Children ‘locked out’ of childcare to get helping hand

By KAT WONG & DOMINIC GIANNINI

Australian families earning less than $530,000 a year will be able to send their kids to childcare for at least three days a week under a Labor election pledge.

Every Australian child will be able to attend childcare for at least three days a week to “give them the best possible start in life”.

Families earning less than $530,000 a year will be guaranteed access to the government’s child care subsidy for three days a week if Labor is re-elected.

“There’s some children that are really cut out or locked out of the system through no fault of their own because of the circumstances their parents,” Education Minister Jason Clare told ABC TV on Wednesday.

“They can’t get access to three days of early education a week and that inevitably means that these children start behind the rest of the classroom when they go to kindergarten or prep and this is about fixing that.”

Labor will also scrap the activity test, which requires parents to be in paid work to access the subsidies.

The test “was a punitive policy that has locked out as many as 126,000 children, particularly from lower income households, disadvantaged backgrounds and First Nations children”, The Parenthood’s Georgie Dent told Sky News.

One in five children started school “developmentally vulnerable” and this increased to two in five among Indigenous kids, she said.

“When children arrive at school behind it is incredibly difficult for them to catch up to their peers over the course of their life, so we’ve got this window between zero and five, where we can set the trajectory of a little person’s life.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will launch the policy at the Building Early Education for Australia’s Future event in Brisbane on Wednesday.

It would benefit about 66,000 families, he said as he defended the income threshold.

“This is about children, just as everyone can send their child to the local public school or the local high school because we understand that these issues are universal,” he told ABC radio.

“We want every child to be able to access three days of quality early education.”

Deputy Liberal Leader Sussan Ley questioned how much it would cost taxpayers.

“Who is going to pay? We want to see affordable, accessible childcare, of course we do, but it has to be sustainable,” she said.

The announcement follows a September Productivity Commission report, which found children from vulnerable or disadvantaged communities would benefit most from early childhood education but were also the least likely to attend.

A universal childcare system would ensure every child aged up to five has access to high-quality early childhood education and care for at least 30 hours or three days a week, for 48 weeks of the year.

The best way to achieve this and boost attendance for low and middle income earners was to scrap the activity test and expand funding for families earning up to $80,000 and households less than $140,000 with multiple children under five.

Universal early childhood education and care supports women in the workforce, reduces developmental vulnerabilities and transforms lives, associate commissioner and report co-author Deborah Brennan says.

AAP