Every Australian Family Should Have Access to Quality Early Childcare

There is no more appropriate day for me to be speaking on this MPI about child care than my son's third birthday. Today Leo turned three. Happy birthday, Leo! I'm not going to sing, but I will say that it's an exciting day for him and a very proud day for me and Jess.

Leo has benefited, like millions of Australian children, from a quality early childhood education, and Jess and I have benefited from the support that you receive from early childhood educators who allow you to follow your passions in life and your vocations and careers. I want to make sure that every Australian family can have access to quality early childhood education. Working families get the importance of this. The member for Kingston gets the importance of this. But it is amazing to hear in the arguments against this that there is no passion. It comes down to a dollars-and-cents approach from the government that has created a trillion dollars of debt, but all of a sudden it can't afford to support families or working parents. Working parents understand the childcare cap. They get it. They now the cost of the fourth or the fifth day. If people do not understand how this system works, they should go and ask someone who has kids in child care. They understand it and they'll explain to you exactly how they make the calculations of whether they will work the fourth or fifth day.

The system that this government is trying to defend right now is bracket creep on steroids. It proves just how out of touch they are with working Australian families. What they've decided to do instead of saying that child care is too expensive is try to increase the cost of everything else. They increased the cost of university degrees to try to bring them closer to the high childcare fees that they seem to be entirely comfortable with. Labor's plan is clear: a more-productive workforce, more early childhood education, more money in the pockets of working families and, of course, respecting the choice that parents should have as to whether they choose to look after their children at home, choose to go into the workforce or, indeed, how much they choose to participate in the workforce. All of these things are possible only because of the quality early childhood educators and childcare centres in our country. In my electorate of Perth alone there are 62 centres. We add another two or three every single year because there is increasing demand despite the financial disincentives for many thousands of parents. I do want to say a huge thank you to the early childhood educators—161,000 of them in Australia. This is a huge sector. It is a huge workforce. Those opposite should remember that when they talk about this sector they are also talking about thousands of people in their electorates who work in the sector doing incredibly difficult work day in and day out.

The member for Kingston referenced Bec, who is in Perth. I asked the Prime Minister about Bec, who has two children and a household income of $193,000. She is one of the thousands of Australian families who lose money if they work a fourth or a fifth day, even though it would be good for her career as a solicitor if she could work those extra days. When you ask the Prime Minister about something he doesn't like he just throws insult after insult to the Labor Party. We didn't get a serious answer. We still don't have a serious answer as to why the Liberal Party thinks this is not a good idea. I think the only reason they don't think it's not a good idea is that they didn't come up with it. This is a serious issue for so many families in Perth.

I posted the Prime Minister's response from question time to my Facebook page and the responses were not happy. Lana said, 'Please push this. My young family with two kids can't afford to go to work either.' Nicole said, 'He totally just avoided your question and went to justifying Liberal debts.' The Liberals one trillion dollars of debt and nothing for childcare. That is a lot of bucks when you don't find a single cent for child care.

The Prime Minister says that he's pleased with the system. Remember he told us he was proud of it. He said, 'I am so pleased having been directly involved in structuring these reforms'. So for every working parent, where this system doesn't work just know that the Prime Minister's hand was on every single error in the current system. He does sometimes admit his mistakes. It has been a while since we talked about his much promised nannies program where he was going to fund nannies in the home. Apparently they had enough money for that but not enough money to make the childcare system more affordable. The Productivity Commission we've heard about—good enough to look at the Liberal Party's plans but not good enough to look at others. Who knows the truth? The West Australian newspaper knows the truth— (Time expired)