Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Dastyari is clearly neither very nimble nor very agile in his questioning, because if he listened to the previous answer he would have heard that I addressed pricing and pre-empted that that might be his supplementary question.

I am very happy to say that this government's reforms will put downward pressure on prices, because for the first time we are introducing an efficient level of pricing within the childcare sector that has been benchmarked and that will provide an hourly efficiency charge against which services will be expected to operate, or at least declare, and that we will be basing the subsidy arrangements for parents on that basis.

Of course, extra funding is going in—more than $3 billion additional funding—to ensure parents have extra support. But unlike the previous government, who turned a blind eye to the rise in childcare costs, we have not, and we have structured our reforms to make them more affordable through more taxpayer support and a better model of revision— (Time expired)