Page 4836 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 25 October 2011
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what is going on in the sector well enough to understand the implications that this will have. She says: “The sector talks to me. We have steering committee meetings.” But when we hear about the culture of bullying in her directorate, I defy the average childcare centre manager to stand up in one of those meetings and be able to say, and get away with saying: “I have real problems with this. I have real problems with what is going on and I have real problems about how we are going to implement it.”
I visit childcare centres on a regular basis and I have childcare centre managers and their representative groups through my office on a regular basis. There is a chorus of “We are all in favour of better childcare, but we cannot justify the costs.” We cannot justify the costs. The cost pressures in the childcare sector are enormous. There are wage pressures because the people who are working in the sector are not very well remunerated, especially by ACT standards, and there is a big leakage out of the sector into the public service and elsewhere.
These are real problems, but all of them come home to roost to Canberra families, who will have to foot the bill. Everyone says, “We are all in favour of high quality childcare,” but when you talk to Canberra families when they have children in childcare, especially if they have more than one child in childcare, one of the things that they are constantly looking at is how they can reduce the drain on the family budget caused by childcare. They all want the best, but they do not have the capacity to pay for what Minister Burch thinks is the best.
As a result of that, parents will cut back their hours and will leave their children with their parents when their parents probably are not feeling that they are in a position to be regular care providers for long day care. Grandparents want to have grandparent lives; they do not want to be looking after their grandchildren from eight in the morning to six at night on a regular basis. But there are plenty of grandparents who do it because they know that their kids cannot get on and cannot pay their mortgage unless they do that. It is not good for the grandparents; it is not good for the family relations; it is not good for the kids; it does not necessarily provide the high quality childcare that Minister Burch says we need.
Minister Burch thinks that passing legislation is all you need. Minister Burch thinks, “If we pass this, it is all done.” All the little pink pigs—their wings are flapping and they are all fuelled up and ready to go. It will not change anything except that it will cause some childcare centres to close; it will make smaller childcare centres less viable than they already are; it will see a reduction in places, particularly places in infant rooms; it will see costs go up; and it will see people withdrawing from the workforce. And it will see more children going into informal care that is not supervised by anybody except the parent, where there is no-one there to second guess and there is no-one visiting those homes to ensure that those children are getting the childcare that Minister Burch thinks that everyone should have.
I agree with Minister Burch that childcare should be of the highest quality. But these changes today will not do anything for at least 50 per cent of the children who are in childcare in the ACT, because they are in the informal childcare sector. While we are regulating the life out of the formal childcare sector, 50 per cent of the children who are outside the sector will not have the same benefits. That shows that this is a piece
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