Page 1093 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 3 May 2006
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responsibility, and in many ways major responsibility, on the federal government. Mrs Burke has addressed that. Dr Foskey, to some extent, has addressed that. But Dr Foskey’s motion is about what we in the ACT Assembly do for the people in our community, what the planning minister does and what the minister responsible for childcare does, or should be doing, in this place to ensure that what we can do in this community is being done for the benefit of working families.
The newest member of this place stood up here yesterday and rattled off all the figures, figures that we all should know, about the high proportion of women in the ACT in particular who participate in the work force. For them to do that properly, and so that they actually get satisfaction out of their job and provide a good service to the people who are employing them, they need reliable childcare that they can trust and they need to know that they can trust the people who look after them, that they can rely on them.
The issue that both Dr Foskey and Mrs Burke touched on of the hideous saga of the Teddy Bears Child Care Centre is an example of the failure of this government. There may be a number of places which are saying that they would like to get some more children in their childcare centres, but if you talk to the people who are the clients of the Teddy Bears Child Care Centre, who are looking for childcare in southern Canberra, you will find that it does not exist.
I have talked to those mothers and fathers and I have talked to the people who have, as an exercise, gone around and seen what else is available for them, and there is nothing available. If the Teddy Bears Child Care Centre closed tomorrow, we would be looking at some people having to wait 18 months before they could get appropriate childcare in a centre in south Canberra, which means that those 80 families would be in a situation where someone would have to give up work because there would be no one to provide care for their children. That has huge social, financial and economic—financial for the family and economic for the community—implications, but this government does not care.
We had Mr Corbell come out and pull a swiftie in the last couple of days by saying, “We have found a block of land.” I am relying at this stage on second-hand advice because I have not seen the block of land myself. I attempted to go and have a look at it last night but it was too dark when I got there to have a look at it, but I have been told that it is a rather small—pocket handkerchief size—block, probably not more than half the size of the block currently occupied by the Teddy Bears Child Care Centre, and probably would be inadequate for a childcare centre.
This was a case of a minister of the government saying, “I have to appear to be doing something. Here is a likely looking block of land. I can put out a press release and save my bacon for another day.” I touched yesterday on the obvious rush job that the minister has done on this issue. The press release displays a monumental lack of understanding—either that or it was a rush job—on the part of an experienced planning minister about the implications for planning of this issue here. I am being told by the parent group who have had a chance to look at the block in daylight that it would not meet the requirements of any childcare centre.
It was very interesting a couple of weeks ago to see the Stateline program about childcare in the ACT. It did actually look at many of the issues that have been touched
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