Early Childhood Education

Mr PASIN (Barker) (12:37): I rise to speak on this motion because it asks the House to commend the government for building an early childhood education system that Australian children deserve. For families in regional Australia, that claim rings hollow. The greatest challenge in regional Australia is not affordability; it's availability. We're in a childcare drought. Across Barker, we are thousands of hours short of the child care required just to meet the current demand, and that's before we even talk about growth. No subsidy can create a childcare place that doesn't exist. No rebate opens a centre that is closed. No amount of Labor spin can help a family when there is simply nowhere to leave their child.

Across Barker, child care is no longer just a family issue. It's become a workforce issue, an economic issue and, increasingly, an issue of community resilience. Businesses are closing their doors at three o'clock each afternoon because staff must leave to collect their children. Boardrooms are being converted into makeshift crèches simply so that people can continue working. Employers are struggling to recruit staff because mothers and fathers cannot access child care. The consequences reach well beyond the private sector. Our hospitals have qualified nurses ready to work, yet shifts go unfilled because childcare isn't available. I've heard of a young senior nurse reduced to tears every time she hears the RFDS plane land at her local hospital because she knows her colleagues are facing an emergency, understaffed and without her help, simply because she can't find a single hour of child care. There are stories like that right across my electorate. In another town there is no senior paramedic working—again, because there's no child care available. And it's across the board. Doctors, dentists and teachers are all stuck out of the workforce when we need them the most. This is the hidden cost of Labor's childcare failure. It's a pity. In fact, it's putting at risk regional lives and livelihoods.

This Labor government continues to pursue city-centric improvements, ignoring rural and regional failures. Country Australia doesn't operate on a nine-to-five Monday to Friday timetable. Nurses work nights, paramedics work shifts, tourism businesses work weekends, factory workers work rolling shifts and farmers work when the seasons demand it—through seeding, vintage and harvest—often before dawn until well after dark. Yet our childcare system still assumes that every family works a nine-to-five five-day-a-week schedule, like many do in metropolitan Australia.

Regional communities are telling us what they need. They need flexibility—multitown service models that recognise small populations spread across large distances. Above all, they need governments to remove the bureaucratic barriers that prevent communities developing idiosyncratic solutions for themselves. The tragedy is that many of these ideas are ready to go. What is holding them back is not a lack of local initiative but a lack of flexibility from governments that continue to impose a one-size-fits-all policy on communities that are anything but one size fits all. Regional Australians deserve better because this isn't about child care. It's about whether a small business can stay open, whether a nurse can go to work, whether an ambulance can respond, whether a family can remain in the town they love, whether food processors have the workforces they need, whether a child has the same opportunity to thrive regardless of where they are born and, indeed, whether we want to live in a country where fertility rates are going up or where they continue to go down.

If this government is serious about strengthening regional Australia, it must stop measuring success by how much money it spends and start measuring success by whether regional families can actually access child care. Until every regional family can find a childcare option that suits them when they need one, Labor's claim about building the early education system children deserve will remain nothing more than hollow Labor spin.