Page 3525 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 18 August 2010
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choice when they need to go to hospital. That is what they want and the Greens want to deprive them of it.
But the substantive matter that I wish to address here today is the issue of childcare. I have dealt with this matter a lot recently and we have seen the sort of hand wringing and hand washing of the current minister about the cost of childcare. She keeps saying: “Look, it is not a matter for me. It is a matter for the provider to determine the cost of childcare. I just set the policies that determine what childcare costs will be.”
As Mr Smyth and Mr Seselja have said, the whole issue of childcare and the quality of childcare is very important. The federal Labor government want to lower childcare ratio incentives to come into force in 2012. But now we have the Greens, who want to go one better than that. They want to reduce childcare ratios in childcare centres even lower from Labor’s one to four to an all-new record low of one to three. Like Labor, they want to say to the people of Australia, “Do not worry about it; it will be good for you and it will be good for your children.”
They are not telling the people of Australia that a further reduction in child-to-carer ratios will cost mums and dads even more. They are not telling the people of Australia that it will put pressure on the ability of childcare centres to meet demand for childcare places. They are not telling the people of Australia that their plans will put pressure on the ability of childcare centres to recruit staff or that their plans will put pressure on childcare centres to meet requirements of that plan.
The Australian Greens, like Labor, are not telling mums and dads that this pressure will affect their ability to keep their kids in childcare and keep themselves in work. What the Greens are telling the people of Australia is just what the ALP are telling people, that they have a plan and that that plan is good for them, but let us not worry about the detail.
There is no denying that the quality of childcare is critical in giving a good start to children in life. Parents place a lot of trust in their childcare centres to deliver high-quality services to care for their children. I note the disparaging comments made by Ms Hunter this morning about the quality of childcare. She implied—in fact, she said—that the quality of childcare was low and that is not the case. But there are some real issues here and they head around cost.
The Productivity Commission’s ROGS report for 2010 released in January this year tells us that Canberra’s mums and dads pay the highest childcare fees in Australia. The median charge last year was $65 a day, which is more than $8 above the national average. The report shows that a family with a combined income of $50,000 spends 14 per cent of that income in after-tax terms if they have two children in long-day care. What we have seen, and these figures have been disavowed by Ms Burch who thinks it is not important, is that if you are on $65,000 you are actually $2,400 worse off in the ACT than if you are in another part of Australia. If you are on $50,000, you are $2,150 worse off.
If you do not think that there are many families in that category, let us just think about it. The latest census shows that 7,000 families in Canberra who require some form of childcare earn below $65,000 a year. So we are talking about real money for real
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