Press conference, Penrith
E&OE
MINISTER MORRISON:
It is great to be out here in Penrith with Fiona Scott, it is great to be here in your electorate, also joined by Russell Matheson, the Member for Macarthur, and Alex Hawke, the Member for Mitchell. It’s great to be here in Western Sydney to make the announcement of the government’s nanny pilot programme that will start in January of next year. It will provide subsidised support to families through service providers to ensure that they who may currently struggle getting access to mainstream childcare support services, will be able to do that through subsidised support for nannies. We expect that some 10,000 children will be able to be cared for over that two year period and some 4,000 nannies will be employed into those roles right across the country.
The focus here is on supporting families who can’t access the mainstream services now and that will be a key qualification/criteria for assessing people’s involvement in this pilot programme. So it will support shift workers, it will support police officers, firies, ambos, those like in the Customs Service where I was previously a Minister, those who are working irregular hours and who find it difficult to access services that the rest of us who are working in more mainstream occupations are able to access those services and the subsidies that are there for them.
There will be a means test on the provision of this support, this represents the first part of the government’s Childcare and Early Childhood Learning Package that will be released between now and the Budget, this programme is all about ensuring that families can be in work, can stay in work, can get in work, because we believe families need to be able to have the choice to do that and not have that choice taken away from them, simply because of the lack of affordable and quality childcare support that is there for their family.
Now before I take any questions, I might just throw to my colleagues who have different experiences, Alex is a new dad of course, Fiona’s just about to get married and Russell’s kids are well beyond the age of childcare now but in each of their electorates across Western Sydney, we really do see this being able to provide some real levels of support; people in key worker occupations who will be able to access this support. I should also stress that well beyond Western Sydney in regional areas we will be focusing much of this programme because in regional areas the broad array of options that are available in most metro areas are not there and this will provide an important filler to fill the gap but equally for families with children with special needs and of course in regional areas you can have all three of those things. So that means that we’ll be able to ensure that somewhere where there has been a gap before we’ll be able to fill and over two year period we’ll be able to address any of the integrity and compliance issues and regulation issues that need to be addressed before considering a more mainstream application of the service. Fiona, we’re in your neck of the woods, so–
FIONA SCOTT MP:
Thank you. Well firstly I’d really like to thank Scott Morrison for being here today and for thinking of Western Sydney to announce this remarkable and amazing pilot programme. When we think of Western Sydney, Western Sydney really is the youngest, one of the youngest communities in Australia; in fact Lindsay is the 10th youngest electorate in the Commonwealth. That’s really important for having the range of childcare services from all the childcare services, family day care and this nanny pilot programme. A lot of the workforce here, they do work in emergency services or in nursing staff at Nepean Hospital.
This provides that career continuity that so many women want and deserve and it provides equity to get women back into the workforce and to have the careers that they’ve worked so hard to foster and to work on. I’d really like to thank the Minister for that, because thinking of this part of Western Sydney is very crucial and look, I just can’t thank you enough Scott.
MINISTER MORRISON:
I’m pleased to be here. Alex?
ALEX HAWKE MP:
I come from an electorate which has the highest proportion of families with dependent children in the country and childcare is absolutely the barbeque stopper for Australian families, especially in Western Sydney at the moment and the government is really being very responsive to the need for flexibility and the affordability and the availability of childcare. It’s the number one issue affecting families in Sydney at the moment. So we welcome this announcement because emergency service workers, those – that flexibility they need will be there but also for as Scott points out, families with special needs, this is the move in the right direction, that flexibility is I think is going to be so valuable to families where childcare is now the number one issue on their table and on their family budgets.
MINISTER MORRISON:
Russell was not only a key worker in the Federal Parliament but he was a key worker as a police officer so he has a special insight.
RUSSELL MATHESON MP:
Thanks, Minister. I’d just like to say that I was in the police force for 25 years and you knew that talking to Police Association and Police Federation of Australia that police officers now can actually plan their careers, they can plan when they’re going to have a family. The impacts upon having children and you’re working shift work and if you went to a major incident, you don’t know what time you’re going to get home; it could be 15, 16, 18 hours on the job so I’ve already had three or four phone calls on the way here this afternoon from police officers saying great, we’ve been wanting a long, long time for this to happen and they were very happy about the situation and I want to thank the Minister, he’s done a great job in his portfolio and the Police Association, Police Federation, all emergency services, thank him, thank him for what he’s done.
MINISTER MORRISON:
Questions?
JOURNALIST:
Scott, this afternoon the parenthood and advocacy groups have put out a release suggesting that money should be completely spent on childcare services rather than nannies.
MINISTER MORRISON:
I think that observation ignores the feedback that we’ve been getting from families who currently are just not catered for by those mainstream services and as Russell has just said, I mean, for the last few weeks here, the last week or so particularly in New South Wales, we’ve seen our Emergency Services go above and beyond in providing support for our communities right across the State and I think the subsidy support we provide to them should at least be equal to those which are afforded to others in the community.
This isn’t a replacement for mainstream services, this is a supplement to ensure that those who are currently unable to access either the service and therefore the support we provide for that service, to be able to get that access and so I think it addresses that need. The government is investing more in childcare and early childhood learning, not less. We’re doing that with fully offset savings that we already had before the Budget from last year, which are still unlegislated, so this is a programme that will be supported by the savings that we have in place so we’re going to spend more in this area based on those savings to deliver better support to families so they can get into work and stay in work whether they’re a key worker, working as a nurse, or a police officer, or working as a teacher in a school during mainstream hours or other forms of occupation.
JOURNALIST:
That parents group says it’s extending taxpayer money for babysitters, that’s how they’ve described it.
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well I think, I reject that description of the service, I think it’s unfortunate that people would put that connotation on what we’re doing here. I think it fundamentally misses the point and the point is that nannies provide support to key workers in our economy, in our community that we rely on and they’ve largely been ignored and this change will ensure that they’re no longer ignored.
JOURNALIST:
How much per hour would you be willing to subsidise nannies?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well the subsidy rate we will have will be on a benchmark price similar to what will be announced for the broader Childcare Package which we will announce before the Budget. The level of that price will be lower than for Long Day Care and for the other forms of care, simply because they aren’t the same level of overheads that are involved in providing that service so it will be a more cost effective subsidy in that respect but as I said it is a supplement, not a replacement.
JOURNALIST:
Will there be a tiered system would shift workers for example get paid more?
MINISTER MORRISON:
There will be a tapered rate of assistance based on a family’s income, as we were saying there around the table around 60% of families with three children earn around $120,000 or less and that’s really the area also where we know that families need to access these types of services, particularly for those sorts of occupations when you have three children trying to put them through a formal main stream child care and you’re working shift work or your have a very irregular set of working hours that is very difficult so it will focus on low to middle income earners and it will provide a supplement to services that are already there.
JOURNALIST:
What about the qualifications, what qualifications would be required?
MINISTER MORRISON:
There will be a need for a first aid qualification as well as a working with children qualification. We are not extending the National quality framework’s early childhood education requirements to this area because it needs to have the flexibility. We are talking about a different type of service here, were not talking about a 9-to-3 school hour type service where people are engaged in education we’re talking about things that are quite different to that and as a result we think it needs the flexibility. Where parents wish to have nannies that have those qualifications then I have no doubt that service providers will be making that service available and we will leave families to make the decisions about what is best for their kids.
JOURNALIST:
What about in areas where for example you say it’s in places where there are remote areas or areas where they don’t have existing services? So they might be looking after kids 9 to 3 in those areas so why shouldn’t they have educational qualifications?
MINISTER MORRISON:
I am sure that in those cases that parents will exercise a judgement which is best for their children and if they want to seek out nannies that have those qualifications then I am sure they will. The government does not like to get involved in making decisions for families we want to support families and decisions that they are making and that is what we are trying to do through this programme.
JOURNALIST:
Minister after two years and a quarter of a billion dollars spent how do you judge if this has been successful?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Well I think there are a number of measures. I think the first one is are we helping families stay in work and getting work in these areas.
JOURNALIST:
How do you measure that? I mean that is very subjective isn’t it?
MINISTER MORRISON:
No, I think there are very clear measures where we can look at the increase in the participation rate amongst those who will fall into these categories and working with the partners we will have in this programme the Police Association represented here today and other groups who we are working with on the pilot. There are also families with children with disabilities and we know that they have struggled getting care in these areas and we will be able to recognise how many additional families are able to be supported where they weren’t previously. So it really is how many more people are able to stay in work but also where we are able to extend services where there were no services before and I think they are the key measures.
JOURNALIST:
How will it be regulated, how do you police this sort of system so it is not abused?
MINISTER MORRISON:
We are going to learn from the many mistakes that were made in the Family Day Care sector in terms of registration processes and issues like children swapping and those sorts of things. They are not practices that will be indulged under the regime it will be another 6 months and more before the scheme is introduced and we will work together with our partners to get a good registration process in place. We won’t be providing the subsidies direct to families we will be providing them to registered service providers and there will be a process for people to be engaged with that and there will be integrity measures that will also be applied.
JOURNALIST:
Will child care subsidies be subject to an ‘earn or learn’ test for parents that are on welfare before they can access the childcare subsidy as well?
MINISTER MORRISON:
If we are talking specifically about the programme today this is about families who are working and needing to work. That’s why they will find themselves in the situation needing this type of this service. We will have more to say about the broader child care and early learning package. The government understands that there is a need for families who are on low incomes to be able to access early childhood learning and we understand that that’s in the interest of those children. It’s also in the interests of those children that they’re in families where people are working particular in single parent families and we want to encourage that as well. I note some of the comments that have been made about the activity test of the Productivity Commission and some modelling done on that basis; that’s the Productivity Commission’s recommendation it’s not the governments the government is still finalising our views on the activity test but we also know there is a need for a safety net that goes beyond the activity test for children from disadvantage families. As I said we will be spending more on child care and early childhood not less that means we will be taking the various safety nets that are currently in existence and frankly are not well targeted and are open to rorting and abuses and we’ve seen those rorting and abuses and we will be tidying that up to ensure we can get better focussed support particularly to disadvantage families.
JOURNALIST:
So can I just clarify in terms of the spending, is the money in the budget at the moment or are you looking at savings measures from other measures being passed in the Senate?
MINISTER MORRISON:
We have unlegislated savings in the Senate now and those savings will be directed to supporting this package and this package will involve increased investment above and beyond obviously what was currently been spent in this sector. But it will be done in a targeted way that will respond to the many issues that were raised in the Productivity Commission inquiry. The Commission did a very good job while all of their recommendations may not be shared in agreement by the sector and others I think they did a very good job at pulling together the observations of where the weaknesses in the sector were, where the abuses were, where the failure of targeting was and where the gaps were. Today what we have done is filled a very important gap that needed to be filled in the provision of childcare to help people stay in work and be in work who are in occupations that we rely on as a community and now they can rely on us to provide them that support.
JOURNALIST:
How will you ensure that providers won’t employ cheap labour and that they will employ properly qualified Australian nannies?
MINISTER MORRISON:
The same way that every employer is required to comply with the various regulations and legislation in relation to employment practices in any occupation in the country and this is not an isolated sector; these will be mainstream businesses that will be required to meet the requirements of Australian law. There is no need for any additional law here, the law that exists to prevent the exploitation of workers in one sector is the same as what is needed in other sectors. No one has suggested to me that there needs to be any additional protections on that front it would be the same in the mining sector or the education sector more broadly, the same rules apply.
JOURNALIST:
And you expect this to subsidy 4,000 nannies, how many of those would be low income families?
MINISTER MORRISON:
The overwhelming majority of these will be low to middle income families, because that’s where the families are in this area as I said before. Families with say three children more than – around 60% of those have incomes less than $120,000 and the majority of families do have incomes of less than around about that mark. So, remember the first test for participation in this pilot is that you need to be able to demonstrate your inability to access existing mainstream services and so that’s why police, firies, and ambulance officers and customs officers, and nurses and those working in all these occupations will be at the front of the queue for this because they’re the ones who are currently having the most difficulty accessing these services then there will be an income test and taper that applies to the level of income.
JOURNALIST:
Scott, Can I just quickly clarify the $250 million is that going to be contingent on Labor and the Independents passing existing savings through Parliament?
MINISTER MORRISON:
Every increased investment has to be paid for and the government doesn’t get a leave pass on having to pay for its increased investment in particular areas and neither should the Labor party and the Opposition more broadly with the Greens and nor should the Crossbenchers. You have to cover your costs and this package will fully cover its costs through the savings measures that we have already outlined and if others don’t want to pursue and support those savings then they will have to identify other savings to support this package.
JOURNALIST:
So you are saying the ball is in their court now to pass these savings now or it won’t happen?
MINISTER MORRISON:
What I am saying is – is I think pretty straight forward. The measures that we will be announcing formally in the budget and I have foreshadowed here today in relation to the nannies pilot have to be paid for. We have identified how we are going to pay for those savings to deliver this programme and obviously we will be seeking the support of the Parliament to that end. We believe key workers and others who need these services deserve that support. We have put forward responsible savings and in the Family Tax Benefit area I remind people that the previous government went through $15 billion in savings in the Family Tax Benefit area through doing principally the same sorts of changes that we have put forward in last year’s budget but for political reasons the Opposition has rejected that. That is a matter for them to consider now, any increased investment has to be paid for I think that is what the Australian public deserve and expect from their governments and their Parliaments and that is the way this government will behave.
Thanks for your time.