison suggested, we still lack the agenda that was paraded by the Howard government as being developed for many years.

As Senator Allison said, childcare costs have escalated. We had unprecedented levels of unmet demand which were allowed to develop under the Howard government and deliberately maintained. Like employment services and some areas of education delivery, the childcare sector became another radical free-market experiment under the Howard government. Here now we have one element of genuine and constructive reform. I am glad that the opposition’s economic vandalism does not extend to this particular bill. We do have a strong mandate for this bill, and much of that mandate has been developed by the vandalism that occurred under the Howard government to this sector.