Family Assistance Legislation Amendment (Child Care Measures) Bill 2014

Dr CHALMERS (Rankin) (10:56): I also support the member for Adelaide's amendment. I appreciate the opportunity to speak about the bill and follow the wise words of my colleague the member for Charlton and my other colleagues the member for Griffith and the member for Parramatta. I also thought the member for Lalor made a characteristically thoughtful contribution last night.

I begin my own contribution by paying tribute to childcare workers. In my own electorate, like so many of the electorates in this place, we are very fortunate to have some tremendous childcare centres full of people whose contribution and commitment to raising the next generation of Australians is faultless. On Chatswood Road, you can go past one of the centres in the morning—even before the sun comes up, if you are on a walk or a run—and see the childcare workers out there sweeping the astroturf. They are making sure they are there early enough so that when the tradie utes pull up with the young boys and girls to be dropped off to the childcare centre there is someone waiting for them and someone to care for them.

I am very blessed. I have two wonderful sisters, and one of them is a childcare worker. She used to run one of the child care centres in my own electorate, at Algester. I know from speaking to her, over the years, the extraordinary commitment of these childcare workers. Even though they are not paid a great deal of money, I know that they often dip their hands into their own pockets to pay for the crayons or the butchers paper. I know they often do special things for the kids' birthdays out of their own pockets. I pay tribute to the types of people that my sister Chelley works with, because I do know they are fantastic people. You cannot say enough about their commitment and contribution to helping raise that next generation of Australians.

In my own electorate, there are something like 11,100 families who rely on child care. There are 147 approved services and something like 9,760 families who rely on the childcare rebate, which is one of the things we are talking about today. These are good people who want to be good parents and good workers, all at the same time. They are people who are just trying to make ends meet and, quite often, that means having access to good-quality and affordable child care.

This government had two very different themes before and after the election, when it comes to these sorts of issues. Before the election, they talked about being a government of no surprises. They talked about no cuts to education. They talked about being consultative. They sent all kinds of reassuring letters to childcare centres, pretending they had no plans to cut people's assistance when it came to the childcare system. After the election, of course, a very different theme emerged.

We should not mince words about the team that emerged after the election. It really is an unfair agenda. It is a deliberate attack. It is an ambush on people who want to access that good-quality child care at affordable prices. They are people who are just trying to make ends meet. In lots of ways it was less of a budget and more of an ambush that we saw, in this place, delivered by the Treasurer in May.

The more kind interpretation of all of this would be to blame it in some way on ignorance or something like that, but the reality is that the government are not ignorant of the impact of these changes. They did not even care to ask what the impact would be, particularly on low- and middle-income families. It is unforgivable, to my mind, to think that they did not even ask any of their experts, 'What would this mean for people who are doing it tough in our community, who are trying to be good parents and good workers?' You would think that would be the very least that they could do. The fact that they did not ask for that kind of advice really does speak to their lack of care about this issue.

There are people behind every policy change that is made. Every number that is on the page of a budget document represents an impact on a human being and an impact on their community. It is crucial to understand just who this policy change proposed by the government hurts. It is not accidental; it is deliberate, it is intentional and it is by design. It is another example of the burden of this so-called budget emergency—which is a con—being unfairly borne by the people who can least afford it.

We get a bit of a hint of their thinking on some of these matters when we consider that the Prime Minister really does think that there are two kinds of women in the workforce. We know this because of his comment not that long ago which tried to differentiate women of calibre and, by implication, women who are not of calibre. This was a really Romney-like moment. You will remember Mitt Romney talking about binders full of women when he was trying to defend himself against some of the allegations made in his own presidential campaign. Mitt Romney and Tony Abbott really are Downton Abbey brothers in arms when it comes to these sorts of issues. We know that the Prime Minister has a view that there are some deserving women and some undeserving women. We know this especially in the case of the Paid Parental Leave Scheme.

I thought that those who spoke on this legislation before me did an extraordinary job of pointing to the unfairness in the government's Paid Parental Leave Scheme. The member for Griffith explained it well in referring to it as a really regressive measure. It is not fair, when you have limited funds coming into the government, when you have budget constraints, to think that their highest priority would be $21 billion so that they can give $50,000 a year to the wealthiest parents in our community just to have a baby. It is extraordinary that they would prioritise that over some of the assistance that we are talking about today. It just shows how warped those priorities are. It is not just Labor saying that and it is not just the union saying that—as important and as crucial as the union is in looking after childcare workers. There are a whole range of stakeholders who are saying that.

I want to mention again, as other speakers have, that the Australian Industry Group argued that the cuts would not be necessary if some of the expenditure allocated to the government's Paid Parental Leave Scheme was redirected. You would think that would be a no-brainer. When you look at the unfairness of the PPL and the extravagance of that scheme compared with the unfairness of some of the things being proposed here, you would think that would be a no-brainer. It was not just the AiG who opposed this bill. Early Childhood Australia, Family Day Care Australia, Early Learning Association Australia, Australian Childcare Alliance, Goodstart Early Learning and the National Welfare Rights Network have all lined up. There is a long queue of people who think that this legislation has been rushed and that it needs more consideration and that it is not right to attack people on low and middle incomes who are just trying to access affordable child care. These groups cannot understand—just like big swathes of the community cannot understand—why there is a need to rush. Why the rush, from a government that said 'no surprises'? I can shed some light on that.

As other speakers have reminded us—the member for Charlton mentioned this in his contribution—the Productivity Commission will report on some of these issues firstly in July and then I think in October. You would think the government would wait for the outcomes of that review before they made these changes. There are two reasons why they have not. The first reason is very sneaky. They have given a commitment that the Productivity Commission will come up with proposals that relate to the same sized funding envelope as we began with. They have rushed in $1 billion worth of cuts so that the envelope is substantially smaller for the Productivity Commission to report on. That would not be well known out in the community, but that is a sneaky thing that they are doing. I think the second sneaky reason is appreciated in the community, judging by all the doors I knocked on on the weekend in Meadowbrook in my electorate, plus the forum we held in Browns Plains. When people talk about this budget they say, 'What is the government thinking?'

Mr Hunt: We are thinking of the $240 billion in deficits that accumulated while you were advising the Treasurer.

Dr CHALMERS: Some of them say—and I certainly believe this as well—that what the government are trying to do is place a big bet that all this nasty stuff they are doing to Australians now will be forgotten in two years time. That is all it is. That is why they are rushing out these regressive changes before they even get the outcomes of their own review.

Mr Hunt: We are thinking that the kids will have to pay for it if we don’t pay for it now.

Dr CHALMERS: I would have thought the Minister for the Environment, who is at the table, would be up for some empirical policy advice—obviously not, judging by the interventions being made as he makes his way through his big stack of folders.

The rush to make these cuts is really a political strategy. It does sell Australian mums and dads short. It does attack their living standards. The government try and justify it by a budget emergency that does not exist, if you listen to credible people, like the International Monetary Fund. If the government had an economic strategy, we would not be debating these cuts. Unfortunately, these cuts are not the only cuts that they propose to the childcare system. Others have spoken about a series of cuts that add up to around $1 billion, whether it is the $450 million for outside school hours care, the $157 million for family day care services, the funding that has gone from Indigenous child and family centres or the $300 million in support for educator wages—the people I began my contribution by talking about, the great people who look after our kids in the community. Now, of course, we have this attack on the absolute backbone of the childcare system: the CCR and of the CCB. We know from the education department that the combination of measures that we are debating now will hurt half a million low- and middle-income families, who will receive less support as a result of this measure.

The member for Griffith paid tribute to former Prime Minister Rudd, and I pay tribute to him as well and to former Prime Minister Gillard and all the ministers who were in this portfolio, including the member for Adelaide and others, who did such a tremendous job in this policy area.

Ms Kate Ellis: Tell me more!

Dr CHALMERS: The member for Adelaide would like to know more about this, so I will tell her more. One of the first actions of the new Labor government in 2007, as she would know, was to increase the childcare rebate from 30 per cent to 50 per cent and to increase the CCR cap. We also gave families the option of claiming the CCR payment fortnightly, which made a big difference—and there are all kinds of stats that others have spoken about. Modelling showed that out-of-pocket costs for a family earning 75 grand a year reduced from 13 per cent of their disposable income in 2004 to 8.4 per cent in 2012.

There are reams and reams of stats like this to show what an extraordinary success Labor's childcare policies were in government. We are very proud of these achievements not just because of the impact that they had on the childcare system and that they had on people's disposable income and their capacity to make ends meet but also because they were a contribution to the type of economy that we want in this country. We want an economy where more people participate, where more people benefit, where the gains of economic growth are more broadly and fairly shared. We make it easier for people to be simultaneously good workers and good parents.

The member for Adelaide has mentioned a compelling stat, and it is worth mentioning again. Research shows that the relationship between childcare affordability and women's workforce participation is strong. A one per cent increase in the gross childcare price results in a decrease to mothers' employment rate of 0.7 per cent. That is a substantial, concrete piece of evidence about the impact that these sorts of measures that are being proposed can have on participation in our economy. Lower income families have been proven to be the first to drop out of work as childcare costs increase. I have a lot of lower income families in my electorate. I am proud to represent them. One of the reasons I wanted to speak on this is that the changes that are being proposed would have a disproportionate impact on those people that I am so proud to represent. As the member for Charlton said, you cannot just talk the talk of workforce participation; you need to walk the walk if you are fair dinkum about workforce participation. It is on measures like this that the rubber really hits the road.

We have workforce challenges associated with the ageing of the population and all kinds of things. Participation is one of those workforce challenges. The participation rate has been bouncing around—in the last ABS data, I think it dropped down a little bit. In the long term, we have big challenges associated with finding the right amount of workers to support a growing proportion of retirees in our economy. That is why this debate is so crucial. If we make dads and especially mums choose between being good workers or good parents, we are selling them short. We are selling short their contribution to a stronger economy.

Labor is proud of its record in government. This bill should be split, as the member for Adelaide's amendment proposes, because we should consider the changes to the child care benefit separately. We will oppose the bill if it is not split. This bill is a backward step. Like so many other things in the budget, it is contrary to the guarantees the government gave families before the election. To all of those childcare workers and parents relying on the childcare system in my part of the world in Logan City and some of the surrounding Brisbane suburbs, I want you to know that this side of the House is standing up for people on low- and middle-incomes in the childcare system. We are standing up for childcare workers, like my sister Chelley. We will continue to do that and that is why I support the member for Adelaide, who moved this amendment, and all the good people on this side of the House who have spoken in favour of it.

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