in brief: abbott’s major review of childcare system
On Sunday, the Abbott government released the terms of reference for a major review of the childcare system.
This has been a long time in the making, and will include reviews of childcare and early childhood learning, as well as long day care, parents who hire nannies, mobile care and outside-school-hours care. The Productivity Commission will be asked to consider which models of care should be trialled in or eventually implemented in Australia, paying special attention to the home-based care system currently in place in New Zealand.
The New Zealand government offers subsidies for licensed services in private homes, including those operating 24 hours a day. This could mean that Australian parents who employ nannies could gain more government support.
Prime Minister Abbott stated that he wanted to ensure services were ‘more flexible to suit the needs of families, including families with non-standard work hours, disadvantaged children, and regional families … Our child care system should be responsive to the needs of today’s families and today’s economy … The government wants Australian families to have more choices when it comes to the decisions they make about the care of their children.’
However, this inquiry is unlikely to lead to an overall increase in funding for child care, despite the government asking the Productivity Commission to ‘consider options within current funding parameters.’
The Labor government has in turn voiced its concerns about the review, warning the Coalition to be ‘very careful’ if it means testing the child care rebate available to families to assist them with the cost of services. Labor spokesperson on early childhood Kate Ellis has stated: ‘What I’m afraid of is that these new promises, as there will not be additional funding, will only come at the expense of existing child care assistance that hundreds of thousands of families rely on.’
Official figures show 19,400 child care and early learning services enrolled over 1.3 million children in at least one child care or preschool program in 2012, with the federal government spending more than $5 billion a year in the sector.
The government says that the current child care and early learning system can be improved because ‘families are struggling to find quality child care and early learning that is flexible and affordable enough to meet their needs and to participate in the workforce.’
Labor Senate leader Penny Wong has voiced her disappointment that one of the Abbott government’s first actions was to scrap the Early Years Quality Fund, which is designed to help lift wages in the child care system. Wong has also warned that ‘you’d have to be very careful if you were the Abbott government going down this path that you didn’t in fact set up a set of disincentives for women to participate in the workforce,’ with the suggestion that means testing may be set up to test the majority of the child care rebate.
The review is due to be completed by October 2014.
