Early Childhood Education and Care (Three Day Guarantee) Bill 2025
Mr CHESTER (Gippsland) (11:06): I do take great pleasure in joining the debate this morning. I want to focus my remarks very much along the three key themes of accessibility, affordability and choice. Across this chamber, I have no doubt whatsoever that there is universal recognition of the value of access to child care.
There would not be a member in this place who doesn't see the value in having better access to early childhood education to give our young people the best possible start in life. But the question around access is an important one. I fail to see how those opposite can come in here after almost three years and feel confident in lecturing people on this side of the House about the question of accessibility, when not one of them has bothered to listen to the repeated feedback they've received from rural and regional families, from rural and regional members of this place on this side of the House.
I see the member for Nicholls here nodding his head and the member for Braddon nodding his head. So to come into this place and have the member for Blair claiming to be a rural and regional member of parliament, when his seat is at best suburban—it is on the periurban interface with Brisbane in South-East Queensland—and lecturing us about rural and regional accessibility to child care after 2½ years is completely ignoring the fundamental question for a lot of our families.
The problem with the direction taken by the government in this legislation is that allowing, or providing for, a minimum of 72 hours a fortnight access to subsidised child care doesn't mean anything if you can't get one day's access to child care. If there is no childcare centre, having three days provided in the suburbs, I'm sorry, doesn't help you at all. That is the fundamental problem—the disconnect in this place.
We have members opposite who come in here and yell abuse at this side of the chamber, telling us how we don't know anything. But they never stop to listen to the lived experience of people in rural and regional communities. One of our biggest challenges in our rural and regional communities is attracting and retaining a workforce for critical areas like health, education, child care, police, paramedics, nurses—you name it.
We can't get them to come to regional areas if there isn't access to affordable child care in the towns where they want to be posted to. I can't tell you the number of times I have had conversations with small-town community leaders in my electorate about the paramedic they tried to attract to the region, or the teacher or the nurse, and the stumbling block was the fact there was no child care available to them.
The reason why this access issue has become even more critical is because, in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, we all need to understand that the vast majority of families need at least 1½ incomes, possibly two full-time incomes, to be able to pay their bills. So how can those opposite come into this place and lecture members on this side of the chamber who represent rural and regional communities, who live in childcare deserts, who have not seen a single improvement in the last three years addressing this problem, while the Labor Party has continued to inflame the cost-of-living crisis for families in our regions?
On the issue of accessibility, those opposite have failed to address the fundamental problem for a lot of rural and regional families. On the question of affordability, another key theme in child care, we need to ensure that families, right across Australia, are in a position to have their child go to a good-quality childcare centre, if required, but also to be able to afford to pay the bills.
I do accept those opposite have worked in relation to increasing the wages for childcare workers, which has been a benefit to a large number of workers in the sector. But one of our problems in that regard is that the centres, where they do exist in regional communities, simply can't operate at full capacity because they can't attract the workforce. Again, there are accessibility issues.
I say to those opposite that, with the cost of child care increasing by 22.3 per cent since Labor came to power, this is a piece of public policy that still requires an enormous amount of work. I urge those opposite to work in a bipartisan manner with the coalition to address issues of accessibility and affordability. Finally, I want to refer to choice.
What those opposite don't seem to understand is that individual families, particularly in our regional and rural communities, have different requirements for the early childhood education sector than, perhaps, many of our suburban cousins. I don't pretend to come in here and lecture the member for Jagajaga on the needs of Heidelberg or Ivanhoe, because I don't have a lived experience of those suburban areas.
But I will come in here and talk about the needs of my community, where we have people working on farms, sometimes in quite remote locations. We have a disproportionate number of small-business owners in our communities, where you may have a husband-and-wife or family team working together in a small business. We need choice when it comes to child care.
We need choice in this sector where it may be more appropriate for some of our rural and regional families to access in-home care, which is subsidised to some extent. We need more support for kinship care. A lot of families in rural and regional communities are relying on other family members to take up the care burden.
Why is there only one government sanctioned form of raising a child in Australia—that being institutionalised child care? What about the families who would prefer to be in a position to care for their own child for longer in their own home? Why have we got ourselves in a position as a nation where we seem to discriminate against those families who would prefer, with a little bit of help from the government, to look after their own children in their own home for longer.
It'd be a lot cheaper than subsidising their child care. I don't come in here lecturing those opposite if it's their choice to have their children in long day care, nor should anyone come in here and lecture this side of the House if we represent families in our communities who would prefer to have the option, where possible, to look after their own children for longer.
They are both reasonable choices with the best interests of the child at heart. That's a fundamental issue of the debate that we should be having today: where are we placing the best interests of the child in this debate? Surely, if we're talking about early childhood education and care, we have to be fundamentally addressing the needs of the children throughout Australia, whether they live in the suburbs, the inner cities, or in rural, regional or remote communities.
I appeal to those opposite to start taking the time to listen to members on this side with a lived experience of rural, regional and remote communities, because our needs are different when it comes to early childhood education and care. We're fundamentally focused on accessibility. We need access to more and a greater variety of services.
In many of our communities, the corporate care for-profit model of 120 kids in a childcare centre just doesn't work. There are going to have to be models in regional communities where we work with local councils, hospitals and big industry, and support childcare facilities being built to support maybe only 20 or 30 children at a time. The accessibility question is fundamental.
Again, the affordability question, I see the minister opposite nodding her head in agreement, but the choice question is one that this place has not grappled with, they refuse to respect the different choices Australian families want to make in the interests of their own children. Dr Aly: Come and talk to me, Darren. Mr CHESTER: I'll take the minister's offer to come and talk to her, and I will.
I've always found the minister to be a very reasonable person, but I've sat in here in recent hours and listened to some misinformed lectures from suburban MPs who have no appreciation of life in rural and regional communities, telling us how we have failed to support families in regional areas. So I will take up the minister's offer of a meeting, and I look forward to that.
It is deceptive for the government to parade in this place and claim that it has solved all problems in relation to early childhood care and education across Australia. Mr Burnell interjecting— Mr CHESTER: I welcome the interjection by my good friend, the member for Spence. He's suggesting that it's misleading for me to claim that the government is making spectacular claims in relation to early childhood care and education.
He obviously hasn't been in the chamber for the last hour to hear those opposite sprouting their achievements but failing to acknowledge the very real challenges that still exist in regional areas and communities in relation to accessibility, affordability and choice. Mr Albanese interjecting— Mr CHESTER: The Prime Minister is interjecting that we're against funding for regional child care.
Prime Minister, I invite you to join me in the meeting with the minister. I would love to meet with the Prime Minister to talk about early childhood education and care in my community. I would love him to join us in that meeting, and we could exchange ideas on rural and regional areas.
Prime Minister, I found when dealing with the vast number of your frontbenchers that they're not interested in hearing about rural and regional Australia. They're not interested in having conversations about how your policies have hurt rural and regional families. Your frontbenchers aren't interested in hearing about the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on regional people.
So I do welcome the Prime Minister's invitation. Mr Albanese: I came in here to hear you speak! Mr CHESTER: I welcome the Prime Minister's continued interjections.
He's come in here to hear me speak— well, I'll speak more, Prime Minister! I was about to sit down, but since you've come here, I better let you have the benefit of hearing more about rural and regional Australia and how your frontbench has refused to engage with rural and regional communities on critical issues affecting our community. I'd suggest to the Prime Minister that, in relation to infrastructure and transport, he has a minister who takes up to 10 months to respond to correspondence from rural and regional members for information in relation to regional highways and other infrastructure.
I do encourage the Prime Minister to urge his frontbench to at least pay some respect to members who have a lived experience in our rural and regional areas to understand the very real challenges that we face in dealing with issues which are both complex and require a different approach to the Canberra one-size-fits-all one which has been the hallmark of this government.
I will conclude with a few more remarks from where I started in relation to the fundamental areas where I think there is agreement on this issue. As I said at the outset, I believe that across the chamber there is enormous goodwill towards achieving the best possible outcome for young people and giving them the best possible start through access to early childhood education and care.
Where I think we are failing today is in relation to those three key areas of accessibility, affordability and choice. The accessibility question can be resolved only when we have governments and bureaucrats here in Canberra prepared to listen to the lived experience of people in country areas who will come up with different models that aren't the corporate care models.
They won't involve 120 children in one centre, will have smaller centres and may involve a greater investment in small-scale infrastructure, perhaps even for family day care, to support the growth in that sector. The final point is about choice. We have got ourselves into a position in this nation where we seem to be promoting a government sanctioned model of raising children that doesn't recognise that families are individual and want to make their own choices.
That should be respected. The choice to send your child to a childcare centre if required—sometimes through necessity; sometimes by choice—is a legitimate one, as is the choice of raising your child as much as possible in your own home. Ms Thwaites interjecting— Mr CHESTER: This is where the member is taking insult where no insult is intended.
The member is seeking to have an argument where no insult is intended. I'm saying there are opportunities for people to choose what works for their family or what incentive is forced upon them. When we have a single parent who requires access to early childhood education, of course it should be respected by the government—just as the family looking to have more opportunity to look after their own children in their own home for longer should be respected by government.
If those opposite can't support that choice, they should come out and say it. On my side of the chamber, due to the necessity of rural and remote locations, many families are in a situation where they want to spend more time looking after their own children in their own homes and not access formalised care, because it's not available to them. All I'm asking is that those opposite take the time to understand the lived experience of a lot of families in rural and regional communities around accessibility, affordability and choice, just as those on this side of the House respect the fact that, in a suburban or inner-urban environment, a lot of people with cost-of-living pressures, which are enormous, are faced with no other choice than to have two full-time incomes.
That flexibility is so important for a lot of our rural and regional families.