STATEMENTS

Ms SHARKIE (Mayo) (17:55): Reports of children being abused in child care are nothing short of horrific. There have been multiple cases of paedophilia, and families and many childcare centres have been told to get their children tested for sexually transmitted diseases. This morning there was more horrific news: a woman is facing charges of torture and multiple assaults against a one-year-old.

Allegations include smothering, hitting the child on the head and kicking the little baby across the floor—utterly horrific; that precious little baby. A Sydney childcare centre had photo evidence of toddlers with their mouths taped shut. I mean, what in the world are we dealing with here?

There are many good people that work in child care, but clearly there are some serious problems in this sector. While I want to talk about this bill, I also want to have a bigger conversation about choices—or the lack of choice—that parents have in our nation. Firstly, this bill will provide a lever for government to cut off funding for an early education and care centre that isn't up to scratch.

We don't know how many will be cut off or how many chances they will get to fix their problems. Right now, around four per cent—nearly one in 20 childcare centres—are not meeting safety standards, and many have not met them for some time. The bill will strengthen the powers to perform spot checks and unannounced visits to detect fraud and noncompliance.

I understand that most centres receive around one unannounced visit per year and normally one scheduled visit per year, and that's managed by individual state governments. It's astonishing that safety inspections are so infrequent. This is affecting our vulnerable little Australians, who are at the mercy of those who care for them and whose parents place their trust in these places.

Right now the safeguard for children with the staff is the working-with-children check, and it's sobering to know that alleged paedophiles charged with multiple counts of abuse all had clear working-with-children checks. The government childcare calculator shows that a family with one child aged one in care, where both parents are working and earning $102,000 each—I picked that because that's the average full-time salary according to the ABS—and a daycare centre charging $13 per hour, the national average, will pay $486 in out-of-pocket expense per week, and the government will fund $856 per week.

Yearly, that is a total of $32,000 in care costs, with $21,000 paid by the taxpayer and around $11,000 paid by the parent. Childcare centres are big business, and over the years we have seen for-profit companies grow their share. It is the same in aged care and employment services.

In each one of these sectors, the company is there to make a profit. That's the point of them, and they will cut corners so they can increase their profit wherever they can. They usually do.

In 2013, 39 per cent of childcare operators were for profit. In 2025, it's 53.8 per cent. In 2013, for-profit centres held 42 per cent of childcare places; they now hold over 57 per cent of the actual places that children take.

The cost of care before subsidy has grown exponentially. Back in 2011, the median cost was around $387. Now it's more than $650.

Back in 2009—this is the statistic that worries me the most—25 per cent of one-year-olds were in child care. By 2023, over 50 per cent of one-year-old babies were in child care—which leads me to choice. I think about the parents who watched the Four Corners report and listened to the news and then needed to bundle their baby into the back seat in the early morning and drop off their child.

I wonder if they really know what's happening in their childcare centre. What choice do they really have? I believe we've developed policies in this place that have taken the choice of how we raise children away from families, and we've done this in a few ways.

Successive governments have made housing unaffordable because we've focused on policies that have increased demand. While the current government has announced that they will build thousands of homes to address supply, we've had record migration over the last three years, and that migration is outstripping that new supply of housing. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, in the year 1993-94 we had a net inflow of 47,000 people into Australia.

In 2023-24 we had a net inflow of 435,000 people. Massive population growth has led to exponentially increased housing demand. That is one issue that we have to address, because at the moment it requires two full-time jobs in order to cover a mortgage and basic needs.

Another factor that has taken away choice is that we've changed family tax benefit payments. I had my babies in 1999, 2001 and 2004. If I look back at my life during those years, I see that by the time William was born in 2001, with the money from family tax benefits A and B, I could afford to stay home, even though their father was earning just above a working-class income.

Then, family tax benefits A and B were a substantial part of the family budget. It made a difference, allowing me to care for my children at home and to be there for their first steps and their first words. I will explain the family tax benefit system.

Family tax benefit A is paid to families based on the overall household income. Family tax benefit B is paid to single-parent families or to two-parent families where one parent is working outside the home and one is in the home. Families above the FTA threshold received family tax benefit B if one parent was home doing the hardest and most rewarding job of all: parenting.

Back in the year 2000 there was no income limit for the primary earner. Now the limit for a family to receive family tax benefit B is $120,000. Back in 2001 we had 26,571 families who received only family tax benefit B.

Now, that has eroded to just under 7,500 families. In two-parent families, we no longer have one parent staying at home. For some that is a choice, and for some it is not.

I completely respect those who want to return to work, but I question how many have, because of our public policy settings, been pushed into a situation of both parents having to work. We penalise a parent for staying at home and raising children, but we're happy to pay a private childcare centre $30,000 of taxpayer money in order to care for that same child.

And remember that statistic: in just over a decade we've gone from 25 per cent of one-year-olds to over half of all one-year-olds being in child care. Back in 2001 there were over 1.2 million two-parent families receiving family tax benefit A. Now that has halved to just over 600,000.

I talk to my now adult children and one of their aspirations is being able to afford to have one parent stay at home and raise the children until they go to school. Their first aspiration is being able to afford a child in the first place. No wonder our birthrate has fallen to 1.5!

How sad that, in one generation, choice has been eroded. Let me be clear: this is not about women coming out of the workforce or going into the workforce; this is about having policy settings that recognise that both parents are the first and best teachers of a child and that either parent—whatever works best for that family—should have the choice of being able to raise that child in the home.

Now you need to be wealthy to be able to afford to stay home and raise a child. So what do we do? How can we make this right?

We need to give choice back to families and we should be revising the rates of family tax benefit B through a lifting of the payment and meaningful lifting of the threshold for the earning parent. We should be properly recognising and supporting grandparents who want to be part of the raising of the grandchildren. We pay childcare centres millions—in fact, we pay them billions—and we can't support grandparents with any sort of carers payment to help out with raising children.

We should implement income splitting for tax purposes in families where there is a child or children under school age. The current tax distribution is completely unfair and provides no incentive to raise children at home. If you have two parents earning $102,000 each, for a total family income of $204,000, they pay $42,000 in tax.

If you have one parent earning $204,000 and the other parent at home with the children, that same family pays $58,000 in tax. That's a $15,000 gap—same family, total same family income. Back in 2000 I felt that my role as a stay-at-home parent was valued by the government.

The policy settings reflected this. I felt I was meaningfully contributing to the nation not just by birthing three little Australians but by being home to raise them, and I felt part of a society, not just an economy. I felt I had choice, and right now, for so many parents dropping their children at the childcare gate today, I fear that choice no longer exists.