PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Mr VENNING (Grey) (12:47): I'm utterly sick of this Labor government's self-congratulatory motions. Child care in regional South Australia is in absolute crisis. Only two-thirds of families in my electorate of Grey have access to early childhood education.
It is completely unacceptable. Let me be clear from the outset: I acknowledge and commend the 15 per cent pay rise for early childhood educators. This investment of $3.6 billion will benefit more than 200,000 educators who have been undervalued for far too long.
Earning an extra $255 to $410 a week is a well-deserved result of people doing incredibly important work, all while struggling in Labor's self-inflicted cost-of-living crisis. However, I cannot stand here and listen to more self-congratulatory backslapping from this Labor government while regional families are completely abandoned. This motion paints a picture of an amazing, utopian, perfect early education system—a childcare dreamland, if you will.
But if you step outside the major cities and look at my electorate of Grey, you will see a vastly different reality for regional families. Grey covers 92.3 per cent of South Australia. It is officially the electorate with the worst access to child care in Australia, and it shows.
In 2024, 23 councils across the north and the west of our state formed the Regional Childcare Desert Advocacy Project. They did this to highlight a crisis. We have people with the appropriate skills and qualifications who are desperate to work.
They want to teach. They want to staff our regional hospitals. They want to grow our communities.
But they simply cannot do that without appropriate child care. Housing, health and child care are three of the biggest issues crippling our regions. The shortage is hindering regional growth and damaging our state economy.
Child care is not just an economic necessity; it is a lifeline for mental health and community wellbeing. We must treat child care as an investment for the future, not just as a cost. When the government rolls out solutions, they fail completely.
The federal government's Building Early Education Fund, or BEEF, is entirely unfit to solve the childcare desert in Grey. Look at the Crystal Brook Community Childcare working group. They obtained conditional approval for a site at the local primary school.
They commissioned plans. They found eager operators ready to go. Instead of support, they were locked out by inflexible, ludicrous red tape and guidelines.
The rules demand that applicants already operate an existing centre. They prohibit community consortiums from applying and restrict eligibility to providers of between one and nine facilities. How metrocentric is that?
It is absurd that a community group cannot own an asset and lease it to an operator. Furthermore, expecting volunteers to navigate a bureaucratic nightmare and fund shovel-ready business plans with an onerous two-month application window is also an unrealistic burden. The restrictive conditions of this grant program heavily favour existing metropolitan providers and simultaneously make it impossible for new regional operators to enter the market.
The Labor government made significant noise about how this program would deliver universal child care, but it is failing. It is failing in regional South Australia. It is not just in early child care where we see these issues.
The recent collapse of out-of-school hours care or OSHC in Stirling North and Quorn did not just happen overnight. We saw, only recently, the Premier flaunt investment in OSHC services in Adelaide. Meanwhile, that very same week, he closed down those in Stirling North and Quorn.
It's absolutely outrageous. Despite local operators working closely with the Department for Education, there was absolutely no meaningful intervention. There were no workers, no support and no solutions.
Once again, regional Australia continues to be treated as an afterthought. Families who desperately depend on these essential services have been left scrambling. In our regions, alternatives simply do not exist.
People are forced to lean on grandparents, friends and family to fill the massive gap that the government have refused to fix. This is not a system. This is an unfolding national disgrace.
Stop patting yourselves on the back. Look past the cities and work with the locals, the councils and the state departments to find real solutions to rescue these regional communities. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Wilkie ): I understand that the member for Pearce would like to present a copy of their speech for incorporation into the Hansard, in accordance with the resolution agreed to on 6 November 2025.