Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for School Education and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

There are a few issues here because your comments do not seem to reflect an accurate understanding of how the childcare assistance measures work. You have mentioned that there is no increase in the childcare rebate. The point I was making is that, if families are faced with increases in fees, the level of support they receive under the childcare rebate increases up to the cap of $7,500. You will recall that on average most families are only receiving in the order of the lower end of $2,000 per year. So there is more than ample and adequate scope for any increase in fees, if indeed such increases might incur, to be met with further support under the childcare rebate.

I also made the point that the potential being discussed today has not been the experience in New South Wales. You referred to the vice president of Child Care New South Wales and figures of $12 to $20 per day in costs. They are talking about the cost of a childcare place per day; they are not talking about the out-of-pocket expenses for families after they have received income support.

Yesterday we were discussing child care as a cash cow; today we are using highly emotive language such as 'raiding piggy banks'. I need to refer again to the context here. Under the previous Howard government, the childcare rebate was only 30 per cent, unlike the 50 per cent today, and the cap was $4,354, not the $7,500 which this measure pertains to. A point I made yesterday, and one I recall from its introduction, was that parents had to wait up to two years to receive the support introduced under the Howard government, and this is a point to Senator Ian Macdonald. It is also useful to note that under the Howard government we were ranked 13th out of 14 OECD countries in spending on early childhood education. Indeed yesterday I highlighted that it had taken five years and still we had no early childhood agenda—it had been very much paraded but never delivered during that time. There was no commitment at all to improve childcare quality for the almost 800,000 families with kids in care each week.