Page 5782 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 7 December 2011
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Neither believes the other, so we need someone independent to tell the true story, warts and all. Enter the Productivity Commission. Last week, the commission released its early childhood development workforce research study, which is one of a series of research studies that the Productivity Commission is undertaking. It has undertaken one in relation to the education workforce, and this is the second in the series.
Despite the rather limiting sound of its title, the study does much more than one would expect. It covers much of the holistic ground that I have been talking about since 2009. It looks at all the elements that the commonwealth, state and territory governments should have considered but failed to do so when they came up with the national quality framework for childcare. It reveals all the shortcomings of the framework in terms of the impact on the childcare sector, its impact on the cost for the sector and for families, its impact on the workforce, its impact on training—indeed, all the matters I have mentioned today and over the past two years.
So now we need the ACT government to set aside all the mixed messages and the misinformation and the spin and get down to the nitty-gritty of telling the ACT community exactly what they can expect as the national quality agenda takes hold over the next few years. Importantly, this ACT government needs to put aside politics and think about the childcare sector, Canberra families and the community in general. It needs to take on the mantle of reasoned analysis and sound modelling and look at the whole rather than one part of the whole, and it needs to take responsibility for its policies. That is what open and accountable government should mean, and this is what my motion today quite simply attempts to do.
It asks the government to take the Productivity Commission’s report and distil and analyse all the elements—all of them—all the factors that are identified by the Productivity Commission as having an impact on the implementation of the national quality framework. It asks the government to look at all these elements as they apply to the delivery of childcare services in the ACT specifically. It asks the government to look at all those elements, all those factors, as they impact Canberra families and their ability to participate in the childcare sector.
In the simplest terms, my motion asks the government to at last be honest with the people of Canberra. It then asks the government to tell the people of Canberra what assistance, if any, it intends to provide to address the rising costs of childcare. How will the government assist the childcare sector to continue to provide childcare services under the national quality framework? How will the government assist Canberra families to continue to access the services that the childcare sector provides?
That is what the Canberra people need to know. That is what the childcare sector needs to know. And that is what we in this Assembly need to know. Purely and simply it is about asking the government to talk to the people of the ACT about the impacts of their policy. It is something that this government should have done much earlier in the piece, but it is nevertheless not too late to have an open assessment of the impacts of the government’s policy on the childcare sector.
This is a straightforward motion that calls for the government to provide to the Assembly and to the community in a timely fashion the information it needs to help
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