Childcare is finally a major election issue with the major parties taking very different approaches to what is undoubtedly a crisis in supply and affordability. The major element of the government’s policy is a 30 per cent rebate on the cost of care. Read the policy here.
The ALP will increase the number of places, offer a day’s free care per week and is restoring the operational subsidies to community care centres. Read the policy here.
During the Whitlam period, child care was part of the education portfolio. It is good to see a move to reinstate it there rather than add child care to the social welfare portfolio.
I would like to see child care become a focus point in communities.
In Sweden when I was there in the early ’80s I was impressed by the integration of child care centres into whole life experience. Child care centres were also after-school care centres. So when the child started ‘big school’ (Year 1), the after-school care centre was the same place in the neighbourhood the child went to at ages 2.5, 3, 4 and 5.
(Children in Sweden start formal education later than we Australians do. And back in the 80s there was no public funded child care for children under 2.5 years of age in Sweden.)
Once into the highschool years, the older boys and girls were allowed to drop in and help the staff look after the little ones. All very good and practical training in parenting techniques and being rewarded for being altruistic and unself-consciously liking of children.
No rules about cut-off ages existed. The community centres were user-friendly, not bureaucratically rigid.
We’re a long way off that utopia, I guess. We Australians concentrate on the economics of running centres without taking into account the long term developmental benefits such as I have described above. Econometric economists only analyse the instant present, not the continuous benefit of running child care centres as community after-school centres and adolescent drop-in centres. I should add that these centres were small, manageable, and not filled with hundreds of kids of all ages.
I yearn for the day when the tunnel-vision of running the country like a Coles-Myer Emporium will be over. Vision, please.
Starting with equable access to quality child care seems good to me.
hahaha what a stupid site