Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I will comment on the report Quality and safety of Australia's early childhood education and care system. Australian families are struggling with high mortgages, cost-of-living pressures and the enormous challenges and joys of raising young children. I am not sure what's worse, the gaslighting or the lying. Families are making tough decisions when they decide to start a family: who takes time off work and for how long, when to return to work, how to manage the family budget, how to stretch financial and family support to stay at home as long as possible, how to deal with leaving your young child in the care of strangers while trying to continue to breastfeed. They are doing the very best they can, often under enormous financial pressure with disjointed and sporadic support. In conversations I've had with young mothers, a common refrain is: what is this all for?

Looking at this week's budget is depressing if you were looking for more choice for families. The budget statement for women says caring is important but the real denominator in a federal budget of priority is the money. There is no money. There is no consideration of income splitting. There is no choice in childcare support for families desperate for this type of initiative. An effective family policy agenda requires structural reform that recognises children as a public good, caregiving as productive work, families as economic units and housing as social infrastructure. This budget has failed Australian families on these measures, but what has made it worse is the Minister for Women has continued to purport the lie that children are better off in day care than with their own parents. She said the published evidence is the sooner you get a child into care, the better prepared they are for school. When questioned on the veracity of that, she doubled down and said the evidence is pretty clear. That follows on from equally ridiculous comments from the health minister, who scoffed that grandparents couldn't look after their grandchildren better than someone in long-day care.

I think it's no wonder young families feel left behind, because it's not true. There is a mountain of evidence that from birth to three years old, that critical first thousand days, the child's time is much better spent with the primary carer. The health minister and the finance minister's provocative statements have got a lot of reaction from groups like For Parents, Kids in Harmony, Nanny Granny, Childcare Choice and the Future Care Project. The reactions are raw and real. Hundreds of individuals also expressed their outrage. Labor has to stop gaslighting young families, and mothers in particular, because the evidence against the minister's statements is clear. Child development specialists at the United Nations say the best thing for a child is to stay at home as long as possible. Psychoanalyst Erica Komisar's research shows that infants separated for long periods from primary caregivers elevates the stress hormone, leading to higher rates of anxiety and depression later in childhood.

Parents who have been campaigning for greater choice and support for families have said that the comments were harmful, tone-deaf and insulting. Virginia Tapscott summed up the way that many mothers feel but are too afraid to say aloud, 'I don't want to see my kids any less than I already do.' The idea that a grandmother or a grandfather who raised their own kids is somehow unqualified to be a caregiver is also preposterous, but that's literally what this Labor government thinks. Your budget confirms your bias. The lived experience and the actual preferences of parents are inconvenient truths to those who've built a political agenda around universal child care, and the response to any critique is to seek to silence it and shut it down as 'antifeminist'. Institutional care is not the only viable option; it's simply Labor's preferred option, and parents need us to do better.