Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Faruqi for her question. The government absolutely accepts that child care is important, and under the childcare reforms that our government instigated we saw, for example, workforce participation among Australian women reach record levels. We saw childcare fees become more affordable as a result of a significant increase in investment that we put in place into the childcare system.

Under our childcare subsidy—that we are supporting the system to move back towards—the greatest level of financial support for childcare fees goes to Australian families who are working the longest hours but earning the least amount of money. That is the way that our government believes government spending should most appropriately be targeted—to give the greatest assistance to those Australian families who are struggling to go to work and struggling to pay their bills, to make sure that they get the maximum assistance. In some cases, all of their childcare fees are paid once the additional childcare supplements are taken into account. For many, at least 85 per cent of their childcare fees are paid.

But for those families earning very high incomes, we believe it's not unreasonable that they pay some of those childcare costs. That is about how you make sure you run an economy where you can keep taxes as low as possible, create as many jobs as possible for people to be able to access and target the revenue that you spend from those taxes to those who need it most.

I know that the Australian Greens seem to think that there's a money tree, and that you can take all the money and make everything that you want to for free, and then you can ban other things and it has no consequence to jobs in the Australian economy. But that's not the way the real world works. Higher spending necessitates higher taxes, which means a weaker economy and fewer jobs. That's not what we want; we want to make sure that spending is targeted to those who need it most so that we can support as many jobs as possible.