This week one of Australia’s largest for-profit childcare providers G8 announced its fifth consecutive fee increase since January 2022. In a little over two years fees have increased by 23.8%. That’s not a typo.
Back in 2022 parents were not raving about how affordable early childhood education and care is: this kind of fee increase is just not sustainable for household budgets to absorb.
Since The Parenthood was formed back in 2013, one of the most universal obstacles parents in our community have united around, is how wildly unaffordable early education and care is.
Broke if you do, broke if you don’t, is the unfortunate catch-cry for families around the country caught in the cost-of-working crisis.
In October last year we polled more than 1200 parents in Australia with children under 6 and the findings were sobering.
- 62 per cent of parents with children under the age of six say they are struggling financially.
- Only three in 10 parents who use long daycare say the costs are easily manageable.
- Childcare costs are particularly concerning for those who report being under general financial pressure.
- The vast majority of parents (85%) believe that the cost of living means families don’t have a choice and both parents need to work. This rises to 90 per cent of those feeling financial pressure.
- Six in 10 parents say that they or their partner would work different hours if childcare wasn’t so expensive.
Against that backdrop, how much extra capacity do you think households have to fork out more for early learning? Nil. You cannot squeeze blood from a stone.
So parents face an awful choice: continue working for less money in their pocket by absorbing every fee increase or reduce work. In both scenarios, the result is the same: making ends meet becomes that much harder.
Just this week the release of new gender pay gap data has prompted conversations about women and men making different “choices” around work and family.
“No “choice” is made in a vacuum. The context in which women in Australia “choose” how to combine work and care is still dictated by policies and practices that entrench ‘mum as caregiver’ and ‘dad as breadwinner’. The same policies and practices inform our culture which, unsurprisingly, remains stubbornly wedded to stereotypical roles for men and women. Other countries have managed to unshackle themselves from these boxes in ways we haven’t.
And it hasn’t happened by accident. It’s happened because they have intentionally pursued evidence-based policy reforms that have enabled men and women to share the care and close the gender gap.
Two policies are transformative. Adequate and equitable paid parental leave that is utilised by both mums and dads, and totally affordable quality early childhood education and care.
These policies create an ecosystem in which parents can – legitimately – choose what works for their family.
Until we realise a vision for world leading paid parental leave and universal quality early childhood education and care, parents will remain trapped in a perverse cost of working crisis. Women will remain underemployed and underpaid.
And none of it will reflect “choice”.