Like families in North-Western Tasmania, the Turnbull Government knows the current child care and early learning system is broken.
The Turnbull Government’s reforms will deliver more support for more low and middle-income families as well as a $1.2 billion Child Care Safety Net to help those in need, ensuring around 3,100 Braddon families will be better off.
A family earning $50,000 a year with two children in care for two days a week, for example, will be around $2,000 better off each year.
The Turnbull Government has also committed around $1.73 million to ensure 1,367 local children in Braddon have access to 15 hours a week of quality early learning in the year before school.
In contrast, the Labor Party has no policy to fix the broken early education and care system and no policy to deliver preschool funding.
In Bill Shorten’s recent Budget reply speech, child care and early learning didn’t even get a mention.
Just like Justine Keay couldn’t be bothered getting her citizenship paperwork sorted, the Labor Party hasn’t bothered doing the paperwork to develop any sort of child care or early learning policy.
What’s more, yesterday, Labor’s Amanda Rishworth admitted Labor has no policy and would just adopt the detailed work the Turnbull Government has done.
“I intend to allow the new system to have time to bed down before I look at a proper review”
– Amanda Rishworth, Speech – McKell Institute, 17/5/2018
The last time Labor was in office, child care fees spiked 14.6 per cent in just one year and climbed by around 6.7 per cent on average each year.
The work the Turnbull Government has done has slowed those increases to around 2.7 per cent, and the new hourly fee cap we’re introducing in our reforms will continue to put downward pressure on fee jumps.
Only Brett Whiteley and the Turnbull Government have a plan to help Braddon families with their child care bills and ensure local children get the early learning they need.
Summary of the Turnbull Government’s reforms:
- We’re increasing Australia’s investment in early childhood education and care by $2.5 billion over the next four years so that almost one million Australian families benefit – Low and middle-income families will be the greatest beneficiaries from the package.
- An activity test will ensure that taxpayer’s support for child care is targeted to those who depend on it in order to work, or work additional hours. All it takes is four hours a week of work, looking for work, studying or volunteering. It is estimated our reforms will encourage more than 230,000 families to increase their involvement in workforce participation.
- Fundamentally fair – this package provides the highest rate of subsidy to those on the lowest income levels and more hours of subsidy to those who work the most. We’re increasing the base subsidy from around 72 per cent to 85 per cent for the more than 370,000 families earning around $66,958 or less a year.
- Low and middle income families, earning up to around $186,958, will no longer be limited by an annual cap on the amount of child care they can access – that’s more than 85 per cent of families using child care. Families earning more than around $186,958 will also benefit from an increased annual rebate cap of $10,190.
- Our $1.2 billion Child Care Safety Net recognises vulnerable children and families need extra support.
Families can head to www.education.gov.au/childcare for to see how they will benefit by using our subsidy estimator and to start the switchover to the new system.