Early Childhood Education and Care (Three Day Guarantee) Bill 2025

Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (09:53): I want to associate myself with the remarks of the earlier contributions of the members for Macquarie and Cowper in relation to the Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs inquiries into domestic and family violence. This legislation before the House, the Early Childhood Education and Care (Three Day Guarantee) Bill 2025, goes to the core of families.

Families mean a lot. The meaning of family is vastly different in 2025 than it was just 10 short years ago and certainly back in the sixties and seventies, when I was being raised in a family situation where my late father, Lance, worked the farm at Brucedale between Wagga Wagga and Junee and, prior to that, at Marrar. My late mother, Eileen, stayed at home, and looked after the children—five children.

That was pretty much the norm: dads went out and worked and mums stayed at home. But, today, it's very different. It's very much changed.

Mothers are now, in fact, in some cases, the sole breadwinner. In other cases, they're the highest-wage earner. Society has become very, very different.

I noted the previous standing committee reports and listened very carefully to the member for Cowper talking about men being the problem and men also being very much at the heart of the solution to domestic and family violence. Being a former police officer and having prosecuted cases of family violence as a lawyer, I can say the member for Cowper is very much right.

Late last year, the director of the Wagga Women's Health Centre, Johanna Elms, who I have a lot of respect for for her vision of what society could look like and certainly how Wagga Wagga could improve, organised, conducted and led a men's forum. It was held at a venue out on the Oura Road. It was to see what community leaders could do about domestic and family violence and how we could be achieving zero violent crimes against women.

Ninety to 100 community leaders gathered. It was a men's-only affair. There were no women present.

But Ms Elms arranged that particular forum. Everything was on the table. I have supported the Wagga Women's Health Centre very much.

My mother-in-law, Beverley Shaw, worked there for many years. I have supported that centre in my 14 years in the parliament because it has women's issues at the forefront. They were ahead of their time.

They began in the 1970s, trying to get access to the pill when it was difficult to do so in Wagga Wagga. It was a very conservative city. They formed that centre.

They didn't receive any funding but for some philanthropic donations. They did it on their own. I appreciate there are now calls for a similar type of arrangement for a men's centre and demands that there be state and federal funding for that.

But the women, to their credit, did it on their own. This was in an era where we were just starting to have more women in the workforce. When we were in coalition, I was very proud of the fact there were so many women in the workforce.

In fact, the coalition saw women's workforce participation reach record highs, at 62.3 per cent. That was in May 2022, just before this Labor government took office. It was a big lift from when Labor had previously left office in 2013, when it was at 58.7 per cent.

So it was quite a sizable and significant jump. With this particular legislation before the House, it is interesting to read the May 2024 report of GrainGrowers. They placed as one of their main, if not top, items of importance early childhood education and care.

This is an agricultural group. In that report—and I will read from it because it is fascinating to hear—they said: Access to quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) services promotes children's cognitive and socio-emotional development, laying the foundation for academic success and fostering important life skills such as communication, problem-solving, and collaboration.

Mind you, I'm reading from an agriculture report. That's the thing here. They said: Grain growing takes place in rural, regional and remote areas of Australia, where children and families experience more limited access to a range of quality ECEC services relative to those living in metropolitan centres, and in some instances, have no access at all.

The report continues: Access to ECEC supports working parents living within grain growing regions by enabling them to pursue employment and education opportunities, thereby helping to alleviate workforce shortages in the grains industry and broader supply chain, and allows for greater economic productivity for our communities. That's from GrainGrowers. You would think that a report from an organisation which has at its very heart the growing of grain would be talking about, perhaps, the instant asset write-off for harvesters, augers and silos—that happened under the coalition government—but they're talking about an early childhood education and care policy.

You can see how society has shifted. You can see the concerns in rural and regional Australia about this very important policy area. I've said so often—and you do get sneered at by those opposite, who are quick to crow about the fact that they've got cheaper, more affordable child care—that the rub in regional Australia and especially in remote Australia is not affordability; it's availability and accessibility, because in some areas you can't find child care to save yourself.

Families, often led by women, and sometimes single-parent families where the mother has custody, can't get access to child care, and they are expected to put food on the table and to earn the money. Some of them are seriously super mums, and we pay credit to them. We had a situation in Lockhart not that long ago.

In the 2021 census—and the minister at the table and I have experience with the census, don't we, Member for Fenner? Dr Leigh: Absolutely. Mr McCORMACK: 'Absolutely,' he says.

He'd be interested to know that Lockhart's population was 3,319. There was no childcare centre in that town, in that shire. It is a huge grain-growing area—one of the very best in Australia—which was once represented in this place by the late great Tim Fisher.

It's not far from Boree Creek, a town that Tim put on the map. Of course, the Lockhart council came in to see what it could do to fill the void left by the closure of the childcare centre. Councils have to do more and more of the heavy lifting when it comes to not just child care but the other end of the scale.

Coolamon Shire has a population of 4,385. For some years, its council has provided the aged-care services in that shire, which is only three-quarters of an hour's drive north-west of Wagga Wagga, with a population of more than 70,000. But unless the shire council, which runs the Allawah Lodge, did the aged-care services, there wouldn't be any aged-care services at all.

The sad reality is that, unless local government steps up to fill the void in child care, there won't be any child care at all in some of these centres the size of Lockhart. It's not right. Yet we have a government spruiking the affordability of child care.

It can be as cheap as anything—it can have a zero cost—but if you don't have a childcare centre then it's of no use at all. That is the point when coalition members argue about the childcare desert. I hear so often about the childcare desert from the member for Mallee, who represents the largest electorate in Victoria.

I've heard her eloquently describe the lack of childcare services in that sprawling Victorian electorate. Then there's the retiring member for Parkes. His electorate makes up half of the landmass of New South Wales, and one of the biggest issues in that electorate is childcare access.

It's not affordability. It's access and availability. When you have families desperately needing services, desperately seeking places for the ability for them to go out and work, put food on the table and contribute to the economic wealth of this nation, but they can't find placements for their children, then it is something.

There is market failure, that somebody, somewhere, somehow has to address. There are several issues with this bill, including the removal of priority access for working families. It disincentivises aspiration, it increases access without addressing supply issues—something that I was talking about earlier—and it does nothing to increase access or flexibility for families.

This is the issue. It's all well and good for Labor government members to talk about affordability. Again, if you don't have the infrastructure, if you don't have the service and if you don't have the people running the childcare centres, that issue of affordability is a moot point.

It doesn't address current cost-of-living pressures. I know that yesterday Labor finally, finally, finally—I harp on that point—lifted the biosecurity tax. Some might ask, 'What's that got to do with this particular childcare policy?' The biosecurity tax was forcing our farmers, many of whom often need childcare access, to pay the biosecurity measures of competitors who were coming in from foreign countries to sit on the supermarket shelves in opposition to ours.

We have been banging on about this for months, and I know that Colin Bettles from Grain Producers sat in all the second reading speeches in the Federation Chamber about this. I didn't hear a jot from too many other stakeholders—disappointingly so, I have to say—but it's the same sort of people who were yesterday praising the agriculture minister for lifting it.

About time, because our farmers need every bit of help. And they need every bit of help when it comes to matters such as this—childcare support, childcare access and childcare availability. That's the issue, that's the rub.

We talk—and I listened to the member for Macquarie and the member for Cowper—about the pressures on strained families. We don't need our families to be under any more pressure, and we need to absolutely support our families as best we can, so that local government areas such as Lockhart don't have to then try to fill the void left by a centre closure, so that local governments can get on with the job of filling potholes, fixing the roads, repairing the roads, putting bitumen down, picking up the bins and organising what they do, and do very, very well.

They shouldn't have to be in this space. The bill has been referred to a Senate inquiry, with a reporting date of 21 March 2025. Let's hope it's not too late to get something positive and meaningful done in this space, particularly about accessibility and availability of childcare services in regional and remote Australia.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Buchholz ): Just before I give the call to the minister, I see the member for Nicholls was seeking the call. Mr Birrell: To make a contribution to this debate, Deputy Speaker. The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Absolutely.

I'll come to you straight after I come to the minister.