STATEMENTS BY SENATORS
Senator O'SULLIVAN (Western Australia—Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) (12:23): I want to talk about child care, and the future of safety in child care. Child care is central to the lives of over a million Australian families. It affects whether parents can go to work, can afford to have another child and can feel confident about the care their children receive.
When we talk about child care, we should talk more about that than the subsidies we're spending. We should talk about the care and the quality of that education and the quality of that care. We should be talking about families, quality, choice and, most importantly, the wellbeing of children.
Former treasurer Peter Costello said: Debt-free government is the best youth policy you will ever come across. I would like to extend that principle and say that good economic policy is good family policy. Families feel the economy in their mortgage or their rent.
They feel it at the supermarket, in their power bill and whether they feel secure enough to have their first child or even have another one. A sound economy gives families something no subsidy can replace: confidence in the future. In 2024, Australia's fertility rate fell to 1.48 children per woman.
Yet HILDA data shows that, in 2023, Australian women reported wanting on average around 2.09 children. So the aspiration of women and families is actually higher than what they are able to or feel comfortable to achieve. Around 80 per cent of Australians aged 18 to 49 said that the cost of raising children was an important or very important factor when deciding whether to have a child.
Australians have not simply stopped wanting children. There is a growing gap between the families Australians want and the families they feel they can afford. For many households, living on one income is simply not realistic.
Many mothers have shared with me that they would love to have more children and would love to stay home longer after having their baby to care for their newborn, to recover physically and to return to work when they feel ready. Often during this period, dads carry much of the financial responsibility for the household, but those early weeks matter for fathers too—to support Mum, to stay at home to be with their newborn and to build those early family bonds.
But most families feel that they simply cannot afford it. Government paid parental leave is paid at the national minimum wage for a family with a mortgage or rent to pay. That can be a very significant hit.
Some fathers rely on annual leave to return and work earlier than the family would otherwise choose. The mum may also return to work not because she is ready but because the bills still need to be paid. If they secure a childcare place so both parents can work, another substantial cost is added.
They can find themselves wanting and working more and paying more and feeling like they're getting less, though. This is not genuine choice. Labor's been in government now for more than four years.
These are their budgets, their spending decisions, and Australian families are paying the price. There is a better way. Families should not have to accept that what they're experiencing now is the new normal.
The coalition has a different economic plan: the tax-back guarantee, a future generations fund linking migration to housing supply and putting a speed limit on government spending. We know that stronger economic management is possible because a coalition government has done it before. When the Howard government came to office, Commonwealth net debt had reached 18.5 per cent of GDP, and by 2005-06 the Howard and Costello government had eliminated net debt.
A coalition government got Australia there once before; a coalition government can get us there again. Labor's own budget forecasts that Commonwealth debt of $616.6 billion by June 2027 will grow to a gross debt of $1.051 trillion. We in the coalition have the leadership.
We've got the experience and the plan to help Australians get ahead. But I'll go back to child care. Too often child care is discussed as an economic instrument for workforce participation, subsidy rates and productivity.
But, above all, what matters most is the experience and the development of a child. So when we call a service high quality, what do we actually mean? The national quality standards largely assess structural quality—the staffing ratios, the educator qualifications, the governance and the physical environment.
But research indicates process quality, the actual interactions between an educator and a child, can be even more important. Does an educator notice distress? Do they respond with warmth and sensitivity?
Is there stability in that relationship? Do they engage and encourage that child? Those interactions are harder to capture on a compliance checklist, but they matter and are incredibly important nonetheless.
The E4Kids study, the largest Australian observational study of childcare quality, followed 2,494 children across Queensland and Victoria. Trained observers went into the rooms children attended and assessed the quality of the interactions that were taking place. Across all settings and locations, only one per cent of children experienced instructional support assessed as high quality.
This is a relevant element, most closely associated with cognitive and academic growth. Another Australian study comparing 104 services found direct observational measures of educator-child interactions were consistently lower than the National Quality Standard ratings suggested. This is not an argument to abandon the National Quality Framework; it's a reminder that regulatory compliance is a baseline, not a complete measure of a child's experience.
While the overwhelming majority of educators can and should be trusted, not everyone who seeks access to children does so with good intentions. Parents deserve to know who has access to their children, and that they will not be the last to know when something goes wrong. This is why the coalition has called for a nationally coordinated childcare perpetrator register.
Parents should have timely and legally appropriate information about people charged with, or convicted of, child sexual offences, including relevant early childhood employment history. A charge is not a conviction, and any register must respect procedural fairness and the presumption of innocence. But those principles should not leave parents searching newspaper reports and social media to work out whether an alleged offender worked at their childcare centre.
Parents deserve a reliable source of truth. But where is the government on this? Six weeks ago, deeply disturbing allegations involving people who had worked in child care sent shockwaves through families across Australia.
In the weeks since, parents have understandably been asking questions about who is caring for their children, what information they are entitled to know and whether safeguards that we have in place are strong enough. Yet what has been most striking is not what the ministers responsible for child care have said; it's the fact that they've said nothing at all. The Prime Minister; Minister for Education, Jason Clare; and Minister for Early Childhood Education, Senator Jess Walsh, who's in this place, are front and centre when there is good news to announce about child care, but they are missing in action when it comes to actually dealing with this particular issue.
Six weeks have passed, and we've not heard a single peep. I've not seen a single direct public response from any of the three to our proposals for a national childcare perpetrator register. There's been no direct acknowledgement of the fear and uncertainty that families are experiencing—no answer.
It's a simple question: what more will you do as a government to ensure that parents have the information that they need? We need a government that's going to step up to the plate and provide what Australian families need, what parents are looking for. They want confidence.
They want trust in their childcare system. Government, please deliver it. We need it.