Opinion Piece - Labor Offers Oasis for PM - The West Australian

This year celebrates the 25th anniversary of one of my favourite albums. 

What’s The Story (Morning Glory) is one of the great British rock albums of all time. Oasis at their best. 

What’s the Story is also an audio monument to the power of friendly plagiarism. 

It steals the tunes of everyone from the Beatles, David Bowie and REM. 

Just as Oasis wanted to be The Beatles, Scott Morrison wants to be John Howard. Afterall, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants.

Many have forgotten that when times got tough for Prime Minister Howard he would steal Labor policy. 

Howard abolished the Parliamentary pension system in response to Mark Latham’s campaign. 

He even promised an Emissions Trading System in 2007 (fully supported by his Cabinet including Tony Abbott). 

That’s why Scott Morrison should steal Labor’s childcare policy. 

The childcare boost that Anthony Albanese and Labor have put forward is fair, practical and grows our economy. 

It is a plan to eliminate once and for all, the disincentive to work more hours. This isn’t ideological. It is just logical. 

Too many families are forced to hold back careers or go backwards financially because our childcare support system is poorly designed. 

Unlocking more than $4 billion of economic growth a year is a pretty good argument too. Australia needs all the growth creation we can get when most of our indicators have growth sliding backwards. 

Some might say, early childhood education is one of the best ways to stop Australian kids falling behind the rest of the world. 

Scott Morrison knows the marginal costs of our childcare system are a problem. He started fixing it himself in 2015. 

As Treasurer, Mr Morrison justified increasing childcare subsidies saying, “we want to invest more in childcare, to support families to have choices, to stay in work, to be in work, to get in work”.  

The logic worked then. Surely this logic is even stronger during a pandemic. 

If the Prime Minister needs some further advice, maybe he can ask his aspiring Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

After all, the OECD says that a dollar spent on early childhood education generates a higher return on investment than a dollar spent on formal schooling. 

Australia needs Scott Morison to be the type of leader who can take a good policy wherever it comes from.

He can’t look back in anger because Labor came up with a good idea.

He just needs to roll with it. A bipartisan approach to early childhood education would give certainty to families in the most uncertain of times. 

It could go in the category of permanent economic changes along with Medicare, the Goods and Services Tax and Superannuation. 

For working families in Australia, childcare costs amount to 27 per cent of household income. Surely that’s something every mainstream political leader wants to fix. 

Fixing this system will deliver an immediate economic boost to families. Why wait until the next federal election?

Improving our childcare system will save families between $600 to $2,900 a year. More to spend in our local shops and with local tradies. 

And in a year where there have been more losers than winners, no family will be worse off under Labor’s proposal.

That’s why organisations as diverse as the Minderoo Foundation, the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, Chief Executive Women and the Parenthood have supported this proposed reform. 

This is a hugely important step for the future of our education system. I am a believer that, over time, we need to make our childcare system more like our school system - universally accessible. That’s my Wonderwall. 

This piece was first published by The West Australian on Friday, 30 October 2020.