Page 95 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 25 February 2014
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If the cost is not bad enough, it is also becoming increasingly inaccessible. There was a nine per cent increase in demand for childcare places in the ACT last year, which is the largest increase in the country. The demand for long day care increased in the ACT by seven per cent, again, the largest increase in the country. However, approved childcare services only increased by 6.5 per cent over the same period. So on Ms Burch’s watch we have seen demands going up but services are not commensurate and the costs are going up more than anywhere else in the country.
What can be done to keep costs down and what has this government done that has caused those costs to rise? Mrs Dunne again gave Ms Burch some good advice back in 2010, and the point is that the childcare industry has become more and more regulated. Obviously we want to see good quality child care. That is important. But there needs to be a balance.
When I was doorknocking in Gungahlin, I knocked on the door of a woman who had spent many years working in child care. She actually was a Labor supporter but she railed against the minister and the changes that she had brought in. She said that far from actually helping, it prevented many young women or women who wanted to work part time or women who found it difficult to find other employment from getting into child care and working in child care.
It had a very negative effect on some people who might otherwise find it difficult to get a job, particularly in today’s climate, by preventing them from getting employment and it made it increasingly difficult for people running childcare centres to find staff so they could increase their places and provide the number of hours being sought. She gave a number of examples where university students would come in on university breaks to work in child care but that now the regulation requirements are so restrictive that they cannot get the qualifications for those sorts of jobs in child care, and the costs keep increasing.
There is a balance to be achieved, and the evidence shows this government has got it wrong. The evidence in terms of the increase in costs is clear. Putting the costs up is unfortunate because in many cases it is not a supply and demand equation, it is not an elastic commodity. Many parents do not have a choice in this matter. We can normally discriminate and choose whether we purchase a service. But in the case of child care many people, particularly single parents, simply do not have a choice.
When this government continues to regulate an industry and increase the costs in an industry to a point that it is unaffordable, what happens is that rather than taking their kids out of child care, families go without other commodities and other services. Other things that they might want they will go without. Many young families across Canberra are going without in many areas of recreation, they cannot get a new car and they cannot get a mortgage to buy a house and have to stay in rented accommodation because they simply cannot afford the cost of child care. They are in this catch-22 where they cannot take their kids out of child care.
It is disappointing that after all the warnings in 2010, all the debate that we have had in this place, all the concerns that have been raised with us, under Joy Burch and the
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