Just thinking about the amount it costs to send my eldest son to childcare churns my stomach.
It’s a constant topic of conversation amongst frustrated parents I know paying such fees in Sydney, up there with the impossibly high entry-point of purchasing property.
But I’m so very, very grateful that we can send our son to a centre close to home, where his excellent teachers are passionate, energetic, smart individuals who always have his best interests at heart. I’m grateful we can afford to give our child access to early learning opportunities at such a vital time in his development, and I’m grateful that having access to such care also enables his parents to earn an income.
The fact is that our current system is not set up to make such opportunities affordable – or even accessible, or easy to do.
The system is broken at so many points: From a limited paid parental leave scheme pushing women back into work earlier, to a childcare system that’s so fundamentally flawed that many women conclude they can’t ‘afford’ to work, to the fact vulnerable families are simply shut out of the system altogether — meaning children miss out on early learning opportunities, while parents (mostly mothers) have no choice but to stay home.
It’s all connected, and yet moves to improve the system are still positioned as ‘either/or’. Want a childcare package? Then find some ‘double dipping’ mothers to pay for it. That’s something I learnt last week at the Breakthrough event in Melbourne, while moderating a panel on ‘Who Cares’ with academics Dr Marian Baird and Professor Deborah Brennan, and Deb Tsobaris, who works from The Centre for Excellence in Child and Family Welfare.
Tsobaris, who said she ‘muscled’ her way on to the panel because those working in child protection services rarely get a say on discussions about childcare, made the consequences of such a broken system painfully clear.
When it comes to vulnerable families, childcare offers a means to keep children safe and opens an important point of contact to services. She said she speaks to many people in the services sector who say they’re “fed up” with seeing children missing important milestones, knowing they could be doing a lot better if they were in childcare – if only they had the access.
“Early childhood education is a tool for resilience, for future opportunity and equity,” she said. Indeed, with 10% of children living in poverty, access to childcare could transform a generation of disadvantaged and vulnerable families.
Deborah Brennan shared more on the current, proposed childcare reform package taken to the election by the Coalition Government, but not due to start until 2018.
She noted some benefits of the package – such as streamlining subsidiaries to simplify the system and offering a higher level of assistance to most families, upping the $75000 rebate ceiling to $10,000.
Still, she said the reform package is disappointing, especially in that it aims to cut paid parental leave in order to pay for it.
“The package also entirely fails to mention early childcare educators,” she said. “Qualified educators are earning around $20 an hour, around half the average wage. It’s an absolute disgrace. And 97% of that workforce is female.
“It’s a pretty disappointing package and it certainly doesn’t go to the deep foundation problems that need fixing. I think it’s going to continue to leave Australia far behind. We’re behind in terms of our expenditure and in terms of our policy settings.” She suggested three major improvements that should be addressed: the first to introduce ‘child based entitlements’, offering a core number of low cost hour care hours per week – which is already being offered in a number of countries across the world including England, New Zealand and Germany. She also suggested better investing in the workforce and paying educators properly; and finally, building up and promoting the necessary links between paid parental leave, childcare and other family policies.
On paid parental leave, Marian Baird noted that after Australia finally secured a scheme in 2010 – that was always designed to be boosted with employer paid leave – the scheme is now under attack for the fourth time, with so-called ‘double-dipping mothers’ set to have part or all of their government entitlements cut if they receive paid leave from an employer. “By our calculations women in ordinary every day jobs, such as shop assistants, ambulance drivers, nurses and teachers will lose between $4,000 and $10,000 dollars immediately,” she said.
“It will affect their ability to stay out of work, which means they will be forced back into work at a time when their babies are much younger, which will then put pressure on the childcare system.”
For a system that’s already stretched – and with no great plans to fix it – that’s a serious problem.
So what do we do?
The panelists all noted the federal cross-benchers are a good target for expressing your grievances, and a number of groups including Fair Agenda and The Parenthood are available to help do just that.
What we have is not good enough, nor is what’s currently being proposed.
Sitting with this panel last Friday I saw a roomful of women of all ages who seems angry and fed up with having to debate this issue. Our discussion only touched the surface of the many, many issues involved in care — which certainly doesn’t end with pre-schoolers – but it provided enough information to realize gender equality is still a pipedream if you can’t get the fundamental basics of an accessible, affordable and equitable system of care right.
