Page 1923 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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have committed to one of those childcare centres and have already committed the $4 million that they promised in 2008. So my question is: is there not going to be another childcare centre or are they going to blow their election commitment budget and go beyond $4 million? These are things that have to be answered.
One of the clear messages that have come from looking into childcare planning in the ACT is that the government simply do not have any idea what is going on. They do not have any kind of audit. They do not know where the demand is. The waiting lists are hotchpotch and there is no coordination. They are difficult to keep up to date.
Showing a further lack of understanding of how childcare works, the ACT Labor government introduced portable long service leave, which will put cash flow pressures on centres and affect their viability. It has signed up, as has everybody else, to changes in 2010 that will mean lower child-carer ratios. This will cause childcare centres to completely review how they do business. They will need to make decisions that go to business viability. Should they reduce their numbers, the numbers of the children in care, or should they test the already tight employment market and see if they can get more carers? Should they extend their facilities to allow for more children to be accommodated? What impact will all of this have on childcare fees?
The government simply does not know. We saw the minister in here yesterday unable to answer questions. She just does not think it is going to have any impact. If she thinks that, she is kidding herself. This is why the Canberra Liberals today have announced the policy that we have. We will see an audit of childcare and a master plan which will help people and organisations get through the change in priorities in 2012 and beyond. That is absolutely essential. In addition to that, we think that the ACT government should provide a centralised waiting list service so that there can be some ongoing certainty as to where the demand is and what the nature of the demand is. At the moment the government does not know.
There are other issues in other portfolios that I need to attend to. In the justice portfolio, for instance, the attorney has announced a somewhat quirky proposal—an Australian-first—a virtual district court jurisdiction. It left all of those that I spoke to somewhat perplexed about what it meant, mainly because the attorney had not consulted with anyone before making the proposal public and committing $1.6 million over four years. The attorney says that this will improve efficiencies in the courts in the ACT.
I think no-one would dispute that we need to do something about efficiencies in the courts, but in my discussions with the legal fraternity since this was announced on Tuesday, after being told that they were not consulted, the universal opinion is that it probably will not work because there are not enough resources behind it. The proposal is to take the workload out of an already pressed Supreme Court and put it into an already pressed Magistrates Court, to take two magistrates offline for up to 50 per cent of the time, give them a dual commission, give them a pay rise for that dual commission—which I suppose is fair enough—and then ask them to do more work than they are already doing, with the generous admix of two extra registry staff for two years. The overall impact is that there will be two extra registry staff for two years and this is going to create a more efficient system.
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