Page 1089 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 3 May 2006
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MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Minister for Health, Minister for Disability and Community Services and Minister for Women) (11.11): I thank Dr Foskey for providing the opportunity to talk about the provision of childcare in the ACT. Dr Foskey’s motion calls on the ACT government to do certain things, particularly to look for opportunities to work with childcare providers, to ensure an adequate supply of childcare, to incorporate the use of school and other community buildings in childcare, and to ensure an adequate supply of designated land and facilities.
The Stanhope government is doing all of those things and will continue to work to ensure that there is sufficient childcare across our community, but we need to be clear about what are the ACT government’s responsibilities and the matters over which it has control. Paragraph (3) of Dr Foskey’s motion calls on the ACT government to provide the Assembly with information on the level of demand for childcare, the existing number of childcare places and the distribution of the places across the ACT. All of those are matters for the commonwealth government. They are not matters for the ACT; they are not things over which we have control. All we could do, if we were to provide that information, would be to go and ask the commonwealth government to provide us with the information.
In relation to the provision of information on the number of TAFE and university qualified childcare workers in the ACT, including those not currently employed in childcare, I just do not know how on earth we would do that. We could certainly provide Dr Foskey’s office with details of the number of students currently at the CIT in childcare diploma courses. We would have to survey the whole of the ACT to find out who has a childcare qualification and is working in childcare and who is not. I just do not think that such a response would be practical.
We have taken a number of measures at the CIT to increase the number of students accessing childcare courses, including encouraging the training or retraining of unqualified staff in centres to enable them to upgrade qualifications or, in fact, to get a qualification. But at the end of the day it is not about a shortage of qualified childcare workers; it is about an actual shortage of people who are willing to work in childcare centres.
That comes as no surprise to me, given the wages that are paid to childcare workers. It is simply a question for young people of whether to go on and do an extra year of study and become a preschool teacher and get much more money than they would currently from working in the childcare system under the federal award. Under the federal award, of course, we can see nothing that is going to significantly improve those conditions or increase those wages from what happened in a recent case which was won by the LHMU.
If we look back at what the ACT government has done, we see that in 2002 additional facilities were provided at Nicholls and Ngunnawal, providing 54 childcare places. In 2003, a centre was built at Gungahlin, providing 89 places. We have expanded existing centre-based children’s services across the ACT, which has led to an increase of 125 places over a number of centres right across Canberra. We are currently rebuilding the Weston Creek childcare centre, which will have 20 per cent more places than the original centre.
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