Labor pledges childcare for all

By Kath Gannaway
A FEDERAL Labor Government would give every four-year-old access to pre-school education, Federal Opposition families and community services spokeswoman Jenny Macklin has promised.
The commitment was made when Ms Macklin visited Rob Mitchell, federal Labor candidate for McEwen, in Yarra Junction last week.
The visit to the Upper Yarra Community House Children’s Centre was part of Labor’s unofficial pre-election campaign to highlight the high cost of childcare facing families in the region.
Ms Macklin said figures show families in Yarra Junction on the median family income of $55,000 were paying up to $124 a week in out of pocket childcare costs for one child in full time care.
“The biggest issue for families is affordability,” she said.
Mr Mitchell said the rising petrol, mortgage, groceries and childcare costs were putting families under pressure and that child-care costs had risen by more than 12 per cent every year for the past four years.
“We estimate the value of the childcare benefit has declined by $1200 over the past four years,” Ms Macklin said.
Maxine Burke, general manager of Upper Yarra Community House, said fee increases were partly due to increased pay for child-care workers which had addressed unacceptably low wages paid to child-care workers for years and which recognised the role they played in children’s lives.
She said as a not-for-profit centre, Upper Yarra Community House had refused to reduce the quality of care to children and families to offset those increases but she said that affordability was much more complex than income versus expenditure.
Ms Burke was in agreement with the Labor visitors when she said the current 30 per cent rebate favoured families on higher income.
She said, however, that putting that money back into the child care benefit system and changing the current formula to provide greater subsidies for families on low and middle incomes would provide better outcomes.
She said the current fragmented approach of government relied on the private sector to set up childcare centres in areas that were already serviced promoting competition and making it difficult for each to survive.
She called on governments to cap child care benefit places where existing services had vacancies and invest in value-adding to existing publicly-owned programs.
Responding to Ms Macklin and Mr Mitchell’s commitment to building up to 260 new child care centres in areas of need on primary school grounds, Ms Burke welcomed the initiative but said that governments needed to think outside the square. Investment in the public sector with an emphasis on existing programs would, she said, build social capital and strengthen communities.
Other Labor initiatives to help reduce child care costs included investing $450 million in child care and pre-school for four-year olds, requiring local child-care fees, vacancies and breaches of quality standards to be published and requiring at least two months notice of fee increases.