Page 1096 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 3 May 2006
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That is the situation now. There may be an opportunity to change it. We have heard promising noises from some members of the federal government. Some of them are parents, for God’s sake—it is hard to imagine at times, but they are—and we have seen change within the federal government when such people have taken action. I thought the RU486 debate indicated that and also some moves in terms of the children in detention, so let us not give up totally. We can write to the federal minister, as the government’s amendment suggests, but it is not really enough to do so. It is also blame shifting, because there are things that the ACT government can do. I did highlight some of those.
I have to thank the parents who have used the Teddy Bears Child Care Centre for their efforts and the research that they have done as a result of their incredible situation of need and their support for a good service. Unfortunately, maybe it is not run by the best advocate for himself in the world. Not everyone who runs a childcare centre is good at lobbying the government. ABC Learning Centres obviously is quite good at it. I echo the fear of Mrs Dunne about taking the approach of auctioning off land. There is going to be more of that, I suppose, if we have a deficit and there is concern about revenue but, if it means that services will miss out, it is not going to help us.
I am pleased about the things that the government is doing. I am pleased that there are new centres being developed. But that does not answer our concern about the location of those centres and the staffing of them. There are issues. It is possibly true that the increase in preschool hours is making it difficult in a way, but why do we not find out about these things? We can speculate all we like. My motion is about getting some hard figures in there. I do acknowledge that some of the things that we have suggested might be difficult. We are always prepared to negotiate and talk. We would have talked through this motion. If we could have come out with some action from the government, we would have acknowledged whether things were reasonable or not reasonable.
We are not the government. We can only suggest and we try to be the voice of the community. They cannot come here and speak for themselves and those kids surely cannot. The problem is not just with childcare centres. Family day care is in crisis as well. People who are looking for good places in family day care are having a really difficult time. Lots of people do prefer that model, especially for small children, but there is not a lot to encourage people to stay at home and look after children. There are some wonderful people who are prepared to do it, but obviously not enough.
What can the government do? Heaps. It has the planning capability for a start and the access to land. It has the CIT and it has an ability to support parents. Once we have identified where the need is and the services are not, I suggest we add small schools with so-called excess space into the mix because it just could be that some of those are in those locations. In fact, I would say that it is very likely that that is so because of the demographic shifts. What we are seeing with a lot of the suburbs where we have so-called empty classrooms—I am going to call them that, not desks; I think that is a spin word—is young people moving back into those areas. Also, they are often located near work, so there are those possibilities there and it means that they retain their essential function, which is educating children.
The other thing is that we could support groups of parents who get together—for instance, we could be supporting the Teddy Bears parents right now—in a co-op model,
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